Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Mark Glazebrook

Seduced by Klimt

Art Nouveau, or Jugendstil as it was called in Germany, came rather late to Austria, where it was sometimes called Sezessionstil. Gustav Klimt was a leading light in the breakaway Austrian Secession movement founded in 1897. Only a fool would deny that he was an exceptionally gifted artist. He absorbed in turn 19th-century Realism, Symbolism and Impressionism. He drew so beautifully that only prudes will be shocked by his sensuality. (Indeed, it is to be hoped — or hoffentlich as they say locally — that his erotic images of ladies pleasuring themselves, rendered in soft and not so soft pencil, may have educated and liberated Freud’s neurotically uptight Viennese patients.)

Andrew Lambirth

Shifting truths

Before getting down to a discussion of Wyndham Lewis and an exhibition I’ve been looking forward to for months, I want to register a protest about this year’s recipient of the Wollaston Award at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. This prestigious prize is worth £25,000 and thus ranks with the Turner Prize as a top art world award, and yet it receives very little publicity. Deserving past winners have included Robert Medley, John Hoyland and R.B. Kitaj, but this year it has gone to Jeff Koons. In my review of the summer show I pointed out that Koons should not be taking up space which could be more profitably used

Simon Hoggart

Comprehensive prescription

IT would have been fun to be at the planning meeting for Harley Street (ITV, Thursday), the new medical drama series about a group of stunningly good-looking doctors in private practice. ‘Look, we get all the bloody bits, the emotional traumas, and the scenes where someone’s pushed down a hospital corridor on a trolley at about 40mph while the doctor yells incomprehensible instructions — plus money! And fabulously beautiful settings!’ ‘Yurss, problem is, people love the NHS. They suspect Harley Street is for hedge fund managers and diplomats from corrupt tyrannies. They’re not going to identify.’ ‘So, we make the doctors deeply caring. One of them is black — ticks

Alan Judd

Value for money

How far will the proposed road tax changes influence what we actually buy in the new car market? Not as much, perhaps, as the government likes to think. After all, if you want something like the admirable Fiat Panda you are never going to look at the (differently admirable) Audi A8 anyway. It’s those in the middle where an additional hundred or two a year in tax might count, especially where you have different tax bands for different versions of the same model, as with the Ford Mondeo. Even here, though, the increase in fuel prices is likely to have — is already having — a much greater effect. Which

Ursula Buchan

Making sense

If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. If your ears go back, like a frightened horse, at the word ‘conceptualism’ when applied to modern art, you may not be very pleased to know that this is a hot topic in landscape design at the moment. Before you gallop off round the paddock, however, I should point out that we could all be beneficiaries, if the result is brighter, more interesting public (and private) spaces. After all, there cannot be

Tuesday

Alex Massie

Wodehouse on TV?

In response to this post, a reader asks how did I like the Fry and Laurie TV adaptations? Well, only up to a point is my answer. They are, probably, as good an effort as television can muster but they still, to my mind, fail to cut the mustard. An honorable failure, then. Or rather, to put it more charitably, they were closer to being a success than anyone had ay right to hope they would be. Fry was, I always thought, rather too oleaginously piscine as Jeeves while Laurie played Bertie as – hard though this may be to believe – too much of a fat-headed ass. They got

Monday

The Spectator

Summer Culture

Clemency Burton-Hill, who will be presenting The Proms on BBC 4 this summer, offers her suggestions for what to do and see on the cultural front this summer here. Well worth a read.

Sunday

Alex Massie

Blogging Beckett

Noah Millman, one of my favourite bloggers, on Brian Dennehy appearing in Krapp’s Last Tape: It’s a marvelously devastating bit of theater, as Beckett should be.Krapp’s Last Tape is – and should be – a particularly uncomfortable play for a blogger. Here sits a man, a writer, having reached his grand climacteric, looking back on a life devoted to a project of self-creation through self-revelation (and using new technology – the reel-to-reel tape recorder), and consumed with self-disgust at the utter waste of such an effort. The fact that I’m continuing to blog after having seen this play is only more evidence that theater lacks any real power to change

Saturday

James Walton

What a carry on

James Walton suggests reading George Orwell in order to understand the appeal of Carry On films Recently, we’ve been hearing quite a lot about how the winds of revolutionary change blew through Britain in 1968. Which doesn’t really explain why, in 1969, the highest-grossing film at the UK box office wasn’t Midnight Cowboy, The Wild Bunch or Easy Rider — but Carry On Camping. (It didn’t get any better for British cinéastes, incidentally: in 1971, the nation’s favourite movie was On the Buses.) Not that the film in question completely ignored the turbulence of the times. Towards the end, you may remember, the presence of hippies on a neighbouring field

Clemency Burtonhill

Clemency suggests | 12 July 2008

Festivals In only its third year, the laid-back Latitude (17-20 July) has gained a reputation for being one of Britain’s finest festivals, and it certainly has one of the most enticing and interesting line-ups of any event this summer. More than a merely musical extravaganza, the beautiful site on Henham Park Estate in Suffolk will also host comics, poets, writers, theatre companies, film directors, actors, cabaret artists and musicians, alongside headlining acts such as Franz Ferdinand, Interpol, Blondie and Sigur Ros. I’ve packed the pop-up tent and the Hunters and am now crossing my fingers and praying for sunshine… Rain or shine, this year will mark the 25th anniversary of

Charles Spencer

Uncool fun

My body aches, my bones creak and I have a nagging headache that paracetamol won’t shift. It’s a bit like having a hangover again, but mercifully without the attendant guilt. As I write, my son Ed, his friend Ollie and I have just spent the weekend at Guilfest, accurately and succinctly billed in the Daily Telegraph’s bumper festival preview a few weeks ago as ‘An unlikely success. Not bothered with cool, thus unpretentious fun.’ What I like best about this festival, held each year in Stoke Park on the outskirts of prosperous Guildford, is that it’s just 20 minutes down the A3 from our house and has plenty of parking.

