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Patrick McCaughey

Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again (Whitney Museum of American Art)

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13 December 2018
Andy Warhol — From A to B and Back Again (Whitney Museum of American Art)

Some time ago I appeared on a morning radio program with a prominent guru of Australian culture who roundly declared that Andy Warhol was ‘a one trick pony’. Neither remonstration nor persuasion could help the guru out of his imperturbable complacency. He had summed up Warhol in a sentence – what more need be said?

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Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters by Martin Gayford

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October 2018, no. 405
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Modernists and Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney and the London Painters' by Martin Gayford

The geography of art post 1945 has a boringly settled look and needs disturbing. This engaging and readable book makes a useful starting point. The standard view begins with the switch of the centre from Paris to New York, and so it remained for the next fifty years or so until ...

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Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, encounters, reviews 1980–2017 by Barry Hill

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May 2018, no. 401
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Reason and Lovelessness: Essays, encounters, reviews 1980–2017' by Barry Hill

Barry Hill’s collection of essays from the last four decades is commanding and impressive. Few could match his range of subjects: from Tagore to John Berger, Lucian Freud to Christina Stead – all, for the most part, carried off with aplomb. He catches the ‘raw’ edge of Freud’s studio – ‘worksite’ as Hill calls it ...

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The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick edited by Darryl Pinckney

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April 2018, no. 400
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick' edited by Darryl Pinckney

Elizabeth Hardwick is, unfairly, better known outside of New York as Robert Lowell’s second wife, who heroically endured twenty-three years of tumultuous and tortuous marriage. She inspired his finest love poetry ...

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Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilization by James Stourton

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April 2017, no. 390
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilization' by James Stourton

Kenneth Clark had a life like no other art historian or critic, gallery director, arts administrator, patron, collector, or presenter on television. Whatever he touched, he left a sheen of brilliance. He was handsome, charming, and debonair. And he was rich, spending his last three decades as the lord of Saltwood Castle. His father, the raffish and boozy Kenneth McK ...

Art in Britain 1660–1815 by David H. Solkin

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September 2016, no. 384
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Art in Britain 1660–1815' by David H. Solkin

A major revolution swept through British art history in the 1980s. It shook up its genteel ways and turned it resolutely, even militantly, towards the social history of art ...

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Rendez-vous with Art by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford

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November 2015, no. 376
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'Rendez-vous with Art' by Philippe de Montebello and Martin Gayford

Philippe de Montebello was Director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art for thirty-one years. The astonishing length of his tenure is matched by the brilliance of his reign. Every part of the museum's forty-plus acres of exhibition space was renewed or transformed during those years, from classical antiquity to twentieth- and twenty-first-century art. Not a tatty corn ...

Arts Highlights of the Year

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November 2015, no. 376

To highlight Australian Book Review's arts coverage and to celebrate some of the year's memorable concerts, operas, films, ballets, plays, and exhibitions, we invited a group of critics and arts professionals to nominate their favourites – and to nominate one production they are looking forward to in 2016. (We indicate which works were reviewed in Arts Up ...

My Dear BB: The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, 1925–1959 edited by Robert Cumming

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September 2015, no. 374
Patrick McCaughey reviews 'My Dear BB' edited by Robert Cumming

By some accounts, it was love at first sight. When Kenneth Clark, recently graduated with a 2A from Oxford, lunched with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in September 1925, BB impulsively invited him to collaborate on the revised edition of his chef d’oeuvre: The Drawings of the Florentine Painters, C ...

Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence

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04 June 2015

Every student of Australian art knows that when Arthur Boyd went to London in 1959 and paid his first visit to the National Gallery, two paintings laid siege to his imagination. Titian’s The Death of Actaeon was one from which came Boyd’s tormented

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