Hirst and the art market

Two articles in yesterday’s press neatly demonstrated for me the two polar forces that characterise the art world. The first was a piece in The Telegraph by Richard Dorment highlighting the current show at the Getty Villa in Los Angeles about the Society of Dilettanti which contrasted with discussion in The Independent of Damien Hirst’s much debated September Sotheby’s auction in which the artist is staging the first single-artist sale consigned by the artist himself.

Hirst’s antics have got the art world and media a flutter. By dispensing with the dealers and art galleries that represent him (Jay Joplin at...

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Out of Africa, Australia and Herefordshire

While Australia has recently mounted a lavish retrospective of Sidney Nolan at Sydney’s Art Gallery of New South Wales, an altogether more intimate chance to view a selection of Nolan’s works was available in Herefordshire from 21-31 August, courtesy of the Sidney Nolan Trust.

The exhibition, entitled ‘Sidney Nolan: Africa and Australia’, was held in a converted barn situated on the private estate that was the artist’s home in the later years of his life. The paintings on show were the result of Nolan’s visit to Africa in the summer of 1962, where he spent several weeks in Kenya...

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Titians and tax

In February 2007 Apollo published a list of the 25 most important works in private hands in the UK, works that deserved to be acquired for the nation if at all possible. Yesterday’s announcement that the Duke of Sutherland has offered to sell to the nation two of those works, Titian’s Diana and Actaeon and Diana and Callisto, has been received with due acknowledgment that the offer price, of £50m per picture, is notably generous. Moreover, the Duke has offered the National Galleries in London and Edinburgh the opportunity to pay for the two paintings in instalments over six years....

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Vilhelm Hammershoi – the poetry of silence

The curious thing about the paintings of Dutch artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) is that within moments of seeing them you are casting around to find words that define their mysterious, omnipresent mood. Barren, still interiors of the artist’s flat in Copenhagen, where he lived with his wife Ida, show large empty spaces dominated by open or shut doors, little or no furniture, and given life only through shafts of light or the gleam of a surface. Just occasionally, a female figure features in the composition, her back turned, motionless, arrested by some silent, lone distraction. They are at once oppressive...

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Robbing from us all

At last justice has been done to the Johnson family, the most audacious and determined gang of thieves to plague England for many years. It seems extraordinary that this one family, based in a caravan park in Gloucestershire, could over 20 years amass something like £80m before they were finally jailed yesterday – most with sentences of 11 years each. Much of their work was run-of-the-mill but nonetheless profitable smash-and-grab raids at offices and banks, but the case got huge press coverage because of their fondness for stealing art from country houses, in raids carried out with maximum violence –...

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