Lucas Cranach
There is good reason this month in London to revisit Cranach. Last year saw the Courtauld Institute steal a march: this is all the more notable because before these two exhibitions there had never been a Cranach show here.

The portrait sculpture of Celia Scott
To open a door and enter a room where there are foregathered a dozen individuals, chiefly architects - James Stirling, Richard Meier, Michael Graves, Peter Eisenman, Sandy Wilson, Ed Jones, MJ Long, Alan Colquhoun, John Miller and Colin Rowe - would be to realise, from the temporary hush, that one has stumbled into a hall of fame.

China Design Now
At the time of writing, the Olympic torch continues to make its troubled way around the globe, the protests which accompany its passage sparked by the Chinese government's repressive reaction to both peaceful marches and violent riots in Tibet. In its uncritical eulogising of creative industry, this exhibition skates over the paradoxes of contemporary China, and does too little to advance the cause of mutual understanding.

Papunya painting: out of the desert
Art is a central force in Aboriginal culture and a critical political tool. Through an understanding of the art it has been possible to make a case for Aboriginal rights. The Sydney Olympics in 2000 were used both to expose the dreadfully inhuman conditions under which many Australian Aborigines still lived, and also to incorporate Aboriginal art and ritual into contemporary culture. Thousands of Aborigines took part in the superb theatrical ceremony; a great part of which was inspired and dedicated to the history of Australia before the arrival of white European settlers.

Searching for the Dragon of St George Street
Earl Cunningham (1893-1977) or 'The Dragon of St George Street', as he was called by residents near his Over-Fork Gallery in St Augustine, Florida, left home at 13 to make his way in the world. He spent much of his life travelling by ship along the coast from Maine to New England and Florida, collecting Indian artefacts and various gadgets and trinkets that he sold as his main means of support. He also created more than 400 paintings.

Alexander Rodchenko: Revolution in Photography
Questions about the nature of representation have dogged the medium of photography since its conception. For some, a photographic image quite simply represents a moment. It is a record of what has passed. Others describe the dynamic as being a little more complex: the camera is not just a mechanical eye, but a means of combining elements - natural and man-made - within a picture in a formal rather than representational way.

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions
Landscape painting remains, in the 21st-century, a continuing subject of fascination for art enthusiasts. This leads major national museums and their curators to develop historical exhibitions of the genre, with endless variations of culture, time and place.

The Lost Vanguard: Russian Modernist Architecture 1922-1932
This remarkable survey was synchronised with an exhibition of the same title presented at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, from July to October 2007. It fills a major gap in modernist studies, describing the extraordinary surge of commissioned modern buildings that occurred after the Russian Revolution and continued until after Lenin's death. It is the first fully illustrated survey of Russian modernism in the critical decade 1922-1932.

Turner to Monet: The Triumph of Landscape
This exhibition sets out to be revisionary, looking at 19th-century landscape painting afresh. The genesis of the genre is recognisable in all its familiarity. And, as in the title, landscape is cued as having 'triumphed' over what has to be explained, and hopefully substantiated: but it is possible to draw a different range of conclusions.

Derek Jarman: Brutal Beauty
Fourteen years after Derek Jarman's death, this exhibition, together with a season of films at three cinemas across London, focuses attention on an artist whose passionate avowal of politics, sensuality, experimentation and vision makes his work as relevant now as it was throughout the 70s, 80s and early 90s.

Mars Collects!
'The Mayan civilisation was ruled by a caste of peace-loving astronomer priests' … One of last century's more celebrated anthropologic misinterpretations. The great archaeologist Sir Eric Thompson's opinion held sway until the 1960s, when enough glyphs were deciphered to reveal a religion centred upon war and ritual human sacrifice.

Art & Today
Art & Today is the fruit of the decade spent by the author as contributing editor to Art in America and Artpress. Her previous works include Postmodernism (Movements in Modern Art) (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Critical Condition: American Culture at the Cross Roads (Cambridge University Press, 1997), as well as Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (Midmarch Arts Press, 2004) and Defending Complexity: Art, Politics and the New World Order (Hard Press, 2006).

Contemporary Drawing: Recent Studies
Drawing has played a pivotal role in the work of most artists since the beginning of time. Following the rejection of traditional teaching methods during the 1960s when abstract art dominated, a more private character for drawing was assumed. With renewed interest in figuration in the 1980s, drawing once again resurfaced as a respectable activity for artists and critics alike.

From Russia
In the closing years of the seventeenth century, the youthful Peter the Great toured western Europe with a view to modernising Russian culture along the lines of a European state. The developments which arose from this initiative had a profound impact on Russia for the following three centuries and many of its consequences are still with us today. France had a special place in this process and its impact was felt in all aspects of Russian culture, including architecture, painting, music and language.

Statuesque Dance
This exhibition and catalogue of the work of German artist Neo Rauch (now at the Max Ernst Museum, Bruhl, but last autumn at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) raises many questions, to which there are few answers. The ambience of the work is an apparent 'Gothicism', on the surface at least, but there is much more at play.

