A right Royal summer!

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At the end of July I was told that I was this year’s first public visitor to the garden café overlooking the parched yellow lawns of Buckingham Palace. I had been at the press view of the exhibition 'Coronation', commemorating the ceremony 60 years ago when our Queen was crowned and what took place in the various staterooms of the palace on that day.  On a sweltering day, as I sat eating one of the new (delicious) ‘Royal’ ice creams, I considered what I had written in our editorial at the beginning of that month, when I advised British readers of Cassone to cheer themselves up by considering wonderful exhibitions abroad, to get away from our disastrous summer. What a difference a few weeks make, and as the UK experiences a long period of  unaccustomed summer heat I am going to say to you to look no further than our shores for wonderful exhibitions and books to read in the sun! Wherever you may be in the world, this seems the time to come to Britain.

As usual, however, we are not neglecting the rest of the world. Articles on art in Greece, Italy, Norway, Germany and the USA are included this month. We have an interview with a country-hopping photographer and another with an art collector who has travelled the length and breadth of Asia to build his collection.

Last month Jenny Kingsley visited Greece. She has contributed a feature on the Argolid province in the Peloponnese, which she says makes you realize that Greece really is the cradle of Europe’s artistic heritage. Anyone heading for Greece this summer should read this article for inspiration. Important though the Classical remains in Athens are, there is much else to see and enjoy in this currently somewhat economically stressed country.

Exhibitions this month include Karen Hasin Bromley’s review of African modernist Ibrahim El-Salahi’s show  at Tate Modern. Karen also travelled along the  Thames to Tate Britain to see the exhibition of the work of the people’s artist L. S Lowry, whose work was shamefully neglected for so long by the art world. Sarah Lawson writes on ‘Crisis of Brilliance’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery. Paul Nash, C.R.W. Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington, and David Bomberg were all students at the Slade, and we see them develop their brilliance through this exhibition. One of their tutors was Henry Tonks and you can read about him in Julian Freeman’s article in our Perspectives section, particularly his war service in the Royal Army Medical Corps, when he recorded the work of surgeon Sir Harold Gillies, and  the development of plastic surgery of the face (maxilla-facial surgery) at Aldershot and later at Sidcup. The injuries recorded are not for the faint-hearted.

Clare Finn looks at the photographs of Giorgio Casali at the Estorick Collection which ‘reveal the hidden essence of Italy’s architecture and design that blossomed in the 1950s and 60s’.  Basia Sliwinska and Michal Fornalczyk write the conclusion to their piece on the Venice Biennale. Gilly Turney  investigated what the Tudor and Stuart monarchs wore, at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace. She points out that although The Queen is extremely regal she has it easy when choosing her wardrobe compared with her ancestors from the 16th and 17th centuries, whose standing and presence were judged by their rather more elaborate statement jewellery and attire! In search of very different styles of dress, Gilly also visited the exhibition at London’s Fashion and Textile museum, ‘Zandra Rhodes: Unseen’.

Frances Follin reports on the very large Anish Kapoor exhibition at the Martin Gropius Bau in Berlin. She went early in the morning and had to queue for only a few minutes – by the time she left the queue extended well down the street. From Italy, Sergio Sagnotti gives us his impressions of the art scene in Rome this summer. Meanwhile, in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art is showing some of the 2500 drawings by Edward Hopper that were willed to the museum by Hopper’s widow. David Eccleston takes a look at the catalogue in ‘Hopper the draughtsman returns to the Whitney’.

It isn't true that all the best art in the UK is to be found in London. There are notable collections elsewhere, not least that at the Barber Institute in Birmingham. This summer, Londoners are getting a taste of this wonderful array of art, at the National Gallery – David Eccleston reports.

In June we published Janet Tyson’s interview with Graham Beal, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). Despite the surely unprecedented vote by Detroit citizens to pay extra tax to support DIA, the museum is now having to defend it’s collection against threats to it off to raise money,  in a city beset with financial problems. Janet gives us an update in 'Panic in Detroit? DIA fights back'.

I recently interviewed, Nicky Taylor, one of the UK’s foremost landscape photographers. He has had a peripatetic life travelling around South America, Canada, Europe, Australia and the Caribbean and  his extensive landscape, seascape and underwater photography reflects this global perspective. From India we have Ashoke Nag’s  interview with art collector K.P.V. Nair, who has travelled a lot himself and has amassed a substantial collection of art from across the vast Asian region.

In ‘Ghostly images of a lost Russia’, Patricia Andrew writes on a photographic journey through the ruined country estates of the Russian aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries. By contrast, John Varoli gives us a glimpse of how the Communist elites lived in the 20th century with his article on Soviet furniture design. Phil Baker reviews an impressive book on the visual culture of the ‘magic’ show, not least of which was the ‘get-up’ of some of the stage magicians who held audiences spellbound in the past.

The ‘classical’ ideal in architecture has been revisited since the Renaissance, most recently in much postmodernist architecture. Jonathan Rinck reviews a sumptuous new book that passionately defends the continued reliance on Classical architectural principles. It might be said, however, that some of what is espoused in The Art of Classical Details might better be described as ‘classic’ (the best of its kind) rather than strictly  ‘Classical’ (based on architectural principles developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans). Whatever their views, the authors gathered in this volume are certainly passionate about them. This is a coffee table book with attitude. What would its various authors make of 62 Buckingham Gate, a new building that is part of a project to revitalize London's Victoria area? Read Rosalind Ormiston's enthusiastic report.

Ian Jones writes on the British film industry of the 1970s – if you didn’t think there was anything worth considering from that period, he says that Sian Barber’s new book may change your mind. In June we published Rosalind Ormiston’s review of an exhibition of Surrealist Paul Delvaux’s work, recently shown in New York and London  If you could not get to either show, there is always the Paul Delvaux catalogue, and this has been reviewed for us by Alexander Adams in this issue.

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