Artscribe
| editor | Marjorie Allthorpe Guyton |
|---|---|
| Former editors | James Faure Walker Matthew Collings Stuart Morgan |
| Categories | Contemporary art |
| Frequency | Bi-monthly |
| Year founded | 1976 |
| Final issue | January 1992 |
| Company | Hale |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Based in | London |
| ISSN | 0954-4178 |
| OCLC number | 471632626 |
Artscribe (1976–92), titled Artscribe International from 1985, is a defunct British contemporary art magazine. It was notable for its commitment in the late 1970s and early 1980s to abstract art, and for giving popular art critic Matthew Collings his first break into contemporary art. The magazine was published on a bi-monthly basis.
Artscribe was started in 1976. Its founding editor was the sculptor Ben Jones with the critic and painter James Faure Walker.Ben Jones retired from publishing to concentrate on making art and moved on after a few years.) Faure Walker had been a regular contributor to Studio International which had begun to concentrate on conceptual art. Faure Walker and Jones conceived the new magazine as a showcase of new British and American abstract modernist painting and sculpture as typified by the work of Patrick Heron. Contributors included Adrian Searle, Terence Mulloon, and Stuart Morgan. In this first phase under Faure Walker, Artscribe was distinguished by the lively intelligence of its writing, with a certain range—early content included a long interview with artist R.B. Kitaj (an outspoken champion of figuration) and a sophisticated description of the performance art scene in the United States and Europe by Stuart Morgan. But the main focus was on purely visual issues: To this day there is no equivalent in art publishing.
In the early 1980s neo-expressionism epitomized by the work of Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer, Jörg Immendorff, Francesco Clemente, and Steven Campbell had gained international attention. This kind of art was considered by powerful people in the art world to be loaded with important content that somehow transcended the visual dimension. Faure Walker rejected this view, and his scathing analysis of this mindset in art in an article on the 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting co-curated by Nicholas Serota and Norman Rosenthal, made Artscribe appear out of step with contemporary trends. In 1983 Faure Walker left the magazine to pursue his painting career and Matthew Collings, who had worked on various aspects of its production since 1979, took over as editor.
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