NEW MUSEUM GALLERIES are surely reasons to be cheerful. Shining, clean, full of promise and optimism about the public’s continued enthusiasm for art galleries and museums, they are an investment in our cultural capital of the future. And they happen, even against a backdrop of agonisingly prolonged cuts in funding and staff, witness the European galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Ashmolean’s generously funded gallery of nineteenth-century art, to name but two, and the opening on 8th July of ten new galleries in the National Museum of Scotland on the 150th anniversary of its inauguration.

BRUCE LAUGHTON, who died in Canada aged eighty-eight on 18th January 2016, was one of a select group of writers on British and French nineteenth- and twentieth-century art who brought to their academic studies a deep knowledge of painting as a craft. Following the path established by Adrian Stokes a generation earlier, several – among them John Golding and Lawrence Gowing – pursued intertwined careers. A connection to William Coldstream was a common denominator. 

JACK BAER, who died in London on 4th May 2016, was a much-loved figure in the London art world, renowned for his integrity, charm and wry sense of humour. His generosity of spirit and his exquisite lunches were legendary. His exhibitions of eighteenth-century Italian and French oil sketches and nineteenth-century French landscape painters were trend-setters. Jack was an invaluable supporter of this Magazine as well as of the National Gallery. He was, in essence, an art historian manqué, and one of the first dealers in this country to bridge the awkward gap between the commercial and the museum worlds.

IN THE WAVE of increasing interest in categorising achievement by gender, enormous claims have been made for the art of Georgia O’Keeffe (1887–1986), the subject of an exhibition at Tate Modern, London (to 30th October).1 She dedicated her life in art to show ‘the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it’. This is a case of an artist whose biography is so intriguing that there is a danger that it overtakes and even at times submerges her art.