Peter Phillips

Lost in translation | 12 July 2008

My interest in ridiculous sacred words began with a Victorian edition of Verdi’s ‘Requiem’, which I met at school. At the unbelievably splendid, and brassy, ‘Tuba mirum’ we were asked to sing the translation: ‘Hark! The trumpet sounds appalling’. I later discovered that there is a very enjoyable sub-culture of these things, mostly hidden away in our more traditional hymns. Unlike the psalms, which in the King James translation have a linguistic robustness managing to avoid or transcend this kind of embarrassment, the hymns we sing have the most diverse backgrounds. Shifts of meaning over time have been matched by changes in what is thought to be appropriate sentiment in

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Shifting combinations

Margaret Mellis: A Life in Colour Until 31 August Constructed: 40 Years of the UEA Collection Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, until 14 December The painter and construction-maker Margaret Mellis has led a remarkable and productive life, though sadly she is now living out the remainder of her existence in the twilight of Alzheimer’s, confined to bed and unable to work. Born in 1914 in China of Scottish parents, she came to Scotland as a baby, growing up to study music which she forsook for painting at Edinburgh College of Art in 1929. A talented student, she won a travelling award, studied with André Lhote in Paris, got to know

Matthew Dennison

Passionate collector

Masterpiece Watercolours and Drawings Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight, until 9 November Even passion has its limits. The first Lord Leverhulme — that ‘Soapy Billy’ who founded Lever Brothers — was a man of many passions. Uxoriousness, philanthropy and, of course, hygiene swayed this confident, capable Victorian magnate. So, too, did art. Leverhulme devoted his final decade to the creation of the Lady Lever Art Gallery in his model village of Port Sunlight. A memorial to his adored wife, it is also a pantechnicon of the vast collection of artworks he amassed lifelong, but particularly during the 12 years of his widowerhood. Leverhulme had an omnivorous passion for art.

Martin Gayford

Wanted! Lost portraits

Criminals can turn into detectives: consider the career of Eugène-François Vidocq, thief, convict and subsequently head of the Paris Sûreté. And, as we have seen recently in London, political journalists can metamorphose into successful politicians. So it is not all that surprising that, once in a while, an art critic should cross the line and turn curator. After many years of writing about exhibitions, for the first time I am organising one myself (or, more precisely, co-arranging it with Anne Lyles of Tate Britain). Even less amazing, I suppose, is that the job turns out to be rather different from what I had imagined. Previously, I’d always thought that making

Lloyd Evans

Take two couples

On the Rocks Hampstead In My Name Trafalgar Studios All Nudity Shall Be Punished Union Uh oh. Writers writing about writers writing. Amy Rosenthal’s new play is set in 1916 in a Cornish village. D.H. Lawrence, suffering from writer’s block, has suggested to the publisher John Middleton Murry and his lover Katherine Mansfield, who is also blocked, that they rent adjoining cottages. This promises to be a meagre, literary love-in but the play succeeds extremely well, even for a sceptic like me who remains unconvinced by Lawrence’s obese sentiment-laden novels. (My preference is for the eerie, formless and completely masterful late poems like ‘The Mosquito’ and ‘Baby Tortoise’). The show’s

Deborah Ross

Super trouper

Mamma Mia PG, Nationwide Mamma Mia has to be the most fun you can have with your clothes on. Or is it off? When you get to my age, it’s such a struggle to remember. Either way, though, if you are now expecting this review to be subtly and cleverly interweaved with punning ABBA song titles then you can just forget it. My, my, how can I resist it? Easily, my dears; easily. Or, as Bubbles says, ‘Gimme, gimme, gimme a man after midnight.’ Well, it just goes to show; you can live with someone for years and years and years and still not know everything about them. Anyway, this

James Delingpole

No rude awakening

My favourite part of Banged Up (Channel 4, Monday) — the new reality show in which juvenile delinquents get to spend ten days in fake prison so they’re never tempted to end up in a real one — was the bit where the other inmates discovered Barry was a nonce. ‘Oi, Bazza. Just dropped me soap. Pick it up for me, would you, mate?’ someone said in the showers. And you should have seen Barry’s face as, glancing between his legs, he suddenly noticed the queue of eager lads building up behind him, led by the official prison Daddy, John ‘Baseball Bat’ Holmes. Priceless! No, not really. The scene didn’t

Saturday

Henrietta Bredin

A world elsewhere

Henrietta Bredin visits Oslo’s new opera house and finds it impressive, both inside and out Oslo is a small city, with a population of just over half a million, but it now boasts, funded entirely from the public purse, and on budget — Olympic Committee, please note — a spanking new all-singing, all-dancing opera house which has already rooted itself deeply in Norwegian affections, despite initial resistance from many quarters, especially in rural areas. Completed an impressive five months ahead of schedule, it sits on the waterfront in the old harbour area of Bjørvika like an iceberg that might slip into the fjord at any minute. A governing idea behind

Marcus Berkmann

Hitting the mark

Marcus Berkmann on Michael Jackson It seems hard to believe, but on 29 August Michael Jackson will be 50 years old. Maybe fortunately in this case, the music industry doesn’t really go a bundle on 50th birthdays: I believe there’s another half-hearted greatest hits coming out, but that’s about it. How will Jacko celebrate? I think we can all imagine him alone in one of his vast decaying houses, Charles Foster Kane crossed with Miss Havisham, playing his Nintendo all day and pausing from time to time to pick up the latest nose and stick it back on. If George Orwell was right, he will have the face he deserves —