CONTENTS January 2009
EDITORIAL
In pursuit of collectors
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.
CONTEMPORARY ART
Manhattan transfer
The Lower East Side, once home to immigrants and aspiring artists, is no receiving the uptown treatment.
ARCHITECTURE
Shakespeare in stone
The National Trust's plans to acquire Seaton Delaval Hall are a tribute to a genius who has inspired writers and artists for centuries.
Market Preview
A spectacular Turner is being offered in New York, and in London an aladdin’s cave of a dealer’s collection will be sold.
Market Review
While museum-quality works are still realising record prices, the value of the average painting at auction has fallen by as much as 50%.
Art Business
With its location in the heart of europe, cosmopolitan ethos and cheap studio rents, Berlin is now a key player on the international art scene.
Collectors' Focus
Collectors with a scientific interest form the core of a market that is currently benefiting from the vogue for Islamic art, writes Annie Blinkhorn.
Warmer times, better climes?
Isabel Andrews previews the American International Fine Art Fair in Palm Beach, which, despite the current financial gloom, is facing the future with optimism.
Beauty is truth
Horace Wood Brock – universally known as ‘Woody’ – is a collector with both a theory and a mission. In the month that an exhibition of decorative art and drawings from his collection opens at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, he talks to Michael Hall.
Seeking the human story
Canada’s cultural capital is changing fast. Toronto’s latest and most ambitious addition, the Art Gallery of Ontario, designed by Frank Gehry, houses the extraordinary art collection – in fact, a series of worldclass collections – formed by the late Ken Thomson. Susan Moore reports.
Dog days
The painter of Bedlington terriers, landscapes and crucifixions was destined to be a lawyer, before a painting in the Tate changed his life. Martin Gayford visits Craigie Aitchison in his south London home and finds an artist who is a law to himself. Photographs by Derry Moore.
Britain by the Pacific
Santa Barbara Museum of Art, California, has one of the finest holdings of 20th-century British art in America, the creation of a discerning and committed group of collectors. Peyton Skipwith makes a selection of highlights of its paintings and drawings.
Serious beauty
A magisterial survey at the Scuderie del Quirinale of the paintings of Giovanni Bellini strikes a surprisingly melancholy chord for a painter celebrated for his radiant use of colour, writes Tom Henry.
Gateway of the gods
The perennial myths as well as the archaeological reality of ancient Babylon are celebrated in a British Museum exhibition, reviewed by Matthew Glanville.
Devotional states
The Royal Academy’s exhibition of Byzantine art has assembled over 300 works of breathtaking quality. But does it try hard enough to explain them, asks Angeliki Lymberopoulou?
Out of the shadows
Far from playing second fiddle to Rembrandt, Jan Lievens was a virtuoso innovator in his own right throughout his long career, as an exhibition in Washington demonstrates, writes Jonathan Lopez.
Klimt in his setting
Martin Bailey visits a bold attempt to evoke Vienna’s most influential group exhibition of the early 20th century.
‘This is Eggleston Country’
William Eggleston’s Whitney retrospective focuses on his famous 1970s colour photographs of America’s Deep South, but his black-and-white portraits are equally fine, writes Oliver Bradbury.
Friends or foes?
This rich analysis of the often tense relationship between architects and engineers is admirably even-handed, writes Robert Thorne.
A river under the streets
Gillian Darley applauds the latest instalment of a heroic scholarly endeavour, The Survey of London, begun over a century ago.
A life of the Taj Mahal
Giles Tillotson has packed a lot into a short book on one of the world’s most famous buildings, writes Louise Nicholson.
Romantic bumpkins
Andrew Wilton welcomes an account of the idiosyncratically visionary art of Betty Swanwick.