If you want to see Scotland’s superiority complex in action, take a look at its literary culture. The works of Hume, Boswell, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson adorn libraries the world over, and it suits Scotland’s arts lobby to pretend that the age of excellence is still alive. It’s great PR and it justifies the mighty wodges of tax-payer dosh that fund new writing north of the border. But when you seek out the latest Jock geniuses you find someone called David Harrower. Familiar name? Maybe not, but then he’s better known abroad than at home.
His most...
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It is a glorious moment in the life of any music-loving parent when your progeny develop their own fierce musical tastes, and start looking rather askance at yours. My case may be extreme, as my two children have had to put up with my music for years. As previously mentioned in these columns, my tinnitus makes it all but impossible for me to work in complete silence, and I have become accustomed to playing up to a dozen CDs a day to get anything done. As a result, daughter (12) and son (10) find other people’s houses eerily quiet, even...
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In 1966, under the influence of ideas about chance, the artist Tom Phillips pledged to take as the foundation for his next work the first book that he could find for threepence. That book, discovered in a junk shop on Peckham Rye, was a long-forgotten Victorian romance in journal form, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Phillips set about effacing the pages of this book with sketched line drawings and gouache swathes of colour. The result was A Humument, described by Evan Anthony in the early Seventies in this magazine as ‘one of the freshest and most original pieces of...
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Why did Florence become a hotspot for Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century? Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Singer Sargent and a gang of other American artists and writers descended on the Arno, often for years at a time. Sargent, born in Florence, the son of a Philadelphia eye surgeon, didn’t get to see America until he was 20. This engaging — if chaotic — exhibition answers the question.
The Grand Tour had been around since the 16th century, first for the aristocracy and then for the bourgeoisie of northern Europe; Americans were part of the...
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In 1895 the Spanish art collector John Charles Robinson donated a picture to the National Gallery. ‘On the whole I think it is very much above the average of this most eccentric master’s work,’ he phrased his offer less than enticingly. ‘At the same time you know the man was mad as a hatter and his work must be taken with “all faults” of which there are plenty.’
The man was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, aka El Greco, and the picture was ‘Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple’. To an English late 19th-century audience weaned on Murillo this ‘most eccentric...
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We are standing in the wood-panelled anteroom to the state rooms at No. 10 Downing Street — myself, Mo Hussein, David Heaton and Janice Blackburn, the former curator of the Saatchi Gallery who has been putting examples of contemporary decorative art and design into No. 10 since last July. We gaze up at Michael Eden’s Wedgwood Tureen on a high mantelpiece above the fireplace. Eden used to make earthenware pots in deep Cumbria but now he designs with 3D software and his pieces are built layer by layer by a 3D printer. His Wedgwood Tureen is based on a classic...
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