Category: Articles

  • Stillness in Motion: The Photographs of Fan Ho

    Fan Ho: Hong Kong, 1952-1964 Laurence Miller Gallery, New York 4 May-29 June 2006

  • Shaping the American Landscape: Church, Homer and Moran

    During the second half of the 19th century, three artists played pivotal roles in shaping how Americans viewed and continue to view their country, its promise and potential as expressed in such natural wonders as Niagara Falls and the Grand…

  • Troubled Waters: Kara Walker’s Visual Epiphanies

    Kara Walker at the Met: After the Deluge Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 21 March-30 July 2006 Kara Walker functions as both subject and curator of a current exhibit at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the second instalment…

  • Jon Schueler: A Painter of Our Time

    ACA Galleries, New York 21 January-18 February 2006 Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh 26 January-11 March 2006 The American Expressionist painter Jon Schueler (1916-92) was recently the subject of growing interest on both sides of the Atlantic. When he died in New…

  • E lei Terragni: Chipperfield pulls it off again

    The English architect, David Chipperfield, has completed a new museum of German literature in Marburg. This is a part of the Schiller Archive there. The building is reduced to a poetic transformation of glass and concrete; yet, curiously but appropriately,…

  • Lessons on contemporary art

    It seems, notwithstanding the dramatic and soul-searching (and mind-blocking) rehang at Tate Modern, that the gentler approach of the Van Abbe Museum provides a no less powerful vindication of modern art. This is timely, since, this year, the Eindhoven museum…

  • And in France …

    The exhibition ‘La Force de l’Art’ is intended to demonstrate the continuing wealth of French artistic talent through 200 works by contemporary artists born or resident in France. It is the special project of the French Prime Minister, Dominique de…

  • Is John Hoyland our greatest abstract painter?

    Well, this is what critic and author Mel Gooding sets his flag on. Hoyland was feted earlier in his career by John Russell and sprang into prominence in the 1960s. He has been absorbed into London life; however, his trajectory…

  • More and Meier

    The American architect, Richard Meier, recently completed a somewhat controversial museum in Rome. The Ara Pacis Museum is designed to house only one exhibit in its off-white sheath (all Meier buildings tend to be white modern). There stands the exhibit,…

  • Orangerie revived

    The Musée de l’Orangerie at the Tuileries Gardens in Paris has created a brilliant coup in opening up the galleries by the removal of a poorly judged, second level gallery. Claude Monet’s extensive painting of water lilies had always been…

  • Palazzo grassi e grossi

    The refurbishment of the Palazzo Grassi in Venice is taking a new turn. Once owned by Fiat, the Agnelli combine of the day made possible the superb, massively encyclopaedic celebration of Futurism, ‘Futurismo & Futurismi’ (1986) in the Palazzo, organised…

  • Paolozzi remembered

    The late British sculptor and Royal Academician, Sir Eduardo Paolozzi, who died in 2005, will be subject to a commemorative exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts from 12 June to 20 August 2006, where over 100 works will be…

  • Vale, Harry

    The renowned Viennese architect, Harry Seidler, died in early March of this year. An itinerant Modernist in his early career, he soon settled in Sydney, and had a profound and formative effect on Australian modern design. He also, as architect…

  • Surrealism

    Exhibitions of Surrealist art just come and go. The Hayward Gallery has mounted a new show, entitled ‘Undercover Surrealism’. The show focuses on a magazine, Documents, edited by the notorious Georges Bataille. This was a weird enough product of such…

  • Cloning Van Gogh

    Martin Bailey, a Van Gogh specialist, believes he has proved that a so-called missing portrait by Van Gogh, found hanging in a private collection in Oklahoma, is genuine. The portrait is of a young Glasgow art dealer, Alexander Reid, who…

  • Celtic Vision

    John Bellany: A Scottish Odyssey Kunsthalle Jesuitenkirche, Aschaffenburg 16 June-3 September 2006 John Bellany’s (b.1942) paintings are among the most confrontational humanistic paintings produced in Britain in recent history. Layered with references to the Expressionistic tradition in art (Bosch, Breughel,…

  • Dada Revisited for the 21st Century

    Dada Pompidou Centre, Paris 5 October 2005-9 January 2006 It is not often that an art exhibition ascends to the condition of a total artwork in itself, and at the same time acts as a timely reminder of the true…

  • Modernism: Designing a New World, 1914-1939

    Victoria and Albert Museum, London 6 April-23 July 2006 The catalogue promotion for this remarkable exhibition of early 20th-century design pioneers suggests that the contemporary built environment was ‘largely shaped by Modernism’. This is simply not true. The reality was…

  • Ettore Sottsass: Architect & Designer – book review

    Ronald T Labaco. London & New York: Merrell, 2006. ISBN 18589943205, 9781858943206

  • Egon Schiele: Eros and Passion – book review

    Klaus Albrecht Schroder. Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Verlag, 2006. ISBN 379132229X

  • The Terribly Human Tomi Ungerer

    The Human Comedy: Drawings and Posters by Tomi Ungerer Boston Public Library 7 February-31 March 2006

  • Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art – book review

    Paul Coldwell. London: Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art/Philip Wilson Publishers, 2006 ISBN 0856676209

  • Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era

    National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne 9 December 2005-26 March 2006 National Museum of Australia, Canberra 21 April-4 June 2006 The exhibition ‘Exiles and Emigrants: Epic Journeys to Australia in the Victorian Era’ has succeeded in seizing the imagination of thousands…

  • Albers & Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World

    Tate Modern, London 9 March–4 June 2006 Two of the great practitioner-teachers of 20th-century art, Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, were born in the late years of the 19th century. Both taught at the Bauhaus and were caught up in…