Otto Saumarez Smith Bücher

Under Charles Saumarez Smith's leadership, significant architectural changes and redefined missions occurred at the National Portrait Gallery, the National Gallery, and the Royal Academy, positioning him to explore the evolution of art museums over the past century and their potential futures. In this book, he embarks on a global journey to various art museums, including Tate Modern in London, the Benesse House Museum in Japan, the Getty Center in Los Angeles, the Museum of New and Old Art in Tasmania, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, and the West Bund Museum in Shanghai. Saumarez Smith examines how the experience of art is influenced by the architecture of these institutions and their display principles. He notes a shift in the past century: visitors now seek personal aesthetic experiences rather than solely educational ones. Museum displays have transitioned from didactic, chronological, and predominantly Western perspectives to thematic and global approaches. Additionally, museums have moved from city centers to remote locations, becoming cultural pilgrimage sites. Architects have evolved from creating neutral exhibition spaces to designing striking landmarks that revitalize neighborhoods and enhance cultural tourism.

In this first major study of the work of the painter John Wonnacott (b.1940), Charles Saumarez Smith has surveyed a body of work produced at a tangent to the orthodoxies of modernism. Exploring the artist's formative experiences at the Slade, which connected him with artists such as Frank Auerbach and Michael Andrews and the School of London more broadly, Saumarez Smith roots Wonnacott's approach in his commitment to the discipline of drawing, his acute skills in observational analysis and the mechanics of graphic invention that makes his visual response to the world so memorable. 0Alongside commissioned portraits created in the grandest of architectural spaces, from naval bases to the Painted Hall at Greenwich and including John Major in 10 Downing Street and the Royal Family in Buckingham Palace, he has produced a revealing diary of self-portraits stretching back from his early teens and landscape paintings of light and sky which are celebrations of his native Essex coastline. In presenting the full range of Wonnacott's impressive oeuvre, the scope of the artist's remarkable achievement is revealed.