PartB Editor Daniel B Yates plays with the balls of long-dead orphans, yet finds only solemnity and poignancy in his visit to the Foundling Museum…

alexsmall goes to see hogarth

In April 2005 Parliament passed the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (SOCPA) which made any unauthorised act of protest within a kilometre of Parliament Square illegal. The Act has been associated with the continued one-man camp peace protest site of Brian Haw who has been a dogmatic feature sitting opposite the Houses of Parliament since June 2001, surrounded by a cacophony of placards, banners, Banksy’s donated contributions, photocopied war-zone reports, hand-made signs and a more impromptu ‘fallen comrade’ monument of traffic cones and garden cane that have grown in his five-year tenure. Parliament claimed that those shadowy figures of terrorism could use protests similar to Haw’s as a cover for their more devious activities and despite a successful ruling in his favour, they pursued Haw’s continued presence and finally, clutching a Court of Appeal ruling, 78 police arrived in the early hours of May 23rd last year to forcibly remove Brian Haw who had come to symbolise increasing anti-war sentiment.

A Bigger Splash aside, there is no painting in David Hockney's vast portfolio of work which comes close to being as iconic as the celebrated double portrait of his friends, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell. The strangely unsettling study of a modern-day Arnolfini marriage wherein husband and wife stand strikingly far apart and appear more interested in the artist than each other, is one of over 250 works from the past fifty years that is currently being shown in what is the first ever exhibition devoted solely to Hockney's portraits.