10:46am
There are few artists whose death will merit extended slots on the television news and double-page obituaries in virtually every newspaper. It certainly didn’t happen to Robert Rauschenberg, but in the UK this week the accolade was extended to Beryl Cook, painter of fat ladies having a good time. Her death prompted the familiar discussion about why an artist so widely popular is not represented in British national collections. The Guardian quoted the critic Brian Sewell as saying that she was responsible for ‘a very successful formula which fools are prepared to buy’.
Whatever you may think about such a...
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12:45pm
Jake and Dinos Chapman are turning their collective hand from art to celluloid after announcing their intention to make a satirical comedy about the art world. Anyone familiar with the Chapmans’ output will know that it already contains a dark strain of humour but while Jake has previously made documentaries – at least one has been shown on British mainstream television – this is their directorial debut in the world of cinema fiction. No further details on plot or cast have been released so one can only speculate… a YBA version of Robert Altman’s ‘Prêt à Porter’ perhaps? Or maybe...
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1:38pm
A lecture at the Hay-on-Wye Guardian Festival this weekend focused on the role of the English landscape in Ben Nicholson’s work – a fitting theme given the festival’s idyllic setting, and one overshadowed by the artist’s international modernist style. The lecture, given by Tate Britain curator Chris Stephens, was not to plug a book – unusually so for a book fair event – but to promote a forthcoming touring exhibition on Nicholson that opens in Abbot Hall, Kendal, in July. The show, entitled ‘A Continuous Line’, explores the artist’s life and work in the British countryside from 1922-1958 to reveal...
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3:46pm
It is one of the curiosities of the art world that a profession entirely devoted to visual matters should be so oddly coy about party clothes. I am used to the fact that black is the default option, but does everyone have to be so corporate? There were two big parties in London last night, and thanks to sympathetic timings (the V&A decided to stay open late) it was possible to attend both the announcement of the winner of the Art Fund Prize for Museums and Galleries in the spacious Art Deco hall of the RIBA’s Portman Place headquarters and...
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2:03pm
Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto, along with eight other of his manuscripts sold for €3.2m at Sotheby’s in Paris last night. Commentators have turned decidedly lyrical describing the ghost of Breton floating around the auction room and having the last laugh at the huge sum that his anti-bourgeois text fetched. Also noted was the relief that will be felt by critics of the sale who were concerned that the documents would be split up and headed out of France – in fact they have been acquired by Gérard Lhéritier, founder of the Museum of Letters and Manuscripts, a private institution in...
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Moma's show on the impact of new media in the 1960s and 1970s recalls an idealistic age, before art aspired to control its audience.
The 500th anniversary of Palladio's birth is rightly being celebrated, but his influence on architects has in many ways been pernicious.
The National Galleries in Edinburgh and London and the National Trust have formidable fund-raising tasks in hand, but the targets would be even higher were it not for Britain's tax laws – which could be about to get better.
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