Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Tessa Lang

Spoken For

What I want to tell you is I can dream with my eyes wide open, like riding a bicycle without hands down a tree-lined road, weaving in and out of shadow. What I count as treasure is a robin’s nest neatly cached in a corner of my windowbox, a tight squirm of five hatchlings, mum cheeping menaces nearby. What I long for is more than a memory of sharing a skiff tied out of river drift, feeding Pimm’s salad from an   upturned cup to pairs of paddling ducks, with one eye on the fruit and one on   each other.

Wednesday

Jack Wakefield

The next head of the National Gallery will be…

Nick Penny announced that he is stepping down as head of the National Gallery. Next door, at the National Portrait Gallery, Sandy Nairne also announced that he is leaving. Could he be after the job at the NG? Nick Penny’s predecessor, Charles Saumarez Smith, came from the NPG but his lack of knowledge about the NG collection is said to have led to an internal curatorial mutiny. Sandy Nairne could also be said to lack the knowledge of the collection necessary to do the job well. Furthermore, he is not currently popular with lovers of the gallery, some of whom believe that his dogged pursuit of the overpriced Van Dyck self portrait – an attractive work of so-so

Friday

Camilla Swift

A good cad is easier to find – and much more fun – than a good gentleman

Country Life’s ‘Gentleman of the Year’ awards were announced last week, and contrary to the bookies’ expectations, David Beckham has finished in second place. The winner, their panel decided, was another David. David Dimbleby, in fact, for being: ‘an anchor in every sense of the world’ and ‘holding the nation steady when the water gets choppy’. But is either of those Davids really worth of the title? Country Life’s judges have, apparently, decided that tattoos are allowed, since in the 19th century ‘it was quite a gentlemanly thing to do’. I’m not sure everyone will agree with their decision, particularly Sarah Vine, who recently compared tattoos to ‘a form of

Thursday

Lloyd Evans

Alex Jennings interview: the new Willy Wonka on Roald Dahl’s ‘child killer’

‘Oompa Loompa juice,’ says the actor Alex Jennings when I ask if he takes any supplements to preserve his looks. He’s 57 but could pass for a decade younger. We meet backstage in his Drury Lane suite, which boasts a fridge crammed with pink champagne, where he’s preparing to play the lead role in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. His relaxed demeanour and silky voice create an air of instant geniality that is reinforced by his towering figure. He’s six foot four and as lean as a fast bowler. Though he’s due on stage in 90 minutes, he lounges semi-horizontal in an armchair showing no trace of anxiety. ‘I do

Andrew Lambirth

The painter who channelled the forces of gravity

Tragically, Ian Welsh (1944–2014) did not live to see this exhibition of his latest work. Diagnosed with terminal cancer on the eve of his 70th birthday, he struggled to finish the two large paintings in his last series of works, entitled ‘Gravity’s Rainbow’. He found it increasingly difficult to stand to paint, but he worked, sitting down instead, on a group of six small canvases that have a mysterious linear assurance worthy of the best of late de Kooning. Welsh desperately wanted to see his new work up on the refurbished walls of his local gallery, Hasting Arts Forum, of which he was a passionate supporter, acting as chairman until

Fleur Adcock

Eva Remembers Her Two Brothers Called James

When she thinks (if she does) of the first James it is of a six-year-old who died when she was fourteen, of meningitis. His spirit, like a trespassing sprite, flew into his parents’ marriage bed and lurked there as they comforted each other. A month later, conspiring with the genie of ovulation and the hormone fairies, it implanted itself in a fertilised egg, to be born in July 1890 and loaded with the same eight syllables: James Arthur Dickson Eggington. He didn’t resemble his first avatar or any of his incarnate siblings at Eva’s wedding, this gladsome imp with his long chin. When TB clutched him ‘I am still improving’,

Deborah Ross

A funny weepie that paints itself into a contrived corner

The Fault in Our Stars, which is based on the bestselling young-adult novel by John Green, is about two teenagers with cancer who fall in love and it’s a sort of Love Story for younger people, God help them, although unlike Love Story it’s not set to mislead an entire generation. (In my experience, love means having to say you’re sorry constantly, and at least three times before breakfast.) This is funnier — it’s funny about the Big C; that’s its USP — but it is still a weepie and yes, I did weep, as I’m not a cold-hearted monster (am I not still recovering from Marley & Me?), but

