It’s the headgear that does it. Gives it away completely. Without it you’d be none the wiser. But the miner’s lamp makes it beyond any doubt. This is the Professor of Drawing at work on her most important finished presentation piece yet, a celebration of the Wigan pit girls of the 19th century. Such economy of line, every mark counts, […]
The tanks are opening at the Tate on July 18th. These are the very same tanks that stored oil in the days when Bankside served the function of generating electricity by burning Arabia’s finest. And if the ignoramuses in the Tate’s PR department start cooing, and they will – they will – about said tanks being the first of their […]
Charles Thomson reviews the unexpurgated life story of Charles Saatchi. “Ad man you’re a bad man”, proclaimed the artist collective Bank bluntly about Charles Saatchi in 1997. In 2004, Guardian art critic, Adrian Searle, praised Saatchi’s popularist approach, eye and humour in his New Blood show, but drubbed the curatorial incoherence. Sir Peter Blake has refused to sell his work […]
From the Hayward and the ICA to the Royal Academy, and from the public to the private sector, Angus Stewart compares and contrasts the qualities of works on show in London. The British Art Show at The Hayward Gallery should be lively – there are 39 artists. It is, according to the Southbank Centre, recognised as the most ambitious and […]
Artist Paul Wilks responds to Eric Coombes’s tour de force of an essay (Criticism and the collapse of culture, The Jackdaw Mar-Apr 2011) Matthijs Van Boxsel cites, in The Encyclopaedia of Stupidity, a ‘Fame Machine’ devised by Villiers de l’Isle Adam, (1883) in which fame could be manufactured ‘by organic means’. Simply put, the ‘machine’ is a theatre but with […]
Dr Eric Coombes looks back over the period since 1997 and identifies the collapse in standards of art criticism which has allowed conceptual art to prosper uncritically After the recent change of government, this might be a suitable moment to look back to the year in which the recently ejected gang of liars, buffoons and crooks first came to office. […]
Brian Lewis, Pontefract’s poet laureate and a painter to boot, bravely exposed the neglect of local artists when the visiting functionaries of State Art arrived for the opening of the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield In the cultural war which challenges the dominance of the London art world we are the first shock troops of a new guerilla army which urges […]
Brian Lewis, poet and painter of Pontefract and champion of regional arts, reflects upon the Hepworth Museum in Wakefield, home town of the eponymous sculptor “Inside it is beautiful” The PR company who is responsible for naming the new Wakefield Art Gallery which is rising on land between the canal and the River Calder has decided to call it ‘Hepworth’ […]
First published in The Jackdaw ♯1, September 2000 …All of this is distant from the reason that the Royal Academy was set up in 1768; namely, in order to provide an Academy, a school, for the training of artists, as well as to give members and hopefuls the fixed target of an annual exhibition to aim towards… 232 years later, […]
First published in The Jackdaw ♯71 September 2007: Figurative painter Gary M James on the 2007 RA Summer Exhibition. Any outsider who entered figurative work which was not small enough to squeeze into the small south room had wasted their time, money and effort I became a Friend of the Royal Academy not long before a painting of mine, Captain […]
