Category: Articles

  • Et tu, Vettriano

    The painter Jack Vettriano moved some four years ago from Scotland to London, and now lives and works in Chelsea. Vettriano’s maternal grandfather came to Scotland from Italy and drew with a skill which the young Vettriano sought emulate. Self-taught…

  • Daniel Libeskind: Imperial War Museum at Salford, Manchester

    Daniel Libeskind’s new building, an adjunct to the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth, South London, is situated beside the Manchester Ship Canal in Salford. Somehow this was a perfect ‘stealth’ affair. While the launch was crowded, very few of those…

  • New wrap for Auntie: BBC unveils building plans

    At a time when most organisations are throwing in the sponge and moving out to the periphery of their home city, the BBC has unveiled dramatic new plans by Sir Richard MacCormac of MacCormac Jameson and Pritchard to concentrate key…

  • Diana’s space

    The announcement by Tessa Jowell on 31 July, that the scheme chosen to be commissioned to build the memorial fountain to Diana, Princess of Wales in Hyde Park is that of the American landscape designer Kathryn Gustafson is entirely the…

  • Monument of the North online

    A new website entitled Monument has gone online based in Newcastle. Two Francisco-based net artists came over to Newcastle thinking there was real documentary film to be made about the city’s cultural history. However, Monument actually shows a selection of…

  • New Pavilion at the Serpentine

    The new Pavilion at the Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, designed by the Japanese master Toyo Ito, has been drawing in crowds in the unseasonably warm late July climate. One cannot miss this perforated box. White and structurally heavy in steel…

  • Sickert’s Secret

    A painting by Walter Sickert, entitled merely ‘One of Madame Villain’s Sons’ has been bought from Vanessa Bell’s family by the Charleston House Trust, for 24,000, dependent upon a 14,000 grant from the Art Fund charity. We are quite certain…

  • Stonehenge rising

    Australian architectural firm Denton Corker Marshall, originally of Melbourne but now well-established in London, will at last see their competition-winning design for the environs of Stonehenge get built. The target, for completion is to be 2008. The 7000-acre Stonehenge site…

  • Masters of Colour: Derain to Kandinsky

    Only 30 years ago, Gabrielle and Werner Merzbacher began to form a collection of early 20th century art that has become one of the finest yet least known private collections of modern art in the world

  • Braun AG Headquarters, Melsungen, Germany

    The first scheme described here was initially designed by the architects James Stirling, Michael Wilford & Partners With Walter Nageli (1992) Additions by Michael Wilford and Partners were completed this year. The works complex designed by James Stirling and Michael…

  • Ansel Adams at 100

    Ansel Adams’ images are as fundamental to the narrative of the American West as the films of John Ford or the legends of Butch Cassidy, Billy the Kid and Doc Holliday

  • William Eggleston

    Eggleston was an entirely different pioneer — not only of colour photographer, and a rapid, almost casual style (often without using the viewfinder); but also in portraying the seamy underbelly of America and the sordid detritus of human life.

  • Obituary: Kenneth Armitage

    Kenneth Armitage died this January, aged 85. Early in his career he was tidily grouped, misleadingly, with Lynn Chadwick and the painter John Bratby, as indicative of a new direction for post-war British art. However, his invitation to join the…

  • Baltic Centre

    Gateshead is suddenly on the map. First, with the new bridge by Wilkinson Eyre. Now with the opening of the new Baltic art gallery that represents the fuller culmination of a 15-year programme of regeneration along the quayside. This will…

  • Obituary: David Brown, Curator and Art Expert

    In the 1970s in Edinburgh, the then Keeper of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Douglas Hall, made a remarkable acquisition, exceeding all other such before or since. Hall’s choice in the works of artists was of course famously eclectic:…

  • Obituary: Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri

    Born around 1932, on the Napperby cattle station to the north of Alice Springs, Clifford Possum grew up there and also at the aboriginal settlement at Jay Creek. He began wood-carving and was stimulated by meeting the members of the…

  • Kaiser Bill still

    Great yawns have greeted the seemingly inevitable decision voted through by the German Parliament, in their Foster-designed high-tech redoubt at the Reichstag, to rebuild the 18th century Baroque palace of the German Emperors. Yawns, since the simulated, temporary pneumatic version…

  • Sweden’s English immigrant returns again

    After Nordgren’s Baltic, it is timely to remember the act of faith in 1960s Newcastle which brought back Ralph Erskine from Sweden in time to prevent the wholesale collapse of the housing community at Byker along the North side of…

  • Braun AG Headquarters, Melsungen, Germany – Masterwork Revisited

    Masterwork Revisited: James Stirling, Michael Wilford & Partners (With Walter Nageli ). Followed by Michael Wilford GmbH Architecture and Landscape United.

  • Callum Innes wins Jerwood Prize

    It has been announced that Callum Innes, a devout minimalist painter whose monochromatic statements of precision and flair, has won the UK’s Jerwood Prize, worth £30,000. Innes, 39, was selected from a mammoth entry of some 1,300 works sent by…

  • The Banksias: Watercolours

    ‘The Banksias: Watercolours’, by Celia Rosser at the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne (5 April—30 June 2002) marks the publication of Volume III of The Banksias by Rosser and Alex George. The publication marks the completion of a 25-year-old project…

  • Mirror, mirror

    No single model of self-portraiture can stand for the experiences of women generally, or fully express the rich interplay that exists between the examination of the reflected image and the exploration of the social dimensions of lived experience, but self-representation…

  • John Bellany milestone

    The Scottish painter John Bellany will reach 60 this June, and there will be shows in Italy (Barga), Los Angeles, the National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, and Roger Bilcliffe, Glasgow. Not a bad result for a painter who nearly…

  • Obituary: Raymond Durgnat

    Hard to imagine that Ray Durgnat is not still writing and talking. Since his books of film critique still abound, unlike many of the theorists of the l970s whom he so criticised. Films and Feeling (l967) was surely, and still…