Peter Campbell, who was born in Wellington in New Zealand in 1937 and died in London in 2011, designed the LRB and wrote more than three hundred pieces for the paper, including, from 2000, a regular gallery piece. He also did the cover illustrations from 1993 until his death: his last, a fox in the street outside his house, was painted only a few weeks earlier. Many of these covers, as well as some of his other illustrations and book designs, can be seen in the collection Artwork and at petercampbell.org.uk.
Mary-Kay Wilmers, who first worked with him on the Listener in the late 1960s, when he designed the books for such BBC series as Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man, wrote about his capacious interests. When there wasn’t an exhibition he liked, he described what he saw around him: gasometers, plane trees, beaches (and untucked shirts), funfairs, the squares of Bloomsbury (where the LRB offices are), the timber-framed houses of Wellington. He was also interested in how things work, writing memorably about escalators. There were, as Wilmers wrote, ‘few aspects of the world that Peter didn’t wish to honour’.
Until 11 December the exhibition Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement fills most of the main galleries at the Royal Academy. As well as paintings, drawings, photographs and sculptures by Degas himself, there are photographic panoramas of Paris that share the long horizontal shape of Degas’s pictures of dancers in the rehearsal room; there are also examples of the photographic...
My wife and I arrived in England from New Zealand in 1960. Out of the window of the boat train from Southampton the backs of houses built in grimy stock brick were our introduction to London’s domestic architecture. We saw mile after mile of terraced houses, dating from the late 1800s and early 1900s. It must have been a couple of years later that I bought a copy of London the Unique...
Painting and illustration are broad, overlapping provinces. Paintings are (usually) made for walls, illustrations are (usually) printed on paper. There is no need to be pedantic. Illustrations don’t have to have an accompanying text: a Beerbohm caricature, a Rowlandson party at Vauxhall, a Picasso neoclassical nymph and satyr have enough story in them to count as illustrations....
Although pictures are, on the whole, reproduced in formats chosen to suit layouts, there are exceptions aimed at protecting the status of the image. Some are licensed for reproduction only if uncropped or without lettering superimposed. In serious monographs the general rule is that drawings should be reproduced the same size as the originals, or, if necessary, smaller. While there is no...
Painters born into the sunset of Impressionism who were fated to have long lives saw a procession of styles emerge before they died. Some they invented, others they took up to play their own games with. Joan Miró’s naive realism was transformed by Surrealism and his art later drifted in and out of abstraction. The Miró exhibition at Tate Modern (until 11 September) begins...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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