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’.
He was Edward Muggeridge and 22 years old when he left England for America, Eadweard Muybridge when he returned 40 years later. He was English, born in Kingston upon Thames in 1830. He died there in 1904. But it was California that made him a photographer. The largest item in the exhibition of his work at Tate Britain (until 16 January) is a mighty 360° panorama of San Francisco, taken...
At lunch in France last week, with an expert on cheese and its management, the conversation turned to mites. The four teenage girls who were of the party wanted to know what they were getting their teeth into. Cheese mites are too small to be seen easily with the naked eye. Was there a magnifying glass around? There I could help, I had two of the kind of hand lenses botanists and geologists...
In Painted Truths, at the Whitechapel until 17 September, there are nearly 70 oils by Alice Neel, mainly portraits. There is also a very good film by her grandson Andrew Neel about her work and about the Neel family. It includes photographs and clips in which she looks like the model for a Norman Rockwell grandmother: grey hair pulled back, plump, smiling, wearing glasses, and pretty. To a...
In most exhibitions in the Sainsbury Wing the pictures are dominant, the words on the walls discreet. In Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries the words are large and insistent. It is as though the pictures are being publicly shamed, like criminals paraded with their offences written on placards round their necks. While some of the pictures here are arraigned for no more than...
In Magnificent Maps at the British Library (until 19 September) you are surrounded by splendid, if overbearing peaks of cartographic art: an atlas as tall as a man, wall maps of similar size, photographs of palace corridors where every wall is a painted map. There are smaller, curious, handsome and instructive things as well, but nothing is here just because it is a significant piece of...
Peter Campbell talks to Julian Bell about the things painters can and can’t do.
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