James Walton

The girl who had sex with dolphins

BBC4’s The Girl Who Talked to Dolphins (Tuesday) began with the overstated-sounding claim that it would be tackling ‘perhaps the most remarkable period in the history of animal science’. In fact, though, the longer the programme went on, the more convincing this claim felt — even if the word ‘period’ should possibly have been replaced with ‘episode’, and ‘remarkable’ with ‘bonkers’. At times, the story seemed almost too neat a microcosm of the 1960s, as well meant if not necessarily practical ideas about transforming life on earth — and beyond — gave way to something much darker. At others, it brought to mind that hippie Californian scientist in The Fast

Lindsay Johns

The song that fought apartheid

This month marks the 40th anniversary of the release of Mannenberg, the seminal album by the Cape Townian jazz pianist Abdullah Ibrahim (formerly known as Dollar Brand). Recorded against a backdrop of forced removals as the apartheid government evicted Coloured families from District Six, the title track was inspired by and named after the township of Manenberg, where many of those who had been displaced were resettled. An instant hit, the song swiftly became identified with the valiant struggle against apartheid. Notable for the haunting tenor saxophone solo by Basil Coetzee, and with Robbie Jansen on alto sax and Monty Weber on drums, the 13-minute title track is threnodic, passionate

Lloyd Evans

Did Turgenev foresee Russia’s Stalinist future?

Fans of Chekhov have to endure both feast and famine. Feast because his works are revived everywhere. Famine because he concentrated all his riches in just four great plays that grow stale with repetition. For fresh nourishment we turn to Brian Friel, whose stage adaptations of the short stories go some way to appease our hunger. In 1987, Friel applied his skills to Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev, which is now revived at the Donmar. The magical charm of a Russian estate is superbly conjured by Rob Howell’s set. Slatted timbers and peeling paintwork. Golden shafts of sunlight falling on crimson rugs and scattered wicker baskets. The story concerns two

Hugo Shirley

Tilting at metronomes: Massenet’s Don Quichotte opens at Grange Park Opera

To suggest that the ageing Jules Massenet identified himself with the title character of his Don Quichotte is nothing new — and late works such as this by definition encourage biographical interpretations. One of the main liberties of the opera, premièred in 1910 and very loosely based (via a contemporary verse play) on Cervantes, was to bring the character of Dulcinea (here ‘La Belle Dulcinée’) out of the realm of the imagination and to embody her as a distinctly flesh-and-blood mezzo-soprano. That the first singer to perform Dulcinée, Lucy Arbell, was the object of Massenet’s infatuation only emphasises the biographical parallels, all of which give extra layers to a gently

Matthew Sweeney

Ice Sculpture

If I begged you to, would you hitchhike to the ice-sculpture factory, where the drunken cow was just presented, and the sleeping horse was celebrated? Ah, those caught animals, where else would they be paraded? I visualise you sitting on a black camel, wearing a red fedora, and a maroon, velvet dress. It would be sunset, rosé wine would be flowing, the monkey would be dancing to zither music. I picture you laughing, then directing the singing to include a hymn to a snail, that small fellow who brings his home with him — easily shown in ice. And maybe an encore to a frog who sits on a plate,

Tuesday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Marina Abramović is no fraud – or no more so than any religious leader

If art is the new religion, we were always going to end up here. With high priests, acolytes and ‘energy’. That’s the set up at the Serpentine Gallery at the moment: us as the potential believers queuing around the block ready to be received, and Marina Abramović as the high priestess armed with nothing (literally nothing) but her presence. It could be Rome, Jerusalem or Gold Base. It could be the 20th, 8th or 1st centuries. We’re in a world of belief – and possibly make-believe. I was Abramovićed last week. Rationalist cynic that I am, I thought I wouldn’t be able to take it. But I did. I felt

