北美館：斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術

展覽名稱：斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術
展覽時間：2007/07/28～09/16
展覽地點：台北市立美術館（展區E）

台北市立美術館推出「斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術」，展出一百餘幅斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術
創作者的作品，除了傳統蝕刻畫及木版畫之外，更可以看到以「電腦製圖」這種實驗性與
非傳統的全新表現方式所創作的作品。

「斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術」展由柔拉‧珮特拉修娃擔任策展人，她表示，斯洛伐克當代版
畫藝術奠基於一九四○年代，代表人物包括米庫拉西‧哥浪達、魯道威特‧福拉、可拉曼
‧索可勒、文森‧何拉切尼克、歐尼斯特‧惹美塔克、歐勒斯特‧杜拜以及阿比諾‧布魯
諾夫斯基等人。斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術的崛起，來自優異的傳統文化，版畫表現方式是由
早期的古典風格，演變成變形和幾何抽象風格。

此次將展出斯洛伐克當代版畫藝術創作，參展者多半來自斯洛伐克「版畫藝術創作聯盟」
、「G-Point協會」等藝術團體，另外，還有獨立創作藝術家。

此次展出作品中所呈現的創造潛能與藝術成就，只能說是斯洛伐克境內所有藝術家、派別
和其技巧的吉光片羽。參展的藝術家有的專精於平面藝術（包括版畫）及書籍插畫。因此
展出的作品，有的充滿活力且色彩繽紛，有的作品則充滿無限的奇異幻想，並且帶著詼諧
、諷刺、嘲弄等意味，同時，也有一些彩色版畫，隱含著象徵及寓意，帶有結構、建築以
及自然法則的真實面貌。

Saatchi's new stars: collector prepares for new gallery opening

As the world's most influential art collector prepares to open his new gallery on the King's Road, he reveals the latest crop of six contemporary artists he has alighted on. Exclusive report by Arifa Akbar

Monday, 23 July 2007

Charles Saatchi: art patron, showman, cultural impresario. To some, he has done more than any other to shake up the contemporary art world and enliven the British scene with remarkable, visionary collections. To others, he is the former ad man whose taste for the bold and the brash, for the controversial and the confrontational, has started a trend for a generation of artwork that rewards shock-value but little else.

The man who set in motion the "Saatchi decade" with a collection that comprised works by both the best known and the most obscure figures in conceptual art can be relied upon to provoke a sharp divergence of views in critical circles the world over. But by now, with the Young British Artists he plucked from anonymity in the early 1990s regarded as undeniable greats, one thing is beyond debate: Mr Saatchi sure knows a good thing when he sees it.

Damien Hirst, one of the first youthful talents to benefit from the dealer's perceptive eye, is now the world's most expensive living artist. Tracey Emin is a name instantly synonymous with creative courage combined with and unshakeable star-quality. The Chapman Brothers, Stella Vine, Mark Quinn: the list goes on and on. But, as Emin herself admitted with characteristic honesty at this year's Venice biennale, the Young British Artists are no longer exactly young. "We're Middle-Aged British Artists now," was her deadpan verdict. "MABAS."

And so what now for the man with the Midas touch who has made his own career out of making the careers of others? Simple: to find the stars of tomorrow.

Mr Saatchi is notoriously media-shy and known to be so reclusive that he eschews the opening nights of his own exhibitions and rarely gives interviews. But today The Independent can exclusively reveal the identities of the up-and-coming artists whom he credits with the talent to transform the art scene in a similar way to the YBAs.

There are six of them, all fresh faces on the contemporary art scene, the youngest in her mid- twenties and the eldest in his fifties. One displays a preoccupation with disturbing images of male sexuality, another prioritises the elusive quality of "fun" above almost all else. What they all have in common, however, is a raw talent that has convinced the world's most famous collector. Now all he has to do is convince everyone else. To this end, he intends to showcase these works along with established collections at the new Saatchi Gallery, on the King's Road, London, which will give free admission to the public in partnership with Phillips de Pury & Company auction house.

