Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

William Cook

At home with Rubens

William Cook believes that the British cannot really understand the artist until they’ve been to Antwerp In a quiet corner of Tate Britain there is a little exhibition that sheds fresh light on an artist whom the British have never really learned to love. Rubens & Britain (until 6 May) is a fascinating show, documenting his work in England, and like all good exhibitions it leaves you wanting more. There are Rubens in countless British galleries, of course, but really to understand him you have to travel to his hometown, Antwerp. Here, Rubens is everywhere, even on the toilet doors in trendy bars and restaurants. My first visit was a

Owen Matthews

Set art free | 10 March 2012

Let’s not waste more millions ‘saving’ Old Masters Last week the National Gallery and National Gallery of Scotland proudly announced that they had jointly raised £45 million to buy Titian’s ‘Diana and Callisto’ from the Duke of Sutherland, thereby ‘saving it for the nation’. A few days before, Turkey’s Ministry of Culture and Tourism announced that it would be blocking export licences for various exhibits due to be displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the British Museum and the Victoria & Albert Museum. The Turks said they would not release the artifacts until items in UK and US museums excavated in Anatolia during the 19th century

Stephen Pollard

Theatre of rudeness

I’m told that the new production of Dvorˇák’s Rusalka at the Royal Opera House is controversial. There were boos at the first night and reports of audience members walking out in disgust. I too walked out in disgust. Mine, however, had nothing to do with what was happening on stage. It was prompted by the man sitting next to me, who arrived trailing BO the impact of which could alone knock out any Iranian nuclear bomb. The odour was so powerful that I had to get out as soon as possible. No part of my mind could focus on the performance; I had to hold myself together until the first

Michael Tanner

Reflections on guilt

There can be no doubting the nobility of John Adams’s intentions in writing The Death of Klinghoffer to a text by Alice Goodman, nor ENO’s courage in putting it on, though they do have a captive audience for minimalist and near-minimalist operas. The work is conceived, as all commentaries tirelessly tell us, in the spirit of Bach’s Passions, in which a dramatic narrative thread alternates with arias of reflection and choruses of penance and grief. Yet Bach’s purpose was different in kind from Adams’s. Bach could take for granted an audience of unquestioning believers, and his sublime masterpieces embody their faith more powerfully than anything else a Christian has created,

Lloyd Evans

Only the best

Jackie Mason, the New York stand-up, looks very strange. It’s as if somebody shrank Tony Bennett and microwaved him for two hours. Mason is short, dark, troll-like, densely built, with shining bulbous lips and a twinkly expression of diabolical mischief. His hair gathers over his head in a wave of red-brown crinkliness. For his solo show he wears a sharp, grey business suit. He could be Rumpelstiltskin selling real estate. All his jokes are Jewish. And none of them are. He uses ‘the Jew’ as a catch-all tag for a fretful, brow-beaten loser. ‘The Gentile’ is his relaxed, prosperous and self-confident counterpart. The Jew wants to impress people by sporting

Deborah Ross

Running on empty | 10 March 2012

Bel Ami is based on Guy de Maupassant’s 1895 novel of the same name about a young man who sleeps himself to the top of Parisian society — I once slept myself to the top of Parisian society, but by the time I got there I was far too exhausted to properly enjoy it — and while it is lush and handsomely mounted and features copious sex scenes it lacks what it would absolutely have to have were it to work: erotic sizzle. It should, in its energies and passions, be most like Dangerous Liaisons, say, but it’s neither seductive nor absorbing, and although I hate to point the finger

Simon Hoggart

Friends reunited | 10 March 2012

Paula Milne’s drama serial White Heat (BBC2, Thursday) starts in 1965 which to some of us might seem like yesterday, but is equidistant between the end of the first world war and now. So to most people it’s ancient history. Various students in London are looking for accommodation, which is strange since Churchill died in January, around the start of their second term. Doesn’t matter. You take your historical milestones where you find them. The students are selected by their young landlord Jack, a reach-me-down leftie whose father is a wealthy Tory MP. Jack wants them to be part of a socialist commune reflecting all demographics — white, black, gay,

