Category: Articles

  • Faith, Narrative and Desire

    Masterpieces of Indian Painting in the British Museum Room 91, The British Museum 9 August – 11 November 2007 The British Museum has taken the opportunity of the current celebration of 60 years of Indian independence to offer the public,…

  • Book review: Contemporary Garden Aesthetics, Creations and Interpretations

    Edited by Michel Conan Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection and Spacemaker Press Distrib.by Harvard University Press 2007.

  • BP Portrait Award 2007

    National Portrait Gallery, London 14 June – 16 September 2007 When this annual exhibition was launched 28 years ago it suffered some hostile critical reception but has now built itself into something of a national institution, and I personally try…

  • Picasso in Edinburgh

    Picasso on Paper Dean Gallery, National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh. 14 July – 23 September 2007

  • Up Against Jeff Wall

    Museum of Modern Art, New York 25 February – 14 May 2007.

  • Francesca Woodman

    In the Phaidon monograph on Woodman, Chris Townsend says that she “never saw herself as a fully realized artist, even if that is how we see her now”1 and many of her photographs were experiments, attempts, forays into technique and…

  • AfterShock: Conflict, Violence and Resolution in Contemporary Art

    Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich 14 July–2 September 2007

  • Designing for a Change

    Design for the Other 90%, Smithsonian National Museum of Design, Cooper-Hewitt 4 May – 23 September 2007 Twenty-first century design and manufacturing power is at a historical high point, but most of the talent and money that goes into creating…

  • Eye-Music: Kandinsky, Klee and all that Jazz

    Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, 30 June – 16 September 2007

  • ‘Destricted’: sex as performance art

    Directed by Marina Abramovic, Matthew Barney, Marco Brambilla, Larry Clark, Gaspar Noé, Richard Prince and Sam Taylor-Wood The creators of ‘Destricted’ describe the production as a set of ‘explicit films’. The seven short films that make up ‘Destricted’ are, in…

  • Hélio Oiticica returns to London

    The Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica (Rio de Janeiro, 1937-1980) used to say that he was not a ‘career artist’, reflecting his wish not to be categorised under an established label. Oiticica’s early works were influenced by the Brazilian neo-Concretists and…

  • How We Are

    Tate Britain, London 22 May-2 September 2007 Right on time to contribute to the national discussion on what it means to be British, comes Tate Britain’s first photography exhibition – and what a very welcome and ambitious venture it is.…

  • Sharon Booma’s Odes and Intimations of Immortality

    The seductive allure of Sharon Booma’s paintings defies description. Viewing one of the artist’s oil and mixed media inventions, one feels an attraction to surface beauty, the pull of colour and texture, and then the plunge into deeper mystery. Booma’s…

  • It\’s a Great Game of Chess

    So the great Swedish film director and theatre producer Ingmar Bergman has at last died, aged 89, on his island off the coast of Sweden. Earlier this summer he was still talking in interview of a last film, on the…

  • Gorgeous Google

    There is so much to thank Google for (here speaks an editor and a thousand contributors), but they have succumbed (perhaps temporarily) to a common US condition of denial about the effects of Hurricane Katrina on New Orleans. Recently the…

  • Blessed Are the Meek

    Jake and Dinos Chapman have pulled it off again, in the forecourt of the Royal Academy (too large to go inside). Their mega-sculpture, dwarfing most Henry Moores even, is entitled ‘The Meek Shall Inherit the Earth, but not the Mineral…

  • Quisto e Caro, Quello e Piu Caro…

    Six new works will be launched by Sir Anthony Caro this autumn, not this time at Venice where the Gondoliers once parodied his work outside Harry’s Bar (some years back it must be said). Five of these are typically large,…

  • RIBA Stirling Architecture Prize 2007

    This year six Building Projects by British architects have been nominated out of the many submissions. More notably, four of these are for building projects abroad. This has rightly caused a surge of criticism of the conservative attitudes that architects…

  • Lost Tribes of Mankind

    The common tendency for historians in the nineteenth century has been to marginalise those ethnic ‘nations’ such as the Picts, the Carthaginians and the Etruscans largely because there is little trace linguistically of these remarkable groups. The Etruscans are a…

  • The Naked Portrait

    6 June-2 September 2007 Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

  • Vienna summer

    Vienna is a wonderful city at almost any time, but at present it is particularly inviting. In addition to its superb permanent collections, such as the Kunsthistorisches Museum, there are several temporary exhibitions of outstanding quality and interest.

  • Panic Attack! Art in the Punk Years

    In middle age, every generation has a moral panic about the music and behaviour of its youth. Currently we are at the tail end of alarm about the lyrics of rap songs. In the late 1950s it was rock and…

  • Haute Couture’s Grand Showman

    Poiret: King of Fashion The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 9 May-5 August 2007

  • Documenta 12: ‘Documenta as it never was’

    Kassel, Germany 16 June-23 September 2007