Tuesday, 28th October 2008
2:15pm
Whenever I was taken to the local library as a small child I would always take out the same picture book that was so densely illustrated I found something new each time I opened it. I hadn’t thought about this book for decades until I experienced something of a Proustian recollection earlier this week when I saw advertisements for the latest exhibition at the Design Museum, ‘The Man with Kaleidoscope Eyes’, a retrospective of illustrator and graphic designer Alan Aldridge.
The book of my childhood was Aldridge’s The Butterfly Ball and The Grasshopper’s Feast (1975), illustrations from which are...
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Friday, 24th October 2008
2:13pm
Getty wins in battle for bronzes
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, has acquired two 18th-century bronze casts after the British Cultural Ministry failed to raise funds to keep them in the country. The London dealer Daniel Katz, who bought the bronzes privately in 2005 after they failed to sell at a Christie’s auction, sold the bronzes to the museum for an undisclosed price. Made in 1724 by Florentine sculptor Pietro Cipriani, the life-sized versions of the ancient sculptures known as the Venus de Medici and the Dancing Faun, were commissioned by George Parker, 2nd Earl of Macclesfield,...
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Thursday, 23rd October 2008
11:27am
For the first time in over 50 years Titian’s Diana and Actaeon has left the National Gallery in Edinburgh, where it has been on loan from the Duke of Sutherland since 1945. Unveiled today in Room I of the National Gallery, London, this great masterpiece is in a sense returning to its old home, as it forms part of the Bridgewater collection, which from the early 19th century until World War II was on view to the public in the gallery at Bridgewater House, overlooking Green Park in London, having been bought by the Duke’s ancestor, the 3rd Duke of...
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Friday, 17th October 2008
11:47am
Last weekend Manchester Art Gallery unveiled the first international exhibition in over 40 years about the life and work of the Pre-Raphaelite master William Holman Hunt. Writing for Apollo Muse, curator Jan Marsh discusses The Awakening Conscience, one of the highlights of the exhibition.
According to the critics, it was ‘an utterly disagreeable picture’, illustrating ‘a very dark and repulsive side of modern domestic life’. Yet today’s viewers find The Awakening Conscience the most fascinating of all Holman Hunt’s paintings (above).
It shows a young woman dallying with her lover – they are playing popular music in the middle of...
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Tuesday, 14th October 2008
4:56pm
After the unprecedented success of his groundbreaking £111m sale at Sotheby’s, London – which would have stolen headlines even without the current financial context – how could Damien Hirst fail to rank as anything but no.1 in ArtReview’s annual list, published tomorrow, of the art world’s ‘Power 100’?
There’s also an air of inevitability that Science – the company responsible for the team of studio assistants that produce, market and publicise the works that have turned Hirst into a superbrand – is the only corporate institution on the list this year. UBS and Deutsche Bank, key art sponsors who ranked...
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The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
The Fitzwilliam Museum is celebrating the centenary of the directorship of Sydney Carlyle Cockerell with an exhibition that makes clear that he was in many ways the first modern museum director.
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