Category: Articles

  • South Bank hopes raised

    The appointment of the former chief executive of the Sydney Opera House, Michael Lynch, 51, to take over the running of London’s quaking South Bank Centre is a brilliant move, even for a glutton for punishment. However, Lynch has all…

  • The Turner to go international?

    The welcome announcement that the Booker Prize will from 2004 be awardable to American writers has already sent a shiver through the bookmakers stalls that line Tate Britain. Kazuo Ishiguro, Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, David Storey, Ben Okri all support…

  • The Boyds; Australian Gothic: a life of Albert Tucker; Sidney Nolan – book reviews

    The Boyds Brenda Niall. (The Miegunya Press, Melbourne University Press, Australia). $A49.95 April 2002 ISBN 0-522-84871-0

  • Skythian baba: A painting counter-revolution

    Natalia Goncharova: The Russian Years. Russian Museum, Benois Wing, St. Petersburg. From 25 April to 15 July, 2002.

  • Kazimir Malevich – The Blackest Square

    The fourth ‘Black Square’ by Kazimir Malevich belonging to Inkombank, which collapsed during the financial crisis in 1998, is now exhibited in the Hermitage. This icon of modernism found its final sanctuary among the masterpieces at the Hermitage exactly in…

  • Mapping the process

    A well-assembled exhibition opens on 31 May at the Essor Gallery, London. Significant among the exhibitions are works by Dan Graham, Sigmar Polke, and Johannes Brus. Dan Graham creates conceptual buildings, making some proposals about changes in lifestyle for consumers,…

  • Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation

    In vast contrast to Tate Modern’s Warhol exhibition earlier this year, the Picasso Matisse which is about to open and other blockbuster museum exhibitions, Paul Klee: The Nature of Creation at the Hayward Gallery was not only a beautifully curated…

  • Turner Prize 2002

    As rumoured, Madonna really will be presenting the 2001 Turner Prize on 9 December in London. This is an amazing coup for the organisers. ‘La Ciccione’ is the perfect choice for an award now saturated with popular culture. Short-listed artists…

  • Brit Art from the Fifties: the reality versus the myth

    Just after the war, when France had Picasso and Matisse, Giacometti and Existentialism, and Britain could only summon up the shadows of the Ecole de Paris and the ghosts of surrealism, tutors at the Slade School of Fine Art in…

  • Royal academician fights media moguls for royalties

    Peter Blake, veteran RA and distinguished painter, is justifiably famous for his record sleeve icon designed for Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. The famous cover certainly helped promote the music. The amazing thing is that EMI never coughed up…

  • Fridge woman frozen

    , snowman and other items: RA Summer Exhibition 2002

  • Manhattan blues

    The Whitney remains a great American Institution, but after two consecutive plunges, its policy needs a radical overhaul. This is a seminal period for the nation’s creativity, when major redefinitions are occurring across the arts spectrum in music, literature and…

  • Un aventura again?

    The most famous air disaster of the month occurred in Milan where a private pilot flew into the Pirelli Building, the world-famous 32-storey tower designed by the late Italian master architect Gio Ponti. Ironically, 3 May sees the opening of…

  • News from the Royal Academy

    The Royal Academy, London, is much in the news. First of all, esteemed chairperson Sir Anthony Tennant has been under pressure to ‘do the gentlemanly thing’ and tender his resignation following his involvement in the New York auction scam which…

  • Coughs and sneezes after Amsterdam

    Van Gogh/Gauguin at Van Gogh Museum through June 2

  • Hirst afforestation

    In a studio in the Cotswolds, close to Stroud, a megawork is gestating. A massive cube of empty carbon dioxide canisters is being put together. Damien Hirst has chosen to represent his personal emission of the gas. The completed work…

  • National Gallery London coup

    The National Gallery’s everlasting ‘Treasure’, Neil MacGregor, will now save the British Library, where he moves shortly following his appointment after a long and successful term, outstanding for its combination of scholarship and intelligent financial acumen, untrammelled by the populist…

  • Palazzo Ceausescu

  • A pelican in the wilderness – book review

    A short review does not do justice to this splendid publication by novelist Isabel Colegate, published to coincide with the exhibition ‘A pelican in the wilderness: hermits and solitude in art’ at the Holborne Museum of Art in Bath (16…

  • Return of the Buddha: The Qingzhou Discoveries

    Return of the Buddha: The Qingzhou Discoveries

  • Peter Doig 100 years ago

    Victoria Miro Gallery, London 13 April – 22 May 2002

  • Ken Kiff – book review

    Ken Kiff (1935–2001): Retrospective. Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, London.

  • Body Worlds: Fascination Beneath the Surface

    Body Worlds exhibits human corpses: skinned, gutted, flayed, peeled, shelled, filleted, opened up – dissected in every imaginable way. The cadavers are perfectly preserved by infusion with plastics and then posed in order to enlighten as science and elevate as…

  • Gerhard Richter: Forty years of painting

    The enigma of the German painter Gerhard Richter (b.1932) is finally explored through Robert Storr’s grand exhibition this spring in New York