Category: Articles

  • Beijing’s ‘New’ Arts Centre: The Capital Museum

    Beijing’s Capital Museum has emerged from obscurity to become a leading Chinese cultural institution, attracting visitors with its easy accessibility and frequently changing temporary exhibitions. Judging by attendance records, the museum is off to a successful start. For the first…

  • The Egg in a Box

    The Royal Festival Hall, South Bank, London

  • Georg Baselitz

    Royal Academy of Arts, London 22 September–9 December 2007 Georg Baselitz is a powerful and rebellious painter who admits to being a painter of ‘bad pictures’. He has refused to fit into mainstream art since bursting onto the art scene…

  • Leon Kossoff: Drawing from Painting

    The National Gallery, London 14 March-1 July 2007

  • Tintoretto

    Museo Nacionale del Prado, Madrid 30 January-13 May 2007

  • RSA 181st Annual Exhibition

    Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh 5 May-20 June 2007

  • To Dubai, to Buy

    The proactive three of the seven United Arab Emirates, Abu Dhabi, Dubai, and minuscule Sharjah, have formed a triplemover with a surge in the Gulf of high profile museum building for the Arts. The Gulf Art Fair held early in…

  • Gaudi Tremors

    The tremors are still just threatening, but Antonio Gaudi’s famous Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona (work commenced in 1882) is currently on red alert on account of a plan to force a tunnel for high-speed trains close by its own…

  • Greenwich Catastophe

    Greenwich, London, was praised recently as containing ‘a constellation of architectural treasures’. Apart from the Harrison Planetarium at the Royal Observatory (designed by Architects Allies and Morrison of Royal Festival Hall fame), there is now the Temporary Visitors Centre for…

  • Pallant

    The news in mid-May that Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, had won the highly prestigious Gulbenkian Prize for the extension to its existing gallery came through just as Sir Colin St John Wilson RA, its architect was dying in London, aged…

  • South Bank

    The Royal Festival Hall, designed and opened in l951 on the Thames by Sir Leslie Martin (then of the London County Council, subsequently Sir Colin St John Wilson’s predecessor at the British Library/British Museum) is at last open again for…

  • New Stacks for Old

    Tate Modern’s extension project has received a donation from John Studzinski of £5 million, which makes it more likely that this multi-million pound project will reach its financial targets. Studzinski is to be congratulated for his courage in embracing the…

  • Allora and Calzadilla: Clamor

    Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London 17-29 April 2007

  • Ettore Sottsass: Work in Progress

    Design Museum, Shad Thames, London 29 March-10 June 2007

  • New Prado

    New Prado Architect Rafael Moneo in Spain is not one to run for the architects’ Graffiti prize, that is, the practice of erecting extraordinary, mind-boggling, gobsmacking monuments to one self across the major cities of the world. The new extension…

  • Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan

    Edited by Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit. Japan Society/Yale University Press, 2007. ISBN 0-300-11964-0 US$ 65.00 Awakenings: Zen Figure Painting in Medieval Japan, edited by Gregory Levine and Yukio Lippit, accompanies a major exhibition of medieval Chinese (Chan) and Japanese…

  • The Real World of Abstractionism: Arshile Gorky and the Supremacy of the Flux

    Centre Pompidou – Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris 4 April-4 July 2007

  • The Unknown Monet: Pastels and Drawings

    Royal Academy of Arts, London 17 March-10 June 2007

  • James ‘Athenian’ Stuart

    Victoria and Albert Museum, London 15 March-24 June 2007

  • MAD’s Chief Curator Makes An Art of Making Connections

    An interview with David Revere McFadden

  • Non-refusals in Rubbish: Return of the Rubbish Aesthetic

    The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo. Tate Modern, Turbine Hall, London 9 October 2007-24 March 2008

  • National Exodus

    One thing that Charles Saumurez Smith won’t miss, as he transfers to the Secretaryship of the Royal Academy, is the duplicity of ministers over picture purchase funds. He will relish the highly professional culture of the Royal Academy, with its…

  • Raiders of the Lost Ark

    A major crisis is looming in Britain, in the field of government support for the arts. The present Minister for the Arts, Culture, and Sport, Ms Tessa Jowell, seems powerless and incapable of forestalling what will be a growing shortfall…

  • Contemporary Art from China in Liverpool Now: \’The Real Thing\’

    This exhibition, which runs to 10 June 2007 is already attracting interest from across Europe. It matches an exhibition now being mounted in China, entitled ‘Aftershock: Contemporary British Art l990-2006’. They have Tracey Emin’s bed and soiled accessories, as well…