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If you’re in or around New York frickin’ City in the next month or so, check out Todd James aka Reas’ first ever (wtf?!) solo show in NYC, ‘Make My …

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Rathbone gallery will be closed from Monday 18th January until 12th February for a stock take and whilst we prepare for our next exhibition. …

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There are lots of exciting exhibitions and events happening at the Lazarides’ galleries in 2010. So keep up-to-date on what we are up to by checking …

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Robin Simon’s review in the current BAJ of Charles Saumarez Smith’s short history of the National Gallery, which is interesting not least for what it does not make explicit: the uncomfortable circumstances of Smith’s own relationship with his chairman of trustees. Nor does he mention how the National Gallery attempted to prevent his publishing the book…

The National Gallery: A Short History
by Charles Saumarez Smith
Frances Lincoln 2009 £14.99 isbn 978 0711230439

Revenge may be a dish best eaten cold, but the dust had hardly settled on Charles Saumarez Smith’s controversial departure from the directorship of the National Gallery than this elegant Parthian shot appeared. The National Gallery did its best to prevent the book’s appearance, fortunately without success, and readers will delight in the suavity and poise of this beautifully judged account. Dr Smith fingers the often poisonous trustees who have interfered with the running of the institution throughout its history. The snobbery and obstructiveness of Alfred de Rothschild especially (Manet’s paintings were ‘unnecessary rubbish’) prevented Charles Holroyd from a perceptive and inspired attempt at buying modern French paintings as early as 1906. The episode and many others offer a nightmare insight into the ways in which trustees could make a director’s job impossible. This is a situation that Dr Smith understands at first-hand, in his case, through having to put up with his chairman, someone called Peter Scott. Not that you will find Dr Smith saying such things: the reader is left to infer as much from the author’s ingenious prose. Dr Smith does not spare the shortcomings of some of his predecessors, although these, such as they were, were usually failings of timidity or dullness. Given the slightly unpleasant side, inevitably so, to much of the story, the history is perhaps mercifully brief, but it is none the less both authoritative and, best of all, delightful to read.

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Watch and listen: Ancient treasures – including a Roman version of the Swiss Army knife – go on display in Cambridge.

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American novelist JD Salinger, author of classic 20th Century book The Catcher In The Rye, has died aged 91, his son says.

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Artist Michael Landy, who once destroyed his possessions in the name of art, turns a gallery into a giant bin for the disposal of artworks.

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Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy will join 18 other leading poets in a literary Live Aid-style event for victims of the Haiti earthquake.

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Poet Christopher Reid wins the 2009 Costa Book of the Year for his collection of poems A Scattering, a tribute to his late wife.

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