The Tate recently named two new trustees, one of whom is painter Tomma Abts. She is a 44-year-old German, recently appointed Professor of Painting at the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf, who won the Turner Prize in 2006. As an artist trustee, she replaced Jeremy Deller, who won the Turner Prize in 2004. Abts’s paintings are all the same small size (48 […]

In due course, when it has become accepted as a truism, I expect Lee’s First Paradigm – as I’ve modestly decided to name my new theory – to gather a Nobel Prize. LFP concerns museum attendance, and it goes like this: “The proportion of any indigenous population sufficiently stimulated by a love of art and history to visit museums is […]

There is an argument that if it were not for the largesse of the National Lottery since 1994 our museums and galleries would still be trudging knee-deep through the Dark Ages. I happen not to subscribe to the view that the experience of visiting my favourite museums and works of art has been improved in any way by having hundreds […]

… from yonder ivy­-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. DEGAS & GARTERS I knew there’d be trouble, the minute I heard the Keepers were bringing Old Edgar back to the Zoo on Piccadilly. ‘Degas & The Ballet’ sounds good, and is good, because […]

… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. DROPPING A BRICK My old friend, Sir Jack Daw, Bart, the last in a very long line of distinguished Daws – the first Sir Jack was Barted by one of King Charles’s spaniels some […]

… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. ON YER TRIKE What joy it is to learn that the lucky folke of Folkestone have been given another Trike at last. Was it really three years ago since their last one was ridden […]

… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. HOO RA RA If I seem to be hooting on rather too much these days about that Zoo down in Piccadilly, I do apologise, but you know how it is when you get to […]

… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower, Molest her ancient solitary reign. EYE SPY Dear old Dicky Stork is still cawing away, if that’s what storks do, from his nest high on the chimney pots of Burlington House. I can hear him from here, and it’s […]

… from yonder ivy-mantled tow’r The moping owl does to the moon complain Of such as, wandering near her secret bower,  Molest her ancient solitary reign. SOOKE SAYINGS I fear I may have made a mistake in always taking Little Sookey for one of Old Mother Dorment’s gaggle of goslings down on Telegraph Farm. He is certainly still there in […]

“Nothing and no one ever heard so many stupidities as a picture,” remarked Jules de Goncourt, and since he made his observation things have got worse. The insults to intelligence endured by 19th century pictures were as nothing to those routinely heaped on contemporary art. Some things never change, however. Stupidity almost always originates in vanity, and art criticism is […]