Real Baroque
This work is timely in so far as it forms part of the broad revision of architectural history that is underway in the 21st century. The importance of Baroque as such has never been understated previously, but broad studies have repeatedly largely excluded the contribution of Sicily from this spectrum.

Duchamp, Man Ray, Picabia
When Marcel Duchamp met Francis Picabia in September 1911, it was the start of a friendship that would last until the latter's death in 1953. Their relationship, together with Duchamp's close friendship with another artist, the American Man Ray, forms the basis of an extensive exhibition tracing the flow of influences and ideas between three anarchic figureheads of twentieth century art.

Face to Face - The Daros Collections
'Face to Face' presents the two facets, or faces, of the Daros Collections, finding similarities between works by artists from the USA and Europe and works by Latin American artists. Some of the parallels suggested by the exhibition make direct associations between one work and another. On a broader scale, when both collections are gathered together, links between them surface, providing a unique perspective on the major international art trends over a significant period of time.

That Man from Rio: Celebrating Oscar Niemeyer's Centennial
Considered to be Brazil's most important architect, Oscar Niemeyer (b.1907) is also a major figure in the development of modern architecture internationally. He has become a symbol for his country for many reasons: he designed the national capital, Brasília, founded in 1960 and listed as a Unesco World Heritage Site; he drew Brazil onto the global scene with his ideas and designs; and he lived through, witnessed and, of course, contributed to, a century of change in the relationship between human beings and the space surrounding them.

Doorway
With this third architectural/typological monograph, Professor Simon Unwin has completed what is effectively a trilogy. The first two works were Analysing Architecture and An Architectural Notebook: Wall. Both these works were essentially designed to reach as wide a readership as possible, with an emphasis on student readership but addressing a broad constituency of professional and lay interest.

The Danish Gift
In 1974, following a visit to the Furniture Fair in Copenhagen, the question was raised, How will Denmark follow the work of Borge Mogensen, Arne Jacobsen, Hans Wegner and Verner Panton, whose designs seemed so classically timeless that it was hard to see what was left for others to do? The exhibition, 'The Danish Gift', at the Danish Design Centre in Copenhagen, provides the answer.

John Bellany, Exhibition of Portraits
The human image is central to the work of John Bellany. In his treatment of the figure, and in his remarkable portraits, there is a consistent harmony between his expressionistic language and his perceptive understanding of human experience - the capabilities and potential of humanity. The preoccupation with the formal qualities in art in the 1960s and 1970s has meant that relatively few living artists have expressed as explicit an understanding of portraiture and work in the humanistic tradition as John Bellany.

Antoni Tapies - Recent Work
Tapies is now 84 years old. This exhibition constitutes a timely review of his more recent output of work at a time when the informed public is showing a renewed interest in 'Art Brut', as exemplified by the work of André Breton, Charles Ratton, Henri-Pierre Roche, Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapies himself, who all formed the Compagnie de l'Art Brut as early as 1948, in Paris.

Modern Painters: The Camden Town Group
To most people who live in London the name Camden Town means a busy interchange on the Northern Line of the Underground where trains often shudder to a halt in the tunnel for a red light. Passengers sit in claustrophobic silence until the lights change and they can continue their journey.

A gift horse in the mouth: the Artists Rooms project and the d'Offay bequest 2008
On 27 February 2008 a major announcement was made at Edinburgh's National Gallery of Modern Art. Before the assembled British art luminaries, news was announced of possibly the greatest art bequest of the twentieth century and to date. Anthony d'Offay has made over his collection, valued conservatively at £125 million, to the National Galleries of Scotland jointly with the Tate Gallery.

Richard England: Architect as Artist
Dennis Sharp has produced this well-prepared monograph to coincide (approximately) with England's 70th birthday. Launched earlier in February 2008 at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London, it comes at a time when the whole creative basis of architectural design is under revision as never before.

Pallasmaa phenomenon
Juhani Pallasmaa, the Finnish architect and theorist, has in the current period entering the twenty-first century become a major protagonist in the revision of modernism, and hence of postmodernism. To many architects today he has, through his lectures in China, Europe and the United States, provided a template for thought hitherto in urgent need.

Revisiting Juan Soriano in Philadelphia
Mexican artist Juan Soriano is an intriguing figure among the personalities animating the history of Mexican art and literature following the Revolution. Unlike others who their took places on the world stage (for example, Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Rufino Tamayo, Octavio Paz and Carlos Fuentes), Soriano and his work remain best known in his own country, and to scholars, collectors and dealers of contemporary and modern Mexican art.

Chris Ware Builds Stories for Our Time
Choosing an angle from which to consider Chris Ware's captivating world is a tough assignment. Ware's artistic roles range far in imaginative scope and direction, from cartoonist, graphic artist and animator to building designer and musician. As those who have followed Ware's career know, it is difficult to keep up with the twists and turns that make Ware one of the most creative artists working today.