Thursday

Roderick Conway-Morris

Modernism’s dreams – and nightmares – at the Venice Architectural Biennale

An eccentric English aristocrat who constructed a 20-mile network of underground corridors to avoid coming into contact with his fellow humans on his country estate; a Japanese dentist who has amassed an enormous collection of decorative details from buildings spanning a century, retrieved from Tokyo demolition sites; the German inventor of ‘Scalology’, who has spent 60 years studying staircases; and Inuit soapstone carvings of a Cold War early-warning station and of an airport terminal are among the surprises offered by the 14th Venice International Architecture Biennale. The Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas is this year’s artistic director. With his team of researchers, he has not only composed a fascinating show —

Andrew Lambirth

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition offers up the good, the bad and the ugly – and a sore neck

One of the great traditions of the RA’s Summer Exhibition has always been that each work submitted was seen in person by the Hanging Committee, passed in front of their keen or bemused gaze by a succession of porters. Of course this method had its drawbacks: judges could miss something in a state of postprandial somnolence induced by the consumption of too much (heavily fortified) beef tea, but at least the paintings, drawings and prints had a chance of being chosen through that all-important direct communication of eye and art. (Sculpture, because of its scale and mass, has always presented its own logistical problems.) This year, for the first time,

Lara Prendergast

When Mondrian was off the grid

I find it easy to forget that Piet Mondrian is a Dutch artist. The linear, gridlocked works he is famed for seem to beat with the energy of the New York metropolis. But it was not always so. His path to abstraction was a precarious one that bumped into a number of styles drifting round during the early 20th century. And, in the beginning, his work was Dutch — pastoral, domestic, earthy. To see this progression, head to Margate (Margate!) where you will find an exhibition of Mondrian’s work at Turner Contemporary, which commemorates the 70th anniversary of his death. The title sounds generic — Mondrian and Colour (artist —

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Why is the opera world so damn uptight?

God, opera singers are touchy. You dare to analyse how they look, you dare to criticise the enormous subsidies they get, you have the temerity to call someone an opera singer who hasn’t been vetted by an opera commissar and they go all Al-Qaeda on you. Yesterday the Today programme had an interview with Russell Watson, a decent, popular singer whose shtick includes shouty renditions of opera arias. The presenter introduced him as an opera singer and the poncey opera world went ballistic. ‘He’s not an opera singer!’ they bleated, ‘He’s just a singer!’ Note that twatty ‘just’? No art form that was confidant about what it does would ever feel

John Fuller

Memory

While in the mirror I’m an aging face More or less the same day after day,   In the mind’s darker space There are these handles to enticing doors  Of occasional abrupt transition,   Doors of entry, doors   Of intercommunications   Obeying the same laws.  So many rooms! Such impatience!  Backwards and forwards I make my way With a fine sense of continuity And the illusion of one memory,  But always now with the admission   Of an actuarial fear   That soon the day must be near   When I will stand and pause With a shaking hand on one of the beautiful doors (The doors that open and the doors that slam  Quite suddenly

Hugo Shirley

Terry Gilliam turns to eye-watering excess for his staging of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini

Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers, or at least performers, able to persuade and cajole both us in the audience and the other characters on stage through their eloquence. Berlioz, in his first opera, presents the renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, in an episode loosely adapted from his autobiography. But the final casting and unveiling of his new statue of Perseus, against all the odds, provides a climax that music (let alone stagecraft) seems fundamentally ill equipped to portray. The road to that climax is also paved with numerous distractions for both us and Cellini, the most

Lloyd Evans

The Globe’s larf-a-minute Antony and Cleopatra

It’s hilarious. It’s also annoying that it’s so hilarious. Jonathan Munby’s earthy and glamorous production of Antony and Cleopatra goes almost too far to please the Globe’s fidgety, giggly crowds. The Egyptian queen is often treated as a female Lear, a trophy role, a lap of honour for a transatlantic facelift as she enters her bus-pass years. But Eve Best is the same age, around 40, as the real thing, and she invests the character with a fine mixture of romanticism, majesty and erotic guile. She also has a strong Home Counties branding. Slender-limbed and deeply tanned, she drifts around her palace in a range of floaty white linen dresses.