Saatchi intends to champion the work of these "emerging" artists, plucked from across the world, in the 70,000 square feet of exhibition space in the gallery, which is due to open in January.(2008) After having sold some of the work of the YBAs that he became so synonymous with a decade earlier, he described how this latest venue would function as a launch-pad for young, previously unprofiled artists. "The new gallery is going to have a clearly defined role to introduce very new art and artists from Britain and the rest of the world," he said.

He added that the gallery was aimed at introducing "as many people as possible to very contemporary art and make it easily accessible to art students and all schools." The new collection includes artists from all over the world, from contemporary Chinese artists as well as Londoners, such as Barry Reigate, a 36-year-old Croydon-born painter. Reigate was showing his work "Flies around the Fury Flotsam" at a group show at the Curator's Base gallery in London in 2005 when Saatchi wandered in and bought his painting, and later acquired three more. His canvases are described as "pop-porn at its best" containing hedonist visions of disembodied breasts and phalluses. Another of Saatchi's finds is Rudolph Stingel, who, according to the Saatchi Gallery, offers conceptualism with "Blue Peter" simplicity. The Italian artist, born in Merano, had no formal training when he began his career as a portrait painter straight after high school. He had been exhibiting around Europe and America when Saatchi spotted his work.

A spokeswoman revealed his buying methods, which included an arrangement with international art dealers in which he could "view" works for 24 hours before deciding on a sale.

"He gets sent images sent by about 25 or so of young dealers in New York and Los Angeles and they have now got a system in place whereby if he thinks any of the images are interesting, he get the works sent over here for 24 hours so he can see them properly. If they are not for him they can be sent back the following day," she said.

Six of the best?

BARRY REIGATE

Jokingly describing himself as "the blackest white man in art" and "the Ali G of the artworld", Reigate (right) has made it his mission to put the fun back into the profession. "I grew up with Jamaicans and West Indians in Streatham and I play on the idea of being loud and carnivalesque," he said. His work, characteristically painted in squiggly brush marks and smears, captures contemporary schmaltz with great wit and effervescence.

PHOEBE UNWIN

Born in Cambridge in 1979, Unwin is one of the youngest artists in the collection. Her work focuses mainly on portraits, taking in historical references and is described as "painterly" with a keen focus on texture and colour. She has exhibited at The Slade as well as the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, in Bethnal Green, east London. Saatchi bought five of her paintings from her degree show.

THOMAS HOUSEAGO

Born in Leeds in 1972, his work (below) is said to "playfully subvert the expectation of sculpture" by drawing references to Classicism, Cubism and Futurism. His monumental structures are often figurative and mythological and, in spite of their size, often appear almost comically flimsy. Much of his work tends to border on abstract art, with rough hewn and incomplete forms that highlight the process of making a work of art.

RUDOLPH STINGEL

Despite not presenting his art on traditional canvases, Stingel regards himself as painter nonetheless. He invites the audience to interact with his installations and photographs, which he sees as public "collaborations". The Italian has covered the walls of a gallery in silver insulation panels and allowed people to make them in whichever way they felt. In his 1991 New York debut exhibition, his entire collection consisted of a bright orange rug in an otherwise empty gallery.

CLAYTON BROTHERS

Collaboration is central for the American-born brothers Rob and Christian, whose relationship is described by the Saatchi Gallery as "resonating through every aspect of their paintings and installations". They are said to create artworks together on an intuitive basis but seldom work on a canvas at the same time or discuss their projects until they are complete. Playing off their "unspoken synergy", they take turns inventing, adding to and editing each piece. They draw inspiration from their immediate environment.

TALA MADANI

The Iranian artist, born in Tehran in 1981, studied at Yale University School of Art and exhibited at the school's graduate show in 2005, winning the Schickle-Collingwood Prize before going on to study a masters in Fine Art. Her work is tough, confrontational and often hard to look at. Madani refuses to shy away from political controversy, and symbolises suicide bombers with depictions of pink pastries.

