Category: Articles

  • Landscape threatens

    Quietly and with little critical attention, the Natural History Museum in London (through 15 September) shows 19 works by six artists. Entitled ‘Turbulent Landscapes’, this sequence of interactive exhibits shows the impact and essence of tornadoes, sandstorms, and other environmental…

  • Manhattan in memoriam

    The continuing question over what should rise or spread on the World Trade Centre site becomes increasingly pertinent as 11 September approaches. Of course in mediaeval Europe, assuming the perpetrators had been caught a series of gibbets would have risen,…

  • Spirits drained: Puvis De Chavannes returns

    The National Gallery, London does not best mourn Ian MacGregor’s departure with this valedictory recovery of the work of Pierre-Cecile Puvis de Chavannes, (d.1898). Although the most famous muralist in France when he died aged 78, and often credited together…

  • Switzerland invites the world

    Switzerland’s Expo’02 centres on the environment of the region of the Three Lakes, in the north-west tip of Switzerland that coincides with the boundaries of France and Germany. At Murten-Morat, Jean Nouvel was commissioned to design all the actual pavilions.…

  • 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…