Category: Articles

  • Sandra Blow

    Blow was in her time a pioneering British abstract painter of the 1950s. Her work expressed a deliberate informality. Her first sale was to Sir Roland Penrose. In 1960 she had won the first Guggenheim Award. Before this, she enjoyed…

  • Sibling Studios

    The architect Richard Rogers has developed a project for three ‘pavilion style’ houses in Wimbledon. The three are all for members of one family, who grew up on site, and are now demolishing their old house, a kind of family…

  • Stirling Works

    The Stirling Prize shortlist for the top British Architecture Award is, as usual, characterised by razzmatazz, gloss, and glitter. It seems to be Richard Rogers’ year now with his impressive Barajas Airport, Madrid, entered simultaneously with his new building for…

  • Peter Townsend

    Peter Townsend, who died 21 July 2006 in London, has proved to be a daunting prospect for obituarists, which would amuse him.

  • Sculptural Architecture in Austria

    National Art Museum of China, Beijing 5-23 August 2006 Guangdong Museum of Art, Guangzhou 14 October-16 November 2006

  • AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion

    The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 3 May-4 September 2006

  • Out of Beirut

    Modern Art Oxford 13 May-16 July 2006

  • French Book Art/Livres d’Artistes: Artists and Poets in Dialogue

    5 May-19 August 2006 The New York Public Library ‘Never give into routine; at each step, through books or in a wider context, everything must begin anew, from zero.’1 So Jean Fautrier, Jean Dubuffet and Henri Michaux forewarned after World…

  • Will Alsop for Tsar

    Will Alsop has applied for a new post, that of a kind of design ‘Tsar’ to encourage London to consider more Landmark buildings. The Greater London Authority’s architecture and urbanism unit is planned to merge with the London Development Agency’s…

  • Peter Zumthor: Summerworks

    Royal Academy of Arts Summer Lecture, London 3 July 2006 The Royal Academy lecture, ‘Peter Zumthor: Summerworks’, was given by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor to a packed audience. The event was heavily oversubscribed. It was a brilliant tour de…

  • Constable: The Great Landscapes

    Tate Britain, London 1 June-28 August 2006 This fascinating exhibition brings together several of Constable’s best-known pictures in the form of full-scale sketches – the so-called ‘six-footers’. These are supported and informed by works on other scales, sketches and documentary…

  • Jeremy Gardiner: Ancient Landscapes/The Poetry of Crisis

    Foss Fine Art/Aldeburgh Gallery, Aldeburgh 22-28 June 2006

  • Howard Hodgkin

    Tate Britain, London 14 June-10 September 2006

  • On Photography: A Tribute to Susan Sontag

    Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 6 June-4 September 2006 Susan Sontag’s passionate engagement with photography is the subject of a small but intriguing bit of curatorial ingenuity; a show that offers a handful of Sontag’s potent statements on the…

  • Edgar Degas: The Last Landscapes

    NY Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, 28 June-27 August 2006, Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio, 13 October 2006-21 January 2007

  • Peter Spens: Floating London, Paintings and Works on Paper

    Guildhall Art Gallery, London 30 March-5 June 2006

  • Through a glass brightly

    At the National Gallery of Scotland this summer, an unusually proficient 2006 Festival Exhibition of the work of the late Renaissance painter, Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610), has just opened. The majority of the over 30 known paintings displayed are executed on…

  • The enigma of Howard Hodgkin

    Recently, the vociferous television commentator, Alan Yentob, in an interview with Hodgkin, tried to crack the code of silence within which Hodgkin justifiably enwraps himself and his work. Even Yentob had to give up. A leading female critic tried a…

  • Kabul Cabal

    The city of Kabul is etched deep into British governmental and military annals; there were disastrous episodes in the mid-19th century. This should not remove from European or American awareness the ancient significance of the city, first destroyed in 1216…

  • Palliative pallant

    The most discreet, yet perhaps the very best of small post-war collections of modern art has quietly settled this June into the public domain in Chichester – this is Architect Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson’s superb gathering of up…

  • Sanctuaries of today

    Designer and critic Charles Jencks and his late wife Maggie developed the programme for ‘Maggie’s Centres’ intended for outpatient cancer care. These are located close to major NHS hospitals to receive and welcome their stricken visitors. The small but dedicated…

  • Tate Modern movement

    Still in the folds of the Tate, there was a minor tantrum in some areas of the critical mass when it became clear in May that the Tate had agreed to exhibit 150 works from the collection of the corporate…

  • A View of Africa, From the Inside Out

    Snap Judgments: New Positions in Contemporary African Photography International Center of Photography, New York 6 March-28 May 2006 Africa is a vast region that now comprises more than 50 nations. Created through a long history of ethnic and cultural alchemy,…

  • Rediscovering the Silver Age of Russian Art

    Mir Iskusstva: Russia’s Age of Elegance Princeton University Art Museum, New Jersey 25 February-11 June 2006 While the recent, ambitious ‘RUSSIA!’ show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York was a bit thin on the artists associated with the Ballets…