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May 2017

Vol. 159 | No. 1370

Editorial

Funding the arts in the United States

BUREAUCRACIES OFTEN SATISFY pragmatic requirements. The Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Program, unlike other schemes for which the National Endowment for the Arts is responsible, does not attract a great deal of attention. It offers few opportunities for howls of outrage about degenerate art. Elected representatives, vigilant in condemning the wrong kind of government waste, ignore it.

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Free review

Francis Picabia. Zürich and New York

FRANCIS PICABIA’S CAREER resists the tacit presumption of any retrospective survey, namely that the life’s work of an artist can be presented, if not judged, as a totality. Not only does Picabia’s work defy coherence of development or style, but its reception and historical evaluation has been overwhelmingly skewed toward a single decade of his roughly fifty-year long career: the Cubist and Dada works from 1912–24 are ranked among the century’s paradigmatic avant-gardist gestures, while the mass of paintings he subsequently produced until his death in 1953 have been mostly ignored or derided. 

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Free review

The photographic source and artistic affinities of DavidHockney’s ‘A bigger splash’

By Martin Hammer

DAVID HOCKNEY’S A bigger splash (Fig.32), painted fifty years ago this year, features naturally in the artist’s current eightieth birthday retrospective, reviewed on pp.413–15.1 A canonical work in art history, the picture owes its wide appeal to many factors: legibility and economy; the visual wit inherent in implying human action although no figure is visible; its evocation of an idyllic sunny environment, the dream of Arcadia transplanted from the Roman Campagna to modern California; Hockney’s precise, well-crafted execution; reproducibility; and a lingering association with the Swinging Sixties and its good vibrations.

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  • SERRES.Vannoni

    Duveen’s Italian framemaker, Ferruccio Vannoni

    By Karen Serres
  • KUENSTNER.Fuhrerprojekt

    The ‘Führerprojekt’ goes to Washington

    By Molli E. Kuenstner,Thomas A. O'Callaghan
  • HAMMER_DavidHockney_Fig_01

    The photographic source and artistic affinities of DavidHockney’s ‘A bigger splash’

    By Martin Hammer
  • Gianeselli.Bugiardini

    The reverse of Giuliano Bugiardini’s ‘Portrait of a lady’ in Paris

    By Matteo Gianeselli
  • Riccomini_Cret_Fig_02

    More rediscovered works by Donato Creti

    By Marco Riccòmini
  • Obituary: John Bury (1917–2017)

    By Caroline Elam
  • Obituary: Benedict Read (1945–2016)

    By Michael Paraksos
  • Preaching, Building, and Burying: Friars in the Medieval City. By Caroline Bruzelius

    By Claudia Bolgia
  • Tra Napoli e Milano. Viaggi di artisti nell’Italia del Seicento I. Da Tanzio da Varallo a Massimo Stanzione & Tra Napoli e Milano. Viaggi di artisti nell’Italia del Seicento II. Salvator Rosa. By Floriana Conte

    By Francesca Cappelletti
  • Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt (with a catalogue raisonné of his early Leiden work 1623–1632). By Bernhard Schnackenburg

    By Christopher Brown
  • Life in the Country House in Georgian Ireland. By Patricia McCarthy

    By Robert O'Byrne
  • Consumption and the Country House. By Jon Stobart and Mark Rothery

    By Robert O'Byrne
  • British Travellers in Spain, 1766–1849 (the seventy-seventh volume of The Walpole Society). Edited by Hugh Brigstocke

    By Xanthe Brooke
  • George Hadfield: Architect of the Federal City. By Julia King

    By Michael Hall
  • The Bernard and Mary Berenson Collection of European Paintings at I Tatti. Edited by Carl Brandon Strehlke and Machtelt Brüggen Israëls

    By Frank Dabell
  • The Inspirational Genius of Germany: British Art and Germanism 1850–1939. By Matthew C. Potter

    By Christian Weikop
  • Egypt: Faith after the Pharaohs. Edited by Cäcilia Fluck, Gisela Helmecke and Elisabeth R. O’Connell

    By Niamh Bhalla