“Maybe a man’s name doesn’t matter all that much.” (Orson Welles in F For Fake) As so many gifted painters have discovered to their cost, having an unusual talent is not necessarily a passport to a meteoric career. So many whose abilities deserve to be recognised, or at the very least acknowledged, struggle cruelly in obscurity if not in the […]
Last year it was Poussin in the National Gallery, this year Rothko at the Tate. There will have been other examples of vandalism in between these which galleries hushed up, and it is likely that you wouldn’t have known about the Rothko episode had it not been witnessed and photographed. Museums don’t like admitting to attacks on their collections because […]
Chances are you won’t have heard of David Mulholland (1946-2005), a painter of and from Middlesbrough. Until last year, when a group of friends devoted to the preservation of his memory sent me some of his pictures, neither had I. The work hit me immediately as authentic, born of intimate feeling for its subject. Most affecting were powerful graphite and […]
Having slipped into its tedious annual routine, the Turner Prize is upon us again, at Tate Britain, until January 6th; the winner – £25,000 better off – is announced to a live television audience of well into double figures on December 3rd. Those responsible for organising this banquet of self-congratulation continue to fanfare its importance, but it is in truth […]
This large triptych of almost medieval ambition by Ben Sullivan, depicting the 27 non-academic staff of All Souls College in Oxford each of whom sat for the artist, was exhibited briefly during the autumn in the Ashmolean. It is now in its intended permanent home in the southernmost of Hawksmoor’s twin towers at the college. It has been four years […]
Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure (1952/3) has been removed from outside the civic centre in Castleford in order, it is claimed, to protect it from theft by scrap metal merchants. Erected in 1980 (in the sculptor’s home town no less), it is not known when or where the work will be returned to view – presumably when all the, er, charming, […]
A portrait of the Queen by Australian artist Ralph Heimans has gone on show at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra. It shows the monarch at night in Westminster Abbey standing on the spot where she was crowned 60 years ago. She looks like a giant genie has suddenly appeared from the train of a dress and she has succumbed […]
My word what a revelation Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New has been second time around. It was pretty good when first aired all those lifetimes ago in 1980. The fourth episode, it had Utopia in the title, reviewing the history of trendy architecture in the 20th century, was the best television about art for decades. It was alive […]
Explanations to date concerning this marvellous figure are inadequate. What precisely is it? Where did it come from? And what date is it? The Motya Charioteer stood for six weeks until the middle of September in the large gallery housing the Parthenon pediments and frieze in the British Museum. It was worth making a special effort to see it more […]
The new Culture Minister is Maria Miller. Her background is in marketing (Texaco and an ad agency) which means she’ll be in heaven when blather is required. She was born in Wolverhampton and is MP for Basingstoke, both places whose connections to Culture are so obvious they don’t need repeating here. She joined the Conservative Party aged 21 when Mrs […]