The Warhol tradition: The many faces of Stella Vine

Diana, Kate Moss, Delia Smith ... all have been portrayed by an artist whose work chronicles our celebrity-obsessed times. Now she is the subject of a retrospective

By Arifa Akbar
Tuesday, 17 July 2007

Packing in her job as a stripper and signing up for part-time art classes paid off for Stella Vine when Charles Saatchi sauntered into her gallery, above a butcher's shop in east London, to take a look around.

A large portrait of the late Princess Diana in a state of emotional distress with paint dripping from her blood-red lips, calling on her butler Paul Burrell for help, originally priced at £100, caught Saatchi's eye and he bought it for £600. Like so many of Saatchi's purchases, it propelled Vine, not least because of the controversy surrounding the painting and her subsequent works of the princess, of Rachel Whitear, a teenage drug addict whose painted image so offended her grieving parents and of Kate Moss's alleged drug use.

The iconic painting of Princess Diana has lost much of its shock value as it hangs at Vine's first major British retrospective, opening today at Modern Art Oxford. But there are other "shockers" that may make up for its now anodyne effect.

Controversy has remained Vine's calling card. While she is still in the process of painting the prostitutes who were murdered in Ipswich last year, it is the images on display - including Princess Diana's car wreck, a portrait of the missing Manic Street Preachers band member, Richey Edwards, with a razor-slashed torso, and the model Lily Cole sitting in a tub of red paint - that are bound to raise eyebrows and cultural debates on the cult of celebrity and the ethical boundaries of the artist.

Other pieces in the exhibition of 100 works, incorporating Vine's trademark drips of paint falling from the lips and chin of her famous subjects, include images of Pete Doherty, Nigella Lawson with a chocolate cake and Courtney Love taking her knickers off in the back of a taxi, as well as an entire series around flame-haired supermodel Cole.

A painting of the Celebrity Big Brother stars, Samuel "Ordinary Boy" Preston and Chantelle Houghton, which was used as the invitation to their wedding, also features in the show, although the couple have since split.

Vine, born Melissa Jane Robson in 1969, has been dividing critical opinion for as long as she has been painting and this comprehensive show is bound to reinvigorate the same hostilities and adulation as previous works. Her examination of celebrity culture has been described as coming from the same tradition as Andy Warhol, the founder of pop art.

Andrew Nairne, director of the Modern Art Oxford, defended Vine's work as highly emotional and bold. "She looks at the mix of who society considers to be important, who we revere and respect. The paintings seem to be made with love and although they seem to have an incredible naïvety in style, they are actually very sophisticated with a great emotional power behind them," he said.

The "Lily Cole" series highlights many of the themes Vine seeks to explore. In the collection, she shows the model holding a pink telephone with the text "Lily breaks up with her boyfriend in Bulgari, Marc Jacobs and Still by J-Lo", while in another, she is shown swooning alongside some tablets with the caption, "Lily overdoses in Marc Jacobs". Mr Nairne said it is the inclusion of an "emotional" life given to the model that gives the work such force.

Germaine Greer is another Vine fan. In her introduction to the catalogue accompanying the show, she writes: "As a woman paints her face every day, Stella Vine paints the painted face, the mask behind which celebrity females take cover even as they flaunt themselves. Paint cannot lie. Every brushstroke threatens disintegration. The mascara runs. The rouge stands out on the cheeks like a bloody bruise. The eyes glitter with unshed tears or is it terror? Or rage? The paint wells and dribbles like the blood of the self-wounded. The surface heaves and slips. Underpainting grins through."