Down Among the Bowery Boys
It is now three months since the New Museum of Contemporary Art (NMCA) in Manhattan's Lower East Side slid open its doors on 1 December 2007. This event, of some considerable relevance for the vitality of modern art in New York City, arguably exceeds in terms of historical significance the not so recent renewal and reopening of the famed (maybe now infamous) Museum of Modern Art (MOMA).

NeoCraft Conference
The NeoCraft Conference held in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at the end of November had a very ambitious programme, ranging from looking at the traditions and innovations in aboriginal crafts in Canada to 'Craft and Utopian Ideals', 'Craft and the Political Economy', 'Craft and Modernism', and 'Cultural Redundancy and the Genre under Threat'.

l'atelier d'Alberto Giacometti
Travelling through countryside around the northern reaches of Paris, you catch sight of white escarpments of rock protruding from the landscape. Plaster of Paris is the traditional name for these mineral deposits of gypsum, found in abundance near the city. Plaster as a material predominates throughout this significant exhibition 'l'atelier d'Alberto Giacometti' at the Pompidou Centre in Paris until 11 February 2008.

The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History
According to the Australian art historian Bernard Smith, The Formalesque: A Guide to Modern Art and its History, is 'probably his last book'. At 91, he is probably right. What is certain is that this, his swan song, has lost nothing of the fresh, understated authority that characterises sixty highly prolific years of writing, lecturing and international publishing. Smith is affectionately described as the father of Australian art history.

An Exhibition of Event Photography
For anyone interested in the ways in which a photograph can aspire to the condition of a work of art, there is an exhibition which opened on 8 December 2007 which is unmissable.

From Agit-Prop to Free Space: The Architecture of Cedric Price
There can be few architects who have built so little but have had such an influence on architecture thinking in the second half of the 20th century as Cedric Price, forever associated with the Fun Palace that he and Joan Littlewood dreamt up at the beginning of the 1960s. As Stanley Mathews says in his book on Price’s architecture, this was a time of change and optimism, when Britain’s role in the world was changing as the empire dwindled and major power status was lost following the debacle of Suez in 1956, when the birth of new universities and the unexpected success of fashion, graphics and music led to the belief that the power of the establishment and Britain’s class-ridden society was really coming to an end.

The Art of Nothing: Ivo Mesquita and the Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo
The 'Bienal Internacional de Arte de São Paulo' is now one of the major international displays of contemporary art, along with two other grand showcases of modern and contemporary art; the estimable 'Venice Biennale', first held in 1895; and 'Documenta' in Kassel, Germany, which takes place every five years.

Obituary: Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007)
Ettore Sottsass Jr, who died at his home in Milan on New Year's Eve, was a 20th century Renaissance man - an architect, designer, painter, craftsman, philosopher, writer and photographer - whose work for Alchymia and Memphis at the end of the 1970s put an end to the linear development of Modernism and changed the way we think about design for ever.

Marvellous Melbourne
This important city monograph was first published over a year ago, but it is exemplary within the 'World City' genre beyond those established by Academy Group in the 1990s with titles such as Berlin, London and Los Angeles. These works were essentially life studies of 'world cities', and rightly deemed over-large and over-ambitious. Academy Group is now part of John Wiley, and Design City Melbourne is a promising direction in coverage and format, hopefully to be followed by further series of city studies by Wiley. Helen Castle, also editor of Architectural Design magazine, has accomplished no mean achievement here editorially, and the selection of Professor van Schaik was astute.

Heterotopic visions
Increasingly, contemporary artists, as much as architects and urban planners, have to grope for a clearer understanding of the nature of cities in the 21st century. It seems more necessary than ever to put aside the established works of the past half-century and more, even Lewis Mumford is of limited use, and such self-styled theorists as Constantine Doxiadis are somewhat devalued.

Seduced by the Oldest Topic in the World
Sex is an extremely popular subject, but 'sex appeal' is nearly impossible to define. People seem to seek this elusive quality in everything they do and buy. As in ages past, sex - the act and its mystique - is a part of everyday daily life. Of course, the difference today is that 'sex' now reaches far beyond its main objective, the procreation of the human species, and out to the marketplace. In that vast scene of hopes and fears, desires and dreams, sex becomes all things to all people; the golden calf, lurking, hidden among the dross of everyday existence.

The One and the Many: Carlos Ortiz and the Dance of Life
For Nuyorican artist Carlos Ortiz, the seeds for a series of personal epiphanies were planted while he was a child growing up in New York and suburban Queens. His early years were spent on Manhattan's upper west side, where he and his family fitted comfortably with the rest of the struggling Latino community. During a pivotal period in every person's life - the teen years - Ortiz's family moved into what Ortiz calls 'a new world that also brought some painful experiences'. At that point, in his new neighbourhood in Queens, Ortiz discovered the racial and cultural barriers that result in misunderstanding, mistrust, alienation and anger.

| home | architecture | archive | books | museology | new media | painting | photography | reports | sculpture |

Copyright © 1893–2008 The Studio Trust. The title Studio International is the property of The Studio Trust and, together with the content, are bound by copyright. All rights reserved