Kate Chisholm

Overdoing the drama

What took them so long? For weeks and weeks he’d been limping into the farmhouse whining about how cold he is, how tired, how he’s had enough of Tom gadding about Borsetshire selling his gruesome-sounding pork meatballs while he’s stuck on the farm trimming leeks and getting up at the crack of dawn to do the milking. The clues were so obvious even Sergeant Lewis would have guessed that something bad must be waiting in the cowshed for Tony Archer. Perhaps it was intentional, the scriptwriters of The Archers (Radio 4) calling our bluff to prove that they’re in charge, and carefully manipulating our fears and premonitions to ensure that

Friday

Rod Liddle

A question about Question Time

I think we should have a short poll. Who is the thickest person ever to appear on the BBC’s Question Time? I ask having watched a woman last night, can’t remember her name, who worked for the Daily Mail, and who could have been outwitted by a bowl of semi-thawed Iceland Atlantic Prawns. Also, she looked remarkably like Austin Powers. Maybe it was Austin Powers. The singer Will Young was on too, and he was quite staggeringly thick. Are they the worst yet? Let me hear your nominations. Votes for ‘Rod Liddle’ will be discounted on grounds of predictability and taste.

Saturday

Niru Ratnam

Losing its edge

Last November the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles held its annual fund-raising gala. Previously the event had used the tried-and-tested formula of wheeling in celebrity hosts such as Lady Gaga to try to persuade the great and good of Los Angeles to part with cash to fund the museum’s programme. This time, however, the museum changed tack, and appointed the performance artist Marina Abramovic as its creative director. When the guests, who included Kirsten Dunst, Pamela Anderson and Will Ferrell, turned up, they were asked to don white lab coats. They were then led to their tables, many of which featured a live human head poking up through

Susan Moore

All the fun of the fair | 3 March 2012

It is easy to take the art and antiques fair for granted. After all, thousands of them take place every year, from humble events in village halls — cardboard boxes, old newspaper and cups of tea — to fairs so glamorous that on opening nights the ticket alone can cost $5,000. It was not ever thus. That revered mother of all such selling exhibitions — what became known as the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair — was conceived in 1934 as a daring initiative to stimulate trade in the dark days of post-Depression London. As for the word ‘fair’, the late and much-lamented Frank Davis, who was still writing

Michael Prodger

Miniatures to dazzle

Alongside his distinguished career as a painter, Howard Hodgkin has also long been a collector of note. As a schoolboy at Eton he was given to bouts of running away but while briefly in situ his art master, Wilfrid Blunt (the brother of Anthony), borrowed a 17th-century Indian painting of a chameleon from the Royal Collection to enliven a lesson and Hodgkin was hooked. He started buying Indian pictures then and has continued ever since. ‘My collection has nothing to do with art history,’ he says. ‘It is entirely to do with the arbitrary inclinations of one person.’ It is a method that has, nevertheless, resulted in one of the

Laura Gascoigne

Down but not out | 3 March 2012

It’s not every J.D. Wetherspoon’s pub that has a preservation order slapped on it. In fact, I’m prepared to bet there’s only one: The Trafalgar in Portsmouth, Grade II-listed in 2002 for its mural by Eric Rimmington. Rimmington was 23 in 1949 when he won the commission to decorate the clubroom of the old Trafalgar House Services Club and chose to paint a view of Portsmouth and Southsea Station with passengers coming and going on the platforms. More than 60 years on, comings and goings on station platforms haven’t lost their fascination for the artist, though for his latest London show at The Millinery Works he has plunged down the

Andrew Lambirth

Natural selection

Andrew Lambirth meets the artist John Hubbard, whose work is concerned with atmosphere and the spirit of place John Hubbard makes paintings about landscape which draw upon his early training in America and the influence of the Abstract Expressionists. But his pictures are far from abstract images: they are about the play of light through foliage or the surface of rock seen close to. They are concerned with atmosphere and the spirit of place — with earth, air, light and sometimes water interacting. He denies that these are aerial views, asserting that his paintings try to capture the experience of being in the landscape, rather than looking down upon it,

