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’.
At King’s Cross, a Channel Tunnel terminal, a new Underground concourse and a new station for Thameslink are being built. At the bottom of an open shaft about twenty feet deep, walled partly in concrete, partly in brick and partly in raw clay, two mechanical diggers on caterpillar tracks are at play. They are too small to have cabs. Operators in yellow coats and hard hats direct them by...
The show of Islamic art in the Hermitage Rooms at Somerset House, Heaven on Earth, confirms the general impression you get from royal collections that princes, like children, are drawn to bright, pretty things. Fabergé eggs, extensive stables and private menageries seem to be what really take their fancy, even more than pictures and trophies of arms. The pieces in gold, studded with...
Sylvia Townsend Warner in 1927 by Cecil Beaton.
The photographs of themselves that people like are only a fraction of those which exist. Ticks on contact sheets are outnumbered by angry crosses. As the number of images of the famous is huge, the approved picture is always under threat from the tide of those which are not. Faces, which are marketable pieces of personal property, are...
‘Hagar in the Wilderness’ (c.1630)
Astraw poll suggests that Rubens is not popular. How can you persuade those who can’t get on with him to look longer? You can offer opinions: what they find too fleshy I approve as sensual. When they complain of facile energy, empty of meaning, I praise the articulation of fictive space. But giving different labels doesn’t advance...
White paint and an exemplary installation currently give the Hayward Gallery an of-our-own-time presence. But the paintings by Roy Lichtenstein which line the walls – the early ones anyway – are now so well established as an ironic commentary on pop culture that they read as decoration, as conventional and period-flavoured in their way as chintz.* The general effect of the show...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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