ArtReview

ArtReview is an international contemporary art magazine based in London, founded in 1948. Its sister publication, ArtReview Asia, was established in 2013.

==History== Launched as a fortnightly broadsheet in February 1949 by a retired country medical practitioner, Dr Richard Gainsborough, and the first edition was designed by his wife, the artist Eileen Mayo, Arts News and Review set out to champion contemporary art in Britain, providing its readers with commentary, news and reviews. At the outset its focus was set firmly on the artist – its regular cover ‘Portrait of the artist’ introduced its readership to emerging artists as well as reconnecting with the past masters of modernism from before the war. Cover artists included Édouard Manet, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Lucian Freud. As its editorial would declare in 1954, Art News and Review's purpose was ‘to stimulate the criticism of contemporary art, to give to both painters and writers space they would never find elsewhere, and to endeavour to present a balanced and comprehensive picture of living art in twentieth-century Britain.’ Critics such as David Sylvester and John Berger, cut their teeth in its pages during the 1950s, as it covered the growing trend of abstract art, and the lively debates provoked by the arrival of American Abstract Expressionism, while Lawrence Alloway and Reyner Banham celebrated new attitude towards art that embraced science, industry and mass culture, elaborating the terms of what became known as ‘Pop’ art. In 1954 Henri Matisse wrote for the magazine.