Anish Kapoor wins Turner Prize

The Turner Prize, the Tate Gallery’s prestigious award for contemporary British art, has been given to Anish Kapoor. In what Director Nicholas Serota described as a long and difficult deliberation, the jury favoured the sculptor’s distinguished track record over the claims of three young artists who completed the short list: Ian Davenport, Fiona Rae and Rachel Whiteread. (See The Art Newspaper No.12, November 1991, p.3 for details of the controversy over the short list.) In presenting the prize at a formal dinner held at the museum on Tuesday 26 November, Robert Hughes, Time magazine’s art critic, surprised his audience by failing to make any mention of the four contenders, while confirming his admiration for British art by citing the achievements of Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, Leon Kossoff and Howard Hodgkin and Sean Scully, whose omission from the short list surprised many observers.