Category: Articles

  • 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

  • Walk-over

    The current chairman of Christies, Lord Hindlip, has just pulled off a dramatic coup. Christies have been engaged by the Marquess of Bath to sell an estimated £15 million worth of art and antiques from Longleat. Compared with embattled Sotheby’s,…

  • Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh

    Richard Demarco’s Edinburgh Edinburgh belongs to a special kind of city deserving of the UNESCO designation as a world heritage site. These are cities of the imagination; cities which exist on the edge, where our memories and daydreams, our histories…

  • Letter from Poland

    Thursday 14 February The day’s programme began with 10 am meeting at the office of Andrzej Sontag, the Director of the Lodz Region for the Department of Culture, Education and Sport. Also present was his colleague and deputy, Marian Labedziv,…

  • American Beauty

    From the ‘American Sublime’ (at Tate Britain) to the beautiful at Tate Modern. The comments of UK leading critics have been many-thonged. ‘It’s a dumb deal: Andy Warhol was a lot smarter than Tate Modern’s disappointing retrospective lets on’, said…

  • Tell that to Andy

    The phenomenal marketing jamboree associated with the current Warhol exhibition at Tate Modern would have brought a diffident smile to Andy Warhol if he could have seen it all. After the modest 10 entry fee (plus concessions) the 2,500 average…

  • Demarco returns

    This month, Richard Demarco reports here on a dramatic return visit to the Poland of Stanislawski, Borowski, and Kantor. Holder now of the Gold Order of Merit, Demarco is at last reaping the harvest of long years of travail and…

  • Fleming’s notes continue

    A new gallery and a longstanding art collection opened last month in Berkeley Street, London. A flood of nightingales sang all night in Berkeley Square, stimulated perhaps by the strain of bagpipes from the doors of the Fleming-Wyfold Art Foundation,…

  • Gone from Gagosian

    The Gagosian Gallery in Chelsea has just closed (22 February) on Cy Twombly’s thematic group of war paintings relating to the famed Battle of Lepanto of Islamic-Christian shared memory, (and shown within hailing distance of Ground Zero). The point is…