Mr Nairne said the wit in her work is marked by paintings such as Jose and Leya, featuring the Chelsea football club manager, Jose Mourinho as a matinee idol, alongside his dog and accompanied by the text, "I will always love you". The painting is inspired by Mourinho's arrest this year over a dispute about his dog's quarantine status. It was alleged that the Yorkshire terrier was taken out of the country and returned without going into quarantine.

Nairne argues that those who criticise Vine's work for being celebrity obsessed have missed the point. Her work is not only about celebrities, he says, but also about herself. For example, portraits of Moss and a young Princess Diana, both of whose sometimes tumultuous personal lives she identifies with, bear a resemblance to Vine. He said: "She is open to the idea these paintings are about her, that they are self portraits, and that they are actually about her, and by extension, they become about all of us and how we relate to our own self worth".

But others have written Vine off as a tasteless trickster whose shocking subject matter crosses the line into moral reprehensibility. David Lee, the editor of The Jackdaw, has called her a "brainless rotten painter" , while her painting Hi Paul Can You Come Over was nominated as one of the 10 worst paintings in Britain. A portrait of Princess Diana, Murdered, Pregnant and Embalmed, which was bought by George Michael for £25,000, was also condemned as "sick" by the red-top tabloids.

Vine has never appeared perturbed by the criticism. She has likened the commercial art world to the sex industry of which she had some knowledge in her former life. She once said: "The art world is exactly the same as the sex industry: you have to be completely on guard, you will get shafted, fucked over left, right and centre."

And for Vine's supporters, there is a suspected agenda against the former stripper and single mother who is regarded as an establishment outsider. "A few critics insist that she is not a real artist, but just trying it on," said Greer, adding, "They think her work is somehow fake, not seeing that it is about faking it, faking everything, from virtue and innocence to orgasms."

Hirst exhibition makes £130m in sales

By Arifa Akbar
Monday, 16 July 2007

Damien Hirst has become Britain's highest earning living artist after sales from his recent exhibition reached £130m.

But the centrepiece of his show at the White Cube gallery - a diamond-encrusted skull - may be sold to a private international collector.

If this happens, the artwork could be taken out of the country and Hirst's desire to see it displayed for longer in a gallery or museum may never be fulfilled.

Sales from the exhibition at the London gallery, which closed earlier this month, included a £10m work entitled Death Explained, consisting of a shark split in two.

If the skull is sold for its asking price, the total sales from the exhibition are likely to double his £135m personal fortune, even after paying a 25 per cent commission to the gallery.

There has been much speculation about whether the work, For the Love of God, which is priced at £50m, will be taken out of the country. The human skull, encrusted with more than 8,000 diamonds, has attracted the interest of collectors in the Middle Eastern, Russia and America.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Tim Marlow, exhibitions director at the White Cube, said attempts were being made to find a buyer who would have it on public view for at least some period of time.

"We are trying to negotiate a deal with a museum or several museums so whoever buys the jewelled skull puts it on public display, or at least initially, rather than simply keeping it at home or in a vault away from the public gaze," he said.

But sources within the industry fear it may be sold to an individual collector rather than a gallery.

Charles Saatchi, one of Britain's biggest collectors of contemporary art, championed Hirst's work when it first emerged on the market in the 1990s. But he is not believed to be in the bidding for the skull.

In the past decade, Hirst has risen to one of the leading lights of the art world, and has come to distinguish himself from the Young British Artists movement of the 1990s. Last month, Sotheby's announced that a sale of Hirst's work had made him the most expensive living artist at auction. A pill cabinet, entitled Lullaby Spring sold for £9.6m.

His wealth is not only made up from the sales of artworks that can court record-breaking prices, but also from a highly valuable personal collection of works by the likes of Andy Warhol, Francis Bacon, Jeff Koons and Richard Prince.

I’m not who you think I am

From The Sunday Times

July 15, 2007

Brit Artist Gavin Turk has created an identity gag that deserves its 15 minutes of fame

Waldemar Januszczak

I would like to make a bet with you. See the melodramatic self-portrait here, of a ghostly face overlaid with red camouflage? I bet you thought it was Andy Warhol. Go on, admit it. But take another look. Focus on the eyes. They’re too fiery to be Warhol’s.

