A gallery of Russian oligarchs. Wikimedia Commons LAURA GASCOIGNE casts an eye on oligarchs and their arts The Art Newspaper has published its annual museum attendance figures for 2021. The Louvre is top, 5% up on the year before, followed by the State Russian Museum at + 88%. Really? There are four Russian museums in…
DAVID LEE attempts to take an interest in a forty-year old artistic institution Not that it’s much fun remembering, but can it really have been more than 40 years ago that, like a new comet, the British Art Show (Arts Council prop.) first swam into our ken? It’s been coming back to haunt us every…
Ruskin Spear (1911-1990), Patients waiting outside a first aid post in a factory. Wikimedia Commons Humankind: Ruskin Spear Tanya Harrod, Studies in Art, The Estate of Francis Bacon Publishing and Thames & Hudson, 2022, £35 PHILIP WARD-JACKSON remembers an unpretentious but greatly gifted artist ‘This is not a full-scale biography’ apologizes Harrod, lamenting the dearth…
Caresses, by Fernand Khnopff Decadence and Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism Ralph Geis (ed.), Hirmer, 2020, hardback, 336pp, fully illus., €45/£42/$50 ALEXANDER ADAMS immerses himself in disquiet and dreamscapes Berlin’s Alte Nationalgalerie exhibition of Belgian Symbolists, Decadence and Dark Dreams: Belgian Symbolism, closed last month. As few were able to attend, for obvious reasons, this article…
The Wilton Diptych SELBY WHITTINGHAM looks back on a life in the arts, from the New Elizabethans to Generation Z The latest bout of iconoclasm has produced renewed demands for a statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from a building built with his money at his and my alma mater, Oriel College, Oxford. The…