Painter Desmond Sloane rehearses the career of an important British artist and poet who fought in the trenches and whose work is too often overlooked. ‘Part of me, the artist within me, has never left the trenches.’ So wrote the artist and poet David Jones about his service as a front line soldier in the First World War. Jones was […]

Friend of the Royal Academy, James Birkin, believes the RA is neither open nor giving enough considering its charitable status; and overly concerned with business.   It is said that a true friend will speak truth unto power. How sad then that the Friends of the Royal Academy are denied the chance to do just this. Recent correspondence with this […]

Out of respect for one of its recently deceased Academicians, Leonard Rosomon (1913– 2012), the Royal Academy skied one of his best works in the corner of an obscure gallery at this year’s Summer Exhibition (until August 12th). His Committee Meeting, Royal Academy (above), 1979-1984, was on loan from the National Portrait Gallery, where it has probably never been on […]

From the Hayward and the ICA to the Royal Academy, and from the public to the private sector, Angus Stewart compares and contrasts the qualities of works on show in London. The British Art Show at The Hayward Gallery should be lively – there are 39 artists. It is, according to the Southbank Centre, recognised as the most ambitious and […]

Dr Eric Coombes looks back over the period since 1997 and identifies the collapse in standards of art criticism which has allowed conceptual art to prosper uncritically After the recent change of government, this might be a suitable moment to look back to the year in which the recently ejected gang of liars, buffoons and crooks first came to office. […]

First published in The Jackdaw ♯1, September 2000 …All of this is distant from the reason that the Royal Academy was set up in 1768; namely, in order to provide an Academy, a school, for the training of artists, as well as to give members and hopefuls the fixed target of an annual exhibition to aim towards… 232 years later, […]

First published in The Jackdaw ♯71 September 2007: Figurative painter Gary M James on the 2007 RA Summer Exhibition. Any outsider who entered figurative work which was not small enough to squeeze into the small south room had wasted their time, money and effort I became a Friend of the Royal Academy not long before a painting of mine, Captain […]

First published in The Jackdaw ♯21, September 2002 As the cost of non-member submission has increased so the chance of inclusion has diminished owing to the reduction in available room. Seemingly unstoppable, the apparently incurable bacterium of State Art continues to spread like a plague into every corner of culture. Like the feared superbug, necrotising fasciitis, which feasts on healthy […]

First published in The Jackdaw ♯12, October 2001 Will Harvey demonstrates how the RA Summer Exhibition performs a useful function for those who can’t get their works easily exhibited elsewhere… Thousands of paintings are entered for the RA Summer Exhibition. A few squeeze through the jury. Fewer still get past the Hanging Committee and onto a wall. (members – RAs […]

First published in The Jackdaw ♯50, July/August 2005 The RA should come clean about its intentions. It was instituted to help artists not cheat them. Whereas once the Summer Exhibition was a bazaar for the otherwise disfranchised it is now being recreated as a curated exhibition with the usual sly interference from State Art.  One strongly suspects that were the […]