His were smaller and deader. And he didn’t have Johnny Depp cheek-bones, either. Andy had a podgy potato face. So, this is the camouflaged self-portrait of someone else’s camouflaged self-portrait.

It’s actually Gavin Turk, that sneaky and circular Brit Artist, whose art is so damn sneaky and circular, you are never certain whether what it achieves is worth achieving. Turk was the chap who created the sleeping bag that looked as if it had a down-and-out sleeping in it, which Charles Saatchi used to leave lying around in the vestibule of his posh gallery at County Hall. I witnessed someone giving it a kick to wake up its nonexistent occupant. Then there was the blue plaque proclaiming “Gavin Turk Worked Here 1989-91”, which he exhibited as his degree show, and which resulted in his not getting a degree. His pièce de résistance, however, the closest he has come to creating a signature work, was the life-sized model of Sid Vicious singing My Way that he showed in Sensation. Except that it wasn’t Sid Vicious – it was Turk, looking exactly like Sid.

These are the contributions of what I call a blankist: an artist who defines himself by his absences. It’s a stimulating strategy, but a dangerous one. Because, on those occasions when it works best, lots of people won’t even know you’re employing it. For instance, I guarantee that some readers will not be reading this article now, because they glanced at this page, imagined they saw Andy Warhol on it and thought to themselves: oh, no, not another piece about Warhol. Being sneaky and circular is a lousy way to get noticed.

It’s no surprise, then, that Turk seems to have been left behind by the rest of his pack. He’s the same Brit Art vintage as Hirst and Emin, Lucas and the Chapmans, but he doesn’t get talked about nearly as often by nearly as many. Anyway, the consistently stimulating Riflemaker gallery, in a diddy Georgian house in Soho, is the surprising location for a remarkably confusing roomful of Turk’s self-portraits as Warhol, entitled, rather cutely, Me as Him.

The paintings feel like Warhol’s, look like Warhol’s, but aren’t Warhol’s. We’re witnessing another of Turk’s tests of what is real and what isn’t. And this is certainly an investigation of identity. But what else is going on? The key detail is surely the camouflage. First Warhol smeared his identity in it; now Turk has, too. Camouflage was invented to hide things, yet in this instance it seems, perversely, to bring them to your attention. One of Turk’s paintings is lurid blue; another is vivid red. And, with its floor-to-ceiling wooden panelling and topsy-turvy ye olde Georgian spaces, this unlikely venue pours petrol on a sense of disjunction that brought to my mind the advice given to Alice in one of Warhol’s favourite books: “Everything’s got a moral, if only you can find it.”

I remember when Warhol first showed the self-portraits on which Turk’s versions are based. They were his last, completed a few months before his death, and their unveiling at the Anthony d’Offay Gallery in 1986 was accompanied by a grotesque private view, at which Warhol was ushered behind a glass table to keep him away from the crowd. But the crowd kept pressing forward, until the table shattered into a thousand pieces. Warhol never moved. He just stood there, letting it happen. It was spooky. The game he was playing was the typical blankist’s game. By pretending he wasn’t there, by not responding, he allowed himself to be defined by everyone else’s responses to him.

In his original self-portraits, the crudely inked camouflage seemed to add a note of sadness to Warhol’s face. It struck me in the same way badly applied lipstick strikes you on an old woman’s face: something that is supposed to hide the decrepitude ends up bringing it to your attention. How old and worn-out Warhol looked in his snazzy dazzle camouflage.

Turk is piping a different tune. His concern is not to define himself by other people’s presence, or to look old and sad, but to comment on the artificial make-up of celebrity. By assuming Warhol’s identity so neatly, right down to the fright wig, he is continuing his investigation into the synthetic nature of fame. What matters here is not Warhol’s sadness but his recognisability. Even behind the camouflage, he’s unmistakable. Except, of course, it isn’t him.

