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Our JULY ISSUE is in preparation.

June‘s Cassone has seen a vital technical change. If you are a new subscriber you will be pleased it is a fast smooth process – much improved from previously. You can still use any major credit or debit card to pay and Cassone is still just £10 for a whole year, or £5 for full-time or part-time students. Just go to our Registration page and get started! If you would like to try Cassone for a week free of charge, just register and then pay using the voucher code CASSTRY

Last month saw the disastrous fire at the Glasgow School of Art that destroyed the beautiful library designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh. Anyone who has seen the light streaming down the wooden staircase knows this seems irreplaceable, but the GSA is intending to rebuild and restore the library. Many students lost their work in the fire, just as they were approaching their degree assessments, and they must be doubly traumatized. We will give more details as soon as we have them.

In this issue, Jenny Kingsley writes on the Garden Museum in London. This was established in 1977 (and officially opened in 1981) in order to create the first museum in Britain devoted to the nation’s garden history. The work of John Tradescent and his son (also John) is commemorated here. Their gardens and collections were open to the public in the 15th and 16th centuries. The Tradescent tomb is in the grounds of the museum, part of St Mary’s churchyard abutting Lambeth Palace.

Sarah Lawson had an early holiday in Malta and tells us how the Cavaliers (defensive structures) within the walls of Valetta, have been converted to form a centre for creativity. She writes on three exhibitions taking place this year, and the work of the Maltese artists involved.

Our interview this month is with artist Liliane Lijn. She talks to Frances Follin, and discusses her working methods, and why light has been integral to her work since the 1960s.

Meg Green tells us the story of Goldsmith’s, the art college that is part of London University and that boasts over 20 Turner Prize winners and a crowd of illustrious alumni including such influential artists as Lucien Freud, Antony Gormley, Bridget Riley and Damien Hirst. She explains the history of the college and tells us about a show, ‘The Middle’, put on by some of the students earlier this year.

For Stephen Bury, the Sigmar Polke retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York provides an opportunity to see the richness and diversity of the artist he says is perhaps the greatest painter of the late 20th century. A book on another 20th-century German artist, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, by John-Paul Stonard and Pamela Kort is reviewed by Veronica Davies. Anglophone art lovers have neglected this modern German master and it is our loss, as she explains.

 ‘I Cheer a Dead Man's Sweetheart’,  the exhibition on at the De La Warr Pavillion in Bexhill until the end of the month,  is the work of emerging artists alongside established contemporary names who are all producing art in the UK. Ian Jones reports for us. 

For centuries, the sea was both the great separator of countries and continents, and the best way of travelling long distance. Nowadays, many people will associate the sea more with pleasure cruises and seaside holidays, but its crucial role in history has been reflected in much art. This has certainly been true in Britain, as Lindsay Shaw-Miller reveals in her  review of  The Power of the Sea: Making Waves in British Art 1790–2014. This book accompanies an exhibition in Bristol, which is on until 6 July at the Royal West of England Academy. Cassone  readers round the world might like to consider parallels in their own country’s art history.

Fancy a holiday in Rome? You would probably expect to come home as healthy as you went, but in the 18th and 19th centuries even the grandest of ‘grand tourists’ was at some risk of not coming back at all. The ‘mal’aria’ (bad air) or any number of ailments might finish you off in the days before modern medicine. All the art treasures brought back from such tours were collected at not inconsiderable risk, as Patricia Andrew reveals in her review of Roman Fever by Richard Wrigley.

The Beatles hold an extraordinary place in the popular culture of the last 50 years; there must be few people who cannot hum at least one of their tunes. As Rosalind Ormiston discovers at an exhibition now on in London, the photographic record of their early years is itself an ‘avant-pop’ achievement on the part of a young Anglo-Australian photographer, Robert Whitaker.

I hope that the reviews and articles in this month’s Cassone  leave you with plenty of ideas about places to go, art to investigate and books to read. And don’t forget to check out our ‘Art News’ pages through the month, as more items are added.

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Cassone - ca-soh-neh - the elaborately  decorated chest that a wealthy Italian bride of the Renaissance period took to hold her trousseau; a box of beautiful things.