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’.
From 1 to 22 September the two floors of the Victoria Miro gallery in Islington – warehouse-like both in scale and in finish – were the site of installations by the American artist Sarah Sze. They were gathered under two titles: A Certain Slant and Tilting Planet. She has recently shown in Sweden and, over the last ten years, in America, Germany and France as well as in Britain.
...
Looking into cases at the small, utterly engaging exhibition of Indian paintings at the British Museum (Faith, Narrative and Desire, until 11 November) I kept bumping my head against the glass. Little greasy smudges showed where others had done the same thing. A label that describes how these works were first used helps explain why we wanted to get close to them. They were not intended to be...
Much of what is on show in the Queen’s Gallery until 20 January has been in the Royal Collection for a very long time. Charles I himself very probably commissioned one of the most remarkable pictures, Orazio Gentileschi’s Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife. Although the paintings Charles had gathered together were efficiently dispersed at auction under the Commonwealth (a few were...
Some forty years ago I found myself on an operating table. Looking up I could watch the dark line of a catheter as it was pushed along a blood vessel to deliver dye to the veiled, grey, globular mass that was my heart. It seems to me now that the X-ray images I saw on the monitor were a series of snapshots, not a continuous record, yet I also seem to recall watching injected dye enter the...
An exhibition of the work of Prunella Clough runs at Tate Britain until 27 August; it then transfers to Norwich and Kendal. Clough was born in 1919, had her first one-woman show in 1947, and in 1999, the year of her death, she won the Jerwood Painting Prize. The progress of her long creative life can be followed chronologically in a sequence of three modest rooms at the Tate.
By choice she...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.