MICHAEL SANDLE is a great man and a great artist with a conscience-stricken sense of outrage at the futility of violence, which gives an extra edge to his imaginative genius. The word 'genius' does not exactly spring to mind when viewing some of the recent trivialisations of sculpture in England, but, in Prof Sandle's case, I am deploying it with precision and from solid.
comparative evidence... '[his] drawings are among the most beautiful and haunting of the 20th century and have to be considered on equal terms with the sculpture' This tribute to the monumental sculptor could not be more authoritative. Bryan Robertson (1925-2002), as post-war director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, was the most artistically influential British curator of his time. This emerges clearly from a new book to which I have contributed the foreword, Michael Sandle: Works on Paper. It was published ahead of the artist's 88th birthday on May 18-through the initiative of writer and curator Jon Wood, formerly of the Henry Moore Institute, and with support from the Isle of Man Arts Council-and comes 22 years after my own The Sculpture of Michael Sandle. Mr Wood devotes the book, adeptly designed by Peter McGrath, to 250 drawings, watercolours and prints, with explanatory captions by the sculptor.
At the outset of his career, Prof Sandle vowed to try to make at least one monumental masterpiece every decade. Described by art historian Marco Livingstone as a 'radical traditionalist', he has fulfilled his ambition, despite the efforts of commissioning committees a task he has called 'like climbing Everest on a pogo stick'. He is famed abroad to an exceptional extent for an English artist and has spent a fair part of his career overseas, especially in Germany,
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Save our family farms
IT Tremains to be seen whether the Government will listen to the more than 20,000 farming people who thronged Whitehall in central London on November 19 to protest against changes to inheritance tax that could destroy countless family farms, but the impact of the good-hearted, sombre crowds was immediate and positive.
A very good dog
THE Spanish Pointer (1766–68) by Stubbs, a landmark painting in that it is the artist’s first depiction of a dog, has only been exhibited once in the 250 years since it was painted.
The great astral sneeze
Aurora Borealis, linked to celestial reindeer, firefoxes and assassinations, is one of Nature's most mesmerising, if fickle displays and has made headlines this year. Harry Pearson finds out why
'What a good boy am I'
We think of them as the stuff of childhood, but nursery rhymes such as Little Jack Horner tell tales of decidedly adult carryings-on, discovers Ian Morton
Forever a chorister
The music-and way of living-of the cabaret performer Kit Hesketh-Harvey was rooted in his upbringing as a cathedral chorister, as his sister, Sarah Sands, discovered after his death
Best of British
In this collection of short (5,000-6,000-word) pen portraits, writes the author, 'I wanted to present a number of \"Great British Commanders\" as individuals; not because I am a devotee of the \"great man, or woman, school of history\", but simply because the task is interesting.' It is, and so are Michael Clarke's choices.
Old habits die hard
Once an antique dealer, always an antique dealer, even well into retirement age, as a crop of interesting sales past and future proves
It takes the biscuit
Biscuit tins, with their whimsical shapes and delightful motifs, spark nostalgic memories of grandmother's sweet tea, but they are a remarkably recent invention. Matthew Dennison pays tribute to the ingenious Victorians who devised them
It's always darkest before the dawn
After witnessing a particularly lacklustre and insipid dawn on a leaden November day, John Lewis-Stempel takes solace in the fleeting appearance of a rare black fox and a kestrel in hot pursuit of a pipistrelle bat
Tarrying in the mulberry shade
On a visit to the Gainsborough Museum in Sudbury, Suffolk, in August, I lost my husband for half an hour and began to get nervous. Fortunately, an attendant had spotted him vanishing under the cloak of the old mulberry tree in the garden.