I don’t generally like this type of perceptual game, but with Turk I make an exception. He’s witty, elusive, provocative and valuable. And the largeness of his brain is made vivid when you compare his ambition with that of Mel Ramos, the eminently notorious and utterly questionable pop artist who has also surfaced, most surprisingly, in the West End. In the 1960s, Ramos was pop art’s Mr Pin-up. At exactly the same time that Warhol was cleverly singling out Marilyn and Elvis for pop-art attention, Ramos was crudely mining the same fan-mag sources to bring us sexy nudes entwined around toothpaste tubes and naked B-movie stars draped along giant cigars. It was perhaps the most obvious pop art anyone ever made. Girls and goodies. Full stop.

Where most pop artists were questioning the consumer dream on at least one of their many levels, Ramos only ever had the one level, and no questioning went on on it. So obviously trashy and objectionable was his output that he’s never, to my knowledge, had a show in London before. So there are worthwhile historic reasons for going down to ogle the great ogler. Who says superficiality cannot have heights?

Gavin Turk, Riflemaker, W1, until Sept 7; Mel Ramos, Robert Sandelson, W1, until July 28

Diamond Damien will scoop £180m

From The Sunday Times

July 15, 2007

Richard Brooks, Arts Editor

DAMIEN HIRST, the bad boy turned global brand of British art, is set to sell £180m of work from his latest exhibition, easily a world record for a sale by any artist.

Hirst has already sold £130m of exhibits from the show in London, which has just closed, and is expected soon to clinch a deal – at the asking price – for his £50m diamond-stud-ded skull.

Although the artist will have to give about 25% in commission to his gallery, White Cube, this still leaves Hirst with about £135m. This will more than double his fortune, put at £130m in the Sunday Times Rich List.

The £10m cost of the jewels and fees paid to craftsmen for assembling the work – called For the Love of God – are expected to be partially offset with HM Revenue and Customs as tax-de-ductible expenses.

The sale of works at the two White Cube galleries in the West End and east London seals the transformation of Hirst over little more than five years into the art world’s biggest living cash generator. The most expensive work already sold by Hirst, 42, at the exhibition is the £10m Death Explained, a shark split in two. This just beats the

previous record of £9.6m paid for a Hirst work, a pill cabinet named Lullaby Spring, sold at Sotheby’s in London last month.

The next most expensive purchase from the White Cube sale was £6m paid for God Alone Knows, which incorporates three crucified sheep. As with Death Explained, the buyer has not been disclosed. However, the third most expensive work sold, Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain, was bought by George Michael and Kenny Goss, his boyfriend, for £3.5m. The work shows a cow pierced with arrows.

Even some of Hirst’s photo paintings of his wife giving birth have sold for as much as £2m each. They entail little work for the artist, because they are images blown up and then coloured in.

There were predictions that the skull, which is a platinum cast of a human skull encrusted with more than 8,500 jewels, might be bought by somebody in the Middle East or one of the many Russian collectors who are now a powerful force in the art market. But it is understood some of the most serious bidders, of whom there have so far been five, are American or British. One is now on the verge of buying.

Frontrunners are said to include Nat Rothschild, a hedge-fund operator and son of Lord Rothschild, the financier and arts patron. Nat Rothschild just lost out last month in an attempt to buy Hirst’s Lullaby Spring.

Other rumoured bidders include the Americans Adam Lin-demann, a New York financier; Steve Cohen, who paid £7m in 2004 for Hirst’s shark in a tank; Adam Sender, another Hirst collector; and Eli Broad, who made his fortune in property.

Tim Marlow, exhibitions director at White Cube, said attempts were being made to ensure the skull would not vanish from public view. “We are trying to negotiate a deal with a museum or several museums so whoever buys the jewelled skull puts it on public display, at least initially, rather than simply keeping it at home or in a vault away from the public gaze,” he said.