Deborah Ross

Going nowhere | 3 March 2012

The first and perhaps only thing to really say about Hunky Dory is that it is anything but. It is not hunky dory at all. Instead, it is half-baked and tiresome. I’d had rather high hopes for it. It’s a ‘let’s-put-on-a-show!’ film set in a Welsh comprehensive during the long hot summer of 1976 — the summer I turned 16, as it happens — so I expected at least some of it to resonate, but its characters are so unfinished and improbabilities so plentiful and narrative so unoriginal it’s like an extended episode of Fame, only worse. I do feel rotten about saying this, yes, as it’s obviously been made

Michael Tanner

Cold at heart

‘A masterpiece comparable with the last great plays of Shakespeare’, ‘a veritable turbocharged dynamic of music’, ‘a cliffhanger’, ‘a rollercoaster of a drama’ — which opera deserves these and many more ecstatic epithets? They all occur in the brief programme notes to last week’s concert performance at the Barbican of Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, though also quoted there, as an example of outdated hostility to the work, is Charles Rosen’s ‘it’s difficult to convey how unmemorable it is’. Try as I might and have with Clemenza, I am on Rosen’s side. I’d much rather agree that the opera belongs to the canon of Mozartian masterworks, but just think of

Lloyd Evans

Bohemian bliss

Strange sort of classic, Hay Fever. Written when Noël Coward was an unknown actor, it won him no converts among producers. He couldn’t get anyone to stage it. The title is weak and vague. The script lacks incident and action. And the humour is more subtle than audiences were used to. Only after Coward had broken through with his auntie-blasting Oedipal shocker, The Vortex, could he find managers ready to take a second look at his back catalogue. Hay Fever introduces us to a family of maddeningly self-indulgent Bohemians, the Blisses, whose home is swamped by a quartet of weekend guests. A gruesome house party follows. All the wrong people

Giannandrea Poesio

On the ropes

‘Aerial’ ballets were all the rage in late-Victorian London. It mattered little that they were more circus acts than actual ballets; their female stars, swinging from either a trapeze or sturdy ropes, were worshipped on a par with the greatest ballerinas — as in Angela Carter’s novel Nights at the Circus. I often wonder what those people would think of their postmodern successors, as performing with ropes seems to be a growing trend within contemporary dance-making. Take Ilona’s Jäntti’s Handspun, which opened the Exposure: Dance programme at the Linbury Studio Theatre last week. Jäntti combines unique rope-climbing and choreographic skills in a work that makes viewers forget technical bravura and

Kate Chisholm

Archive treasures

It’s a bit of a surprise to discover that my young nephews are huge fans of radio. Since Radio 4 abandoned programmes designed for children, and CBeebies disappeared from the airwaves, radio has become a kids-free zone. What on earth do they find to listen to? Why, of course, Radio 4 Extra, and especially the comedy classics, The Navy Lark, Beyond Our Ken and The Men from the Ministry. Kids are getting the listening bug from programmes that were created more than 50 years ago. Brilliant. To them, these treasures from the archives sound as weird and fantastical as Harry Potter. As Mary Kalemkerian, Radio 4 Extra’s director of programming,

James Delingpole

Kindred spirits

There’s a game you have to play at the BBC and Jeremy Paxman plays it very well — which is why he is currently still the most famous Old Malvernian after C.S. Lewis whereas I’m way down the list at maybe fourth, fifth or sixth. The rules are very simple: no matter how great your sympathies secretly might be towards the British Empire, Tory values, climate-change scepticism, Israel, the idea of national sovereignty, Margaret Thatcher or any other manifestation of what the BBC would consider WrongThink, you must suppress, suppress, suppress, using the mental equivalent of that spiked metal ring the late Victorians devised to discourage young men from masturbating.