Category: Articles

  • Cedric Price

    He was a charismatic architect, larger than life. He visibly stood for the social principles of architects who inherited standards of social engagement from the 1930s generation. He was always characteristically ‘smart’ with a preference for black or grey; smart…

  • Julian Schnabel in Edinburgh

    Schnabel seems like a ghost from the past, from the booming, prancing 1980s. Strange then that he should have crashed through at the Edinburgh Festival. But it’s a quieter Schnabel, seemingly without the broken dishes, on show this year. The…

  • Jon Schueler\’s sky

    From Mallaig, the late Jon Schueler used to captivate Edinburgh. A wartime sky observed from the turret of a B-17 Flying Fortress, enhanced his knowledge of the many moods of the Isle of Skye, observed distantly, painted movingly. He exhibited…

  • Monet: The Seine and the sea, 1878-1883

    The Royal Scottish Academy Building, The Mound, Edinburgh 6 August-26 October 2003

  • Picasso’s designs for Diaghilev’s Les Ballets Russes

    The Edinburgh Festival is not always as strong in the visual arts as it is in the range of excellent performances in ballet, music and theatre. However, it was an inspiring and appropriate venue for an exhibition of one of…

  • Daniel Libeskind: Felix Nussbaum Museum in Osnabrück

    Felix Nussbaum Museum, Osnabrück, Germany Architect: Daniel Libeskind

  • Does Viennese cafe society still exist?

    Does Viennese cafe society still exist?

  • Marc Chagall: Ceramic Masterpieces

    Edited by Roland Doschka, Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Publishing, September 2003. Marc Chagall (1887-1985) was a storyteller with a magical dimension. His popularity was in large part due to the use of Biblical and Hebrew imagery, which imbued…

  • Max Beckmann book reviews

    Edited by Sean Rainbird, London: Tate Publishing, 2003.

  • Ando’s progress

    A recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious Pritzker Prize in 1995 and the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal 2002, Tadao Ando’s works have been lauded by the architectural world. Yet he himself is entirely self-taught, with no architectural…

  • Book review: Where’s My Space Age? The Rise and Fall of Futuristic Design

    Sean Topham. Munich, Berlin, London, New York: Prestel Publishing, 2003.

  • Adventures in Art: Frida Kahlo

    Frida Kahlo: The Artist in the Blue House(published 2003) is the most recent title in Prestel’s list of excellent art books for children. Creatively conceived, well written and well designed, these are the most attractive books of their type on…

  • Essential Art Deco

    Ghislaine Wood. London: V&A Publications, 2003.

  • The Museum of the Mind: Art and Memory in World Cultures

    The British Museum, London, 17 April-7 September 2003

  • 50th Venice Biennale

    The 100th anniversary this year of the Venice Biennale will probably not be its last. But then it’s a good opportunity to call it a century, with the 5oth Biennale creaking, bleeping and glitzing along

  • Absolutely vital for survival | How vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic

    Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic

  • Booty abounds

    The combination of looted heritage from Afghanistan with that from Baghdad has suddenly created a buyer’s market, with an evident surplus of works. There has been no useful analysis as yet about the trade routes for this spread of relics,…

  • Blowing open the turbine hall (soon): foretaste from Eliasson

    In the Danish national pavilion, Olafur Eliasson (‘The Blind Pavilion’) provides a welcome series of optical variations that are polarised in orange light using kaleidoscopes and a multi-faceted array internally. If this offers a foretaste of the artist’s repertoire in…

  • Foster\’s Trafalgar

    In July, popular London Mayor Ken Livingston will unveil the most significant revision of Trafalgar Square since the Lutyens fountains were installed in 1939. Our Ken had the right idea, since the new setting for the National Gallery transforms Wilkins…

  • To the low countries

    In the Dutch pavilion, ‘We are the world’ is the title of a ‘confrontational juxtaposition of installations by five artists of different cultural origins, but all living and working in the Netherlands’. Thus, Mexican Carlos Amorales shows a small shoe…

  • Venice nul points

    One of the stranger but understandable results of the Iraq War has been the failure of Chris Ofili – the favourite in the stakes – to win the Golden Lion at Venice. No, it was not the absence of a…

  • Stem cells in the suburbs

    In the 2003 Biennale Australian pavilion, Patricia Piccinini (‘We are family’) entered into the flesh and spirit of the event by seeking to plumb ‘normality’; she goes on the consider ‘What is family?’ A half-understood image of the human genome…

  • Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is \’absolutely\’ best paired with tonic

    Absolutely vital for survival; or how vodka in Venice is ‘absolutely’ best paired with tonic

  • Good news from the trenches

    Simon Callery’s new exhibition at Dover Castle raises the question of ‘what is archaeology?’ It offers sideways on, a long sectional slice of chalk rock, a ‘dip’ within which shards may be found. Such installation works as Callery’s (which they…