Artscribe

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Artscribe (1976–92), titled Artscribe International from 1985, is a defunct British contemporary art magazine. It is notable for having given Matthew Collings his main break into the contemporary art world.

Artscribe's founding editor was the critic and painter James Faure Walker. Faure Walker had been a regular contributor to Studio International. That magazine had begun to concentrate on conceptual art and Faure Walker set up the new magazine to showcase British and American abstract modernist painting and sculpture as typified by Patrick Heron. To represent this work the magazine featured high quality colour reproduction which made financing the magazine difficult. Contributors included Peter Fuller and Adrian Searle.

In the early early 1980s neo-figurative painting epitomised by Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer, Jorg Immendorf, Francesco Clemente and Steven Campbell had gained international attention. Faure Walker rejected this work notably in a review of the 1981 exhibition A New Spirit in Painting curated by Nicholas Serota, making Artscribe appear out of step with contemporary trends. Faure Walker was ousted by Collings as editor in 1983. Fuller quit as a contributor and eventually set up his own magazine Modern Painters as a rival. Collings made the magazine's content more international with correspondents in Germany and France leading to the name change. Collings also commissioned articles on emerging British artists such as Mark Wallinger by Jon Thompson. Collings was fired as editor in 1988 after an argument. His successor Stuart Morgan had worked for Art in America and he commissioned more articles on American art. Ironically this coincided with the emergence of the Young British Artists and a growth of interest in the British art scene, a moment that Artscribe largely ignored though younger writers including Liam Gillick began to contribute to the magazine.

By 1991 the down turn in the international art market had an impact on the magazine's advertising revenue and it was sold to 'Hale' a company that published glossy home interiors magazines while another new editor Marjorie Allthorpe Guyton was installed. The format was changed again and the cover price was doubled with the consequence that subscriptions were undervalued. The final issues included notable articles on Jannis Kounellis and Damien Hirst by Thompson and Gillick but the decline was terminal and the magazine ceased in January 1992.