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’.
Despite everything Auden said, there are plenty of works by Old Masters, even at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, in which suffering and death take centre stage, in which the drama is concentrated, the tragedy given nobility, the idle crowd banished and the bystanders made to pay attention.
Crucifixions and bloody martyrdoms hang so thick on gallery and church walls that one can...
Exhibitions illustrating the interaction of cultures often display one-way relationships – the influence of Japanese prints, say, on French 19th-century painting. Not so the exhibition Bellini and the East (at the National Gallery until 25 June), which documents a rich multi-directional traffic. The central work among those on show is the National Gallery’s Gentile Bellini...
Joseph Gandy (1771-1843) was an architect. More important, he was also a painter of architectural fantasies and reconstructions of historical architecture. These are precisely drawn, dramatically lit, strange, scholarly and elaborate. He wrote many, mainly unpublished and unpublishable pages of speculation about the origin of architectural styles and their relation to man, nature and the...
I have, most mornings, been keeping track of two construction sites. The Brunswick Centre in WC1 is being refurbished. It opened in 1972 and is the closest thing you will get outside a picture book to one of Antonio Sant’Elia’s Città Nuova projects of 1914. Two of those drawings are to be seen in Modernism at the V&A until 23 July. A couple of hundred yards up the street...
Michelangelo’s red-chalk study from life for the Sistine Chapel Creation of Adam is one of ninety or so sheets to be seen at the British Museum until 25 June. This drawing triumphantly illustrates Vasari’s claim that God had ‘decided to send into the world an artist who could be skilled in each and every craft, whose work alone would teach us how to attain perfection in...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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