CONTENTS September 2008
EDITORIAL
La gloire francais
The decorative arts of ancien régime france have for two centuries or more been the favourite style of the wealthy the world over. Can this last?
CONTEMPORARY ART
Art Now: America
The Carnegie International challenges the interest of the idea that a thing can be a work of art in itself.
ARCHITECTURE
Spence's charm
Basil Spence's centenary is an opportunity to reassess the achievements of an architect who knew how to charm clients and please the public.
Art Business
What is the future for corporate sponsorship of the arts in the current economic downturn?
Asian Art Market
New York’s Asia Week promises some outstanding sales, and an industry veteran has ambitious plans for Shanghai’s contemporary art fair, writes Susan Moore.
Art and its echo
This year’s Hamburg Fine Art Fair offers visitors an unrivalled opportunity to compare themes in art across the centuries, writes Claudia Herstatt.
Market Review
Art Basel showed some signs of market fatigue – unlike the sales figures for Impressionist and Modern art at auction in London.
Around the Galleries
Collectors are heading for Dublin and Paris, where a wealth of fairs and exhibitions awaits them.
Collectors' Focus
Ireland’s decorative arts have always had a devoted following among collectors but increasingly you need ‘the luck of the Irish’ to find the best, writes .
Tribal in Paris at the Parcours des mondes
This month Paris hosts the world’s premier tribal-art fair. Annie Blinkhorn explains its importance to this booming market and previews its highlights.
Art à la française
This month Paris hosts the world’s most beautiful art and antiques fair, the Biennale des Antiquaires. Susan Moore selects some highlights of this great feast of French art and taste.
A window with punch
The outstanding brilliance and dynamism of the stained glass designed by the Irish Arts and Crafts artist Wilhelmina Geddes after her move to England in 1925 is embodied in her window for All Saints church at Laleham in Surrey. Yet this masterpiece provoked bitter controversy, as Nicola Gordon Bowe explains.
French fashion at Petworth
Although the 3rd Earl of Egremont is now best remembered as a major patron of Turner and other British artists, in his youth he had fashionable Francophile tastes. Peter Hughes examines the furniture he acquired at Petworth House, Sussex.
Cork’s merchant pride is revived
William Laffan celebrates the return to Cork of two historic collections, a triumph for Ireland’s tax credit scheme.
French art the American way
The American collector Rodica Seward, owner of Tajan, France’s best-known private auction house, has a missionary passion for modern French art. She talks to Louise Nicholson.
Ornament of the Academy
Academician Marc Fumaroli, president of the Amis du Louvre, is a distinguished scholar and essayist, whose writings on 17th-century art reveal a profound knowledge of its cultural context, writes Robert Oresko.
New paintings at Waddesdon Manor
The collections at Waddesdon have been enhanced by the recent acquisition of four major paintings, by Callet, Chardin and Panini, described here by Juliet Carey.
Drawing on Japan
Ceramics designed by the artist Félix Bracquemond pioneered the use of motifs drawn from Japanese art in 19th-century French decorative arts. Larry Simms publishes here two extraordinary overlooked porcelain services by Bracquemond that add greatly to our understanding of his career.
A family enterprise
The De Brays are a largely forgotten family of painters, but this fine exhibition reveals their outstanding contribution to Dutch art of the golden age, writes Jörg Zutter.
Art in an age of ease
An exhibition organised by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and now at the Nasher Museum of Art, makes a bold and persuasive case for the artistic achievements of the neglected reign of Philip III of Spain, writes Jonathan Lopez.
Longing & constraint
A survey of women artists of the Impressionist movement reveals many similarities in their depictions of women who seem both at ease and subtly confined, writes Jeffrey Meyers.
Flakes of light
John Russell Taylor welcomes an exhibition in London that proves the Italian Divisionists were more than a dead end.
Raising the bar
The first volume of the Getty Museum’s sumptuous catalogue of its French furniture sets new standards of information and analysis, writes Carolyn Sargentson.
Picture perfect
This survey of Robert Adam’s houses offers new insights into buildings that might have been designed for photography, writes John Martin Robinson.
View from the box
This analysis of a celebrated masterpiece by Renoir depicting a couple at the theatre opens up a major theme in Impressionist art, writes Paul Bonaventura.
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Old Masters underground
A 40th anniversary history tells the story of Christ Church Picture Gallery with engaging lightness, writes Michael Hall.