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’.
There is a painter in Henry James’s Roderick Hudson called Sam Singleton: ‘He painted small landscapes, mainly in watercolours . . . improvement had come hand in hand with patient industry.’ His appearance (he is a small plain man), his regular working hours and his modest equanimity (he has a tendency to blush) are a foil to Roderick’s good looks and labile...
If you go to The Cambridge Illuminations: Ten Centuries of Book Production in the Medieval West, make sure it’s not on a Sunday or a Monday. The exhibition, which runs until 11 December, is spread between the Fitzwilliam Museum (open Tuesdays to Sundays) and the University Library (open Mondays to Saturdays).
In or around 735, the year of his death, a copy of Bede’s Historia...
What the architects Herzog and de Meuron call ‘the waste products of a thought process’ are set out on tables and stacked against walls at Tate Modern until 29 August (the transformation of the Bankside power station into Tate Modern was Herzog and de Meuron’s work). A video projection gives you a notion of what it is like to walk round and through a number of their finished...
The Joshua Reynolds exhibition at Tate Britain (until 18 September) is subtitled ‘The Creation of Celebrity’. The case for Reynolds as a prime mover in the invention of that modern kind of fame is well made. The catalogue, the wall labels, the little cards with short quotations set in fancy borders which are stuck below some of the pictures, all these help fill out what can be...
We acquire mementos: an Eiffel Tower cigarette lighter, a mug from Margate, Michelangelo’s David on a key-ring. All say, in one way or another: ‘I was there.’ It is not just airport art and souvenir-shop knick-knacks that commemorate time in foreign parts. Trophies brought home by Grand Tourists and modern travellers – bits of marble and views of Venice, archaeological...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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