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’.
Between its professional beginnings in the middle 1800s and the late years of the century photography was a laborious business, protected by heavy equipment, long exposures and messy chemistry from all but serious amateur incursions. This is the period from which the engrossing images in India: Pioneering Photographers 1850-1900 come. It explains their technical competence, a certain stiffness...
The trees of London are a slow-rising tide. Walk across the centre of the city, from Temple Station on the Embankment to King’s Cross on the Euston Road, and you have them with you all the way. Weedy young ginkgos line Arundel Street. In the spring, lilac reaches above the railings of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In August, the pavement which runs alongside Coram’s Fields playground...
Frank Auerbach is a serious painter. His retrospective at the Royal Academy, which has given over its main rooms to a show spanning nearly fifty years of his work, is a serious exhibition.1 The pictures themselves signal it with heavy colour: first, black, grey, brown, mud and rust, and, in later pictures strong reds and yellows (when he could afford it – earth colours are cheap). Thick...
The content of most library exhibitions tantalises. It’s like food you can look at but not eat: single spreads or isolated leaves of manuscript – nothing you can dip into or flick through. Even the aesthetic of print loses out when you can’t feel the quality of the paper or get a sense of the way one page follows another.
Maps are different. An almost entirely satisfactory...
As the train came into Paris the baby in the seat in front stood up and looked back over the seat. I wondered idly why one so often has a firm opinion about the gender of the very young even when clothes – in her case dungarees – tell very little. For example, my father in the picture here looks like a boy to me, despite the bows and fluff.
We stopped a day in Paris to take in an...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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