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’.
A new exhibition, Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve, runs at the Courtauld Institute of Art until 23 September. It consists of five paintings: Cupid Complaining to Venus, Apollo and Diana, A Faun and His Family with a Slain Lion, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and the Courtauld’s own Adam and Eve. There are also some wonderful drawings and pertinent prints.
Many...
One history of British photography that can be put together from How We Are: Photographing Britain (at Tate Britain until 2 September) traces changes in what people chose or were able to record. From the very beginning, photographers took over the mundane job of representation in portraiture and topography. But they also wanted – or were asked – to capture on film things that were...
It is like the first paragraph of a bit of old-fashioned science fiction: ‘Overnight, figures, the size and shape of men, mysteriously appeared on high points of city buildings. All could be seen from the grey windowless bunker that crouched by the river. Some were near, others far off. All looked towards it.’ That is indeed what has happened. One of Antony Gormley’s armies...
To the National Gallery in search of hands and feet. It is Sunday and by coincidence a procession crosses my path holding stools and drawing books. From what I can see on the odd sheet this seems to be the ‘drawing hands’ workshop signposted at the Education Entrance.
The hand is a testing subject, although not as difficult as the ear, according to Agostino Carracci, who with his...
A few years ago a friend spent some weeks making a copy of Raeburn’s The Archers: the double portrait had recently been acquired by the National Gallery, their first painting by a Scottish artist. She began work at Christie’s, but the gallery wanted the picture on the wall and she had to finish her copy there. Public confrontation of picture and replica made comment inevitable....
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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