CONTENTS February 2008
EDITORIAL
Art and the Diplomats
As the journalists reporting on last month’s New Hampshire primaries discovered, filing a story before an event has actually happened is risky.
CONTEMPORARY ART
You've got to laugh
Do artists today know how to be funny? An exhibition at the hayward gallery argues that they do, even if the example of public art suggests it isn’t always intentional.
ARCHITECTURE
Flogging off the silver
English churches – both new and old – are more than places of worship and more than works of architecture.
Asian Art Market
This month the Gulf’s booming art market welcomes Art and Antiques Dubai, the region’s first world-class international antiques fair, writes Susan Moore.
Collectors' Focus
Judged as works of decorative art, the best quality historic guns offer outstanding value for collectors outside this specialist market, writes Roger Field.
Art Business
Despite France’s international reputation for fine art and culture it has lagged far behind the USA and UK in the art market – something its new president is determined to change.
Around the Galleries
February offers a host of fairs, and special exhibitions on Antony Donaldson and Alfred Kornberger.
Market Preview
February sees hotly-tipped works from distinguished collections enter the market, an unprecedented charity auction of big-name contemporary art and a clutch of fairs, from London to Madrid.
Market Review
Two auction records were set for a sculpture, and the only early copy of Magna Carta in private hands was bought for the National Archives in Washington.
A pursuit of art in miniature
In the 18th century the 4th Duke of Marlborough formed a great private collection of classical gems, dispersed at auction in 1899. Sir John Boardman describes his quest to track down these 800 tiny masterpieces, now scattered across the world.
Battered but unbeaten
The J. Paul Getty Museum here unveils a Roman bronze oil container, or balsamarium, representing a veteran boxer. As Carrie Tovar explains, this is a powerful example of not only the cult of the athlete but also the interest in frank and often brutal realism inherited from Hellenistic sculpture.
The waste land
The artist C.R.W. Nevinson makes an appearance in the first draft of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, written in 1921. As Gül Inanç and Michael Walsh explain, his presence there was appropriate: Nevinson’s postwar paintings of London depict a modern city heavy with memories of war, and apprehensive about the future.
Woven into the collection
One of the world’s pre-eminent textile designers, Jack Lenor Larsen is also a collector who has filled his home in East Hampton with ceramics and basketry of all periods. He talks to Louise Nicholson about his quest for the ‘newer, better, unknown’. Photographs by Rick Lew.
The gods return
Berlin’s vast collection of Classical antiquities, centred on the Pergamon Museum, is undergoing its greatest transformation in over half a century. Its director, Andreas Scholl, talks to Claudia Herstatt about the plans and explains the collection’s new global role.
The River City celebrates a classical past
The San Antonio Museum of Art’s collection of antiquities is one of the finest in the USA, with particular strengths in Greek vases and Roman sculpture. Next month it reopens in a fresh installation. Its curator, Jessica Powers, explains the thinking behind the new displays and introduces some highlights.
Emperor of fruit
The triumphant exhibition on Arcimboldo that has just transferred from Paris to Vienna is the first to set this extraordinary artist’s work in the context of baroque court culture and collecting, writes David Platzer.
Enthroned in silver
Silver furniture created for baroque courts makes a dazzling exhibition at Versailles, writes Philippa Glanville
A family affair
The Liechtenstein Museum’s exhibition of one of Italy’s greatest private family collections is a revelation, writes Robert Oresko.
More than milordi
An exhibition opening in London this month reveals Pompeo Batoni to be an artist of great variety and intelligence as well as a portrait painter of supreme elegance, writes Patrick McCaughey.
The spirit of Wyspianski
Nicholas Hodge visits a spectacular exhibition in Cracow commemorating the centenary of the death of Stanislaw Wyspianski – artist, designer, dramatist and Polish patriot.
More on Moffat
A rare exhibition of Curtis Moffat’s remarkable interwar modernist photographs deserves to prompt further research into the career of this Anglo-American friend of Man Ray, writes Samson Spanier.
Dating the raindrops
Martin Bailey reviews the final volumes in the catalogues of the two most important collections of Van Gogh’s drawings.
Two elusive gardeners
Judith B. Tankard welcomes three books that provide the first detailed account of two of Britain’s most admired garden designers, Harold Peto and Lawrence Johnston.
Honour and display
Drawing on a vast wealth of information about society in 15th-century Florence, Patricia Lee Rubin provides rich new contexts for the city’s art, writes Thomas Tuohy.