The skull attracted long queues outside White Cube over the five weeks it was on show. Hirst has hinted he would like it to be displayed at the British Museum. He recently said he had partly been inspired by the Mask of Tezcatlipoca, an Aztec skull from the 15th or 16th century at the museum.

This weekend the museum, which is planning a £100m extension, said it was in principle interested in displaying the skull but would have to fit it into a suitable exhibition.

Hirst, who rose to fame in the 1990s under the patronage of Charles Saatchi with his pickled cows, sharks and sheep, will soon be the world’s most expensive living artist. Among those he has overtaken are Lucian Freud, the British portrait painter whose work has fetched nearly £5m.

The only artists whose works have sold for more than £50m are all dead – Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Vincent Van Gogh and Gustav Klimt.

How the seaside got sexy

From The Times

July 14, 2007

The British seaside resort is enjoying a revival and, as our correspondent discovers, it is architecture that is leading the way

Tom Dyckhoff

After years of neglect by home-grown holidaymakers, the British seaside is experiencing a comeback – and architecture is very much in the picture. The middle-class rediscovery of candyfloss and kiss-me-quick hats has trickled money – patchily – into our troubled coastline. Most, alas, are as doomed as Margate’s Turner Centre. Little old Littlehampton, though, might make it.

Littlehampton has never been particularly renowned as a hotbed of the decadent avant garde, especially when it comes to architecture. Yet Vogue has dubbed it one of Britain’s hippest spots. Did I miss something? Is crazy golf suddenly de rigueur? Not quite. It’s the East Beach Café ( above). Littlehampton’s newest addition has been compared to many things thrown by a feisty storm on to the town’s shingle beach: the rusting hull of a long-sunk ship, a vast piece of driftwood, a turd washed in from a sewage pipe. Its designer, the much-fêted Thomas Heatherwick, doesn’t mind “so long as it feels as though it has crawled from the sea, with a real raw, rough beauty”. Whatever shape its rippled, ridged abstract steel body takes, though, this Trojan Horse casts enough of a surreally spectacular figure on the promenade to disrupt the normal routine of people taking their afternoon constitutionals along the seafront.

DE LA WARR PAVILION, BEXHILL-ON-SEA, EAST SUSSEX

Almost as peculiar as finding Thomas Heatherwick in sleepy Littlehampton is coming across the staunchly socialist product of a giant of European modernism in gentle Bexhill-on-Sea. During the great seaside building boom in the 1930s, Earl De La Warr commissioned Erich Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff to create this pleasure pavilion. Here you could self-improve, exercise, read novels, sun yourself and have fun – pleasure and enlightenment combined. This Utopia inevitably faded, but it was crisply restored as part of Bexhill and Hastings’ regeneration plan two summers ago by John McAslan, and newly kitted out by one of Britain’s best young furniture designers, Barber Osgerby. Go and slide down the most glamorous staircase around.

SOUTH SHORE PROMENADE SHELTERS, BLACKPOOL

In a town not exactly renowned for its architectural good taste, Ian McChesney Architects last year unveiled its inappropriately elegant take on those classic Victorian promenade shelters. A place where old ladies could gossip and hoodies could swap fags and drink cider, it formed part of the Great Promenade Show public art project. Normally, the words public and art make me run headlong for the hills, but not this time. The pair look like giant white beach towels surprised by a sudden westerly gust, the rippling steel fins catching the prevailing wind and swiveling on their base to protect those perched on its oak bench below. Simply wonderful. Just don’t get a taste for this good-taste malarkey, Blackpool – we like you brassy.

