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We are bowled over! 

We knew that theartsdesk.com had plenty of supporters out there – we’ve always had a loyal readership of arts lovers and professionals alike – but the response to our appeal to help us relaunch and reboot has been something else.

Rachel Halliburton |

Four storeys above Oxford Circus, the noise and bustle recedes to be replaced by a parallel universe of gleaming glass-fronted workspaces and discreet installations of modern art. The room where I am sitting looks towards the upper reaches of the grand neo-classical façade of the London Palladium, framed by a blue early evening spring sky.

Sarah Kent
Francisco Zurburán’s The Lamb of God (Agnus Dei), 1640 (main picture), must be the most compelling religious picture ever painted. Visually, it…
Sarah Kent
Hidden among rampant foliage, a couple makes out with an urgency transmitted through Cecily Brown’s vigorous brush marks (pictured below right:…
Sarah Kent
“Welcome” reads a sign hidden behind a metal screen whose spider-web of bars is designed to keep out unwelcome visitors (pictured below: Welcome:…

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Sarah Kent
A frieze of iPad pictures that sends you hurrying for the door
Sarah Kent
Photographs of California’s queer community in the 1990s
Mark Sheerin
Three artists explore global concerns in rural West Sussex
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The rise and rise of an artist
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It pays to delay; how to be a great painter at 91
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A painter’s journey in the wrong direction
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Seascapes in which everything is stilled into a sense of harmony
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Five of the best of the year's shows
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Photography used to question who and what is worth recording
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Light as a physical presence
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At last, a UK festival that takes photography seriously
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The couple's coloured photomontages shout louder than ever, causing sensory overload
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Fashion photographer, artist or war reporter; will the real Lee Miller please step forward?
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Room after room of glorious paintings
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Locally rooted festival brings home many but not all global concerns
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Remembering an artist with a gift for the transcendent
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Pictures that are an affirmation of belonging
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Social satire with a nasty bite
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Emanations from the unconscious

Footnote: A brief history of british art

The National Gallery, the British Museum, Tate Modern, the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Royal Collection - Britain's art galleries and museums are world-renowned, not only for the finest of British visual arts but core collections of antiquities and artworks from great world civilisations.

Holbein_Ambasssadors_1533The glory of British medieval art lay first in her magnificent cathedrals and manuscripts, but kings, aristocrats, scientists and explorers became the vital forces in British art, commissioning Holbein or Gainsborough portraits, founding museums of science or photography, or building palatial country mansions where architecture, craft and art united in a luxuriously cultured way of life (pictured, Holbein's The Ambassadors, 1533 © National Gallery). A rich physician Sir Hans Sloane launched the British Museum with his collection in 1753, and private collections were the basis in the 19th century for the National Gallery, the V&A, the National Portrait Gallery, the original Tate gallery and the Wallace Collections.

British art tendencies have long passionately divided between romantic abstraction and a deep-rooted love of narrative and reality. While 19th-century movements such as the Pre-Raphaelite painters and Victorian Gothic architects paid homage to decorative medieval traditions, individualists such as George Stubbs, William Hogarth, John Constable, J M W Turner and William Blake were radicals in their time.

In the 20th century sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore, painters Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, architects Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers embody the contrasts between fantasy and observation. More recently another key patron, Charles Saatchi, championed the sensational Britart conceptual art explosion, typified by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin. The Arts Desk reviews all the major exhibitions of art and photography as well as interviewing leading creative figures in depth about their careers and working practices. Our writers include Fisun Guner, Judith Flanders, Sarah Kent, Mark Hudson, Sue Steward and Josh Spero.

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