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June 2016

Vol. 158 | No. 1359

Editorial

The promise of Tate Modern

THIS MONTH MARKS an important moment in the history of Tate Modern. The long-awaited extension – the Switch House, which sits like its eponymous predecessor on the former Power Station’s cylindrical underground tanks – has risen to its ten-storey height and been elegantly clad with 336,000 bricks. This Editorial has been written before the internal arrangement of this new building, and its displays, have been made public. Yet excitement is growing by the day. A previous Editorial for this Magazine posed a pertinent question for museums: ‘Is bigger necessarily better?’1 In the case of Tate Modern the answer is undeniably yes. 

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Free review

Giorgione. London

THE SMALL EXHIBITION In the Age of Giorgione at the Royal Academy of Arts, London (to 5th June), appears like a stimulus to a learned and exclusive conversation between connoisseurs. We would suggest, the organisers seem to say, that this or that work is similar enough to that one hanging nearby to support this or that attribution. And the catalogue follows this object-by-object approach, giving an old-fashioned account of the varying opinions of the great art historians of past and present regarding attribution and date of the work displayed.1 But this approach certainly comes at the expense of wider insight regarding the many interpretative questions that the Giorgione phenomenon raises.  

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Free review

Obituary: Anita Brookner (1928–2016)

By Philip Ward-Jackson

THE DEATH OF Anita Brookner on 10th March brought forth an unsurprisingly extensive response. She had, as a novelist, reached a wider audience than most art historians can command, but one was pleased to find, in the more formal tributes and in blogs, recollections of students who had experienced her teaching at the Courtauld Institute between 1964 and 1988. Among her catchphrases in those days was the admonitory ‘It should not be forgotten that . . .’. Ironically, so distinctive was her teaching style, that there was little danger of us forgetting it.

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  • 201510-Wellington-Danae

    Titian’s ‘Danaë’: the debate continues

    By Miguel Falomir,Paul Joannides
  • 201606-Danae

    A response to Joannides and Falomir

    By Charles Hope
  • 201606-Caravaggio

    Caravaggio ‘Obbediente’

    By Keith Sciberras
  • 201606-Vernet

    Horace Vernet’s ‘Orient’: photography and the Eastern Mediterranean in 1839, part II: the daguerreotypes and their texts

    By Michèle Hannoosh
  • 201606-Matisse

    Renoir, Matisse and the colour black

    By Augustin de Butler
  • 201606-ConservationV

    The Art of Conservation V: Caring for the King’s pictures: artists and restorers in the Spanish royal collection, 1576–1814

    By Zahira Veliz,Ángel Aterido
  • The novelist (my neighbour Anita Brookner), by R.B. Kitaj. 1993. (© R.B. Kitaj Estate, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art)

    Obituary: Anita Brookner (1928–2016)

    By Philip Ward-Jackson