CORNWALL

Lidos puzzle me. They’re adored, they’re sexy, they get us lardy Brits exercising. They should be showered in government money. Yet all over the UK locals are battling to save them, with varying degrees of success. For every recovery, like my newly reopened local London Fields lido, there are several more deaths. But the latest plucked from the jaws of doom is Penzance’s grade II listed beauty. Like the magnificent Tinside lido just up the coast in Plymouth, which nestles on cliffs halfway between the waves and the Hoe, Jubilee is blessed with a glorious position, jutting out like a shark’s fin into the Atlantic. It was designed by Captain Latham, the borough engineer, and opened for King George V’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. Go and use it fast before its vital signs drop again.

LINCOLNSHIRE

No, Lincolnshire has not succumbed to sea level rises quite yet. Sleaford is 20 miles from the coast and the rather curiously chosen location for an exhibition – at the Hub Centre (www.thehubcentre.org) – celebrating perhaps the finest piece of generic seaside architecture: the humble beach hut. From rusting iron bathing machines to the one that Charles Saatchi bought from Tracey Emin for £75,000 in 2000, the beach hut is as much a part of seaside life as Punch’n’Judy. The artist Michael Trainor invited architects and artists worldwide to reinvent the hut, none of which really improves on the classic, but you have to admire the ingenuity. Four will be permanently installed later in the summer on the Lincolnshire coast between Mablethorpe and Anderby Creek.

Sold for £18.5m, a Raphael portrait that once cost $325

By Emily Dugan
Friday, 6 July 2007

A rare portrait by Raphael that had not been seen by the public for more than 40 years sold for £18.5m at Christie's last night. It was the largest sum ever paid at auction for a work by the Renaissance painter.

The work, an oil portrait of the Florentine ruler Lorenzo de' Medici which has been described as "the most important Renaissance portrait to be offered at auction for a generation", had been predicted to fetch between £10m and £15m.

But its recent history has been far from illustrious. Sold to the American collector Ira Spanierman for just $325 in 1968, the painting ­ then in poor condition ­ was regarded with scepticism by many, who doubted that it was the work of the Italian master.

Three years later, art historians confirmed that the work was indeed by Raffaello Sanzio, popularly known as Raphael, leaving Mr Spanierman sitting on a potential gold mine.

According to Christie's, the largest sum fetched for a Raphael at auction prior to this sale was a drawing sold in 1996, which went for £5.3m. This lower figure is in part due to the fact that it is so rare for his oil paintings, which are significantly more valuable than sketches, to be auctioned.

Private sales are more common for Raphael's works, and in 2004 the National Gallery paid £22m to stop his Madonna of the Pinks leaving the UK. The portrait sold yesterday, to a private collector, shows a sumptuously dressed Medici, draped in a shawl of gold and red with a delicately painted fur collar, standing against a rich green background.

The detail in the depiction of his robes is typical of the Italian master, who began his career in provincial church decoration, and came to be known as the "Prince of Painters".

The painting, which has been on display at Christie's in London since 30 June, is also politically important. It was commissioned by Medici's uncle, Pope Leo X, just before the duke got married to a wife he had never seen. The miniature portrait of his future wife that can be seen clutched in the sitter's hand gave the duke his first sneak preview of his betrothed. The pope was involved in the commission as he had personally arranged his nephew's marriage to Madeleine de la Tour D'Auvergne, a cousin of the king of France.

Lorenzo de' Medici, who was the Duke of Urbino and the ruler of Florence between 1513 and 1519, was the Charles Saatchi of the Renaissance. As one of the most influential art collectors of the time, he and his family commissioned a score of artists that reads like a Who's Who of artistic Florence. The masters patronised by the Florentine family included Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello and Fillippo Lippi.

Richard Knight, the international director of Christie's old master department, said he was delighted the "remarkable" painting had finally come to auction. "The importance of the artist and the sitter, together with the provenance and the historical context behind this painting's creation, make it one of the most significant old master pictures to be offered at auction for a generation," he said.

Other masterpieces under the hammer at Christie's yesterday were a Pieta by the 17th-century Venetian artist Domenico Zampieri, and a portrait by the British Restoration painter and official artist to Charles II, Sir Peter Lely.