Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

Olivia Glazebrook

Mean streets

It is a curious thing to watch Christian Bale now, having seen him all those years ago in Empire of the Sun play that fierce, hurt boy Jim Graham, whom no amount of deprivation seemed outwardly to wound, but who bled on the inside like the Spartan boy with his fox. The qualities of that boy’s character are usually to be found lurking in the parts that Christian Bale has played since — he has not radically altered our perception of him with, say, a string of romantic comedies. He still seems untouchable, cold, frightening, and if not amoral (Patrick Bateman in American Psycho), then certainly a little bit weird

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Intelligent design

The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally. Once it opened in 1982, I visited regularly and watched the development of the collection with interest, particularly the addition of the Charles Kearley Bequest in 1989. At that point, the collection was a little gem of 20th-century art — mostly British, with some European additions. Now it has received a further boost. The house

Olivia Glazebrook

Greene pastures

In a change to the scheduled programme, I will not be reviewing Lady in the Water (PG) this week because it simply doesn’t deserve 800 words of either praise or damnation. Actually, I will just give it a little review: it’s ridiculous and awful. Mr M. Night Shyamalan, you should be ashamed of yourself. There. Nor will I be reviewing Nacho Libre (12A), since it’s another madcap, high-octane comedy (Jack Black as a wrestling champ) and I feel that over the past few weeks we’ve covered the blockbuster territory quite extensively. I shall not review Monster House (PG) because my inner child is taking its annual break, and I would

Thursday

Tom Rosenthal

Compelling vision

, Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was born in Pochlarn, Bohemia, studied in Vienna, enlisted in a smart cavalry regiment at the outbreak of the first world war, got shot in the head and bayoneted, went back into action after a spell in hospital in 1916 and suffered shellshock. He had a stormy affair with Mahler’s widow Alma, a very trying woman whose other husbands or lovers included Schoenberg, Franz Werfel and the conductor Willem Mengelberg. The Mahler affair ended badly, so Kokoschka had a life-size doll with her features built for him which was part model and, for some years, constant companion. But there also emerged from their relationship one of

Andrew Lambirth

Breaking the rules

The German painter Albert Oehlen (born in Krefeld in 1954) is of the same generation as the infamous Martin Kippenberger (1953–97), recently celebrated so lavishly at Tate Modern. They were good friends and collaborated on various projects, including jokey mottoes on ‘I Love…’ stickers and poems. Both were of that group of German artists who turned to joking as a way of dealing with the artist’s predicament in an age of so-called postmodernism. If Kippenberger was the wilder of the two, obsessed with being famous and grabbing headlines for a whole stream of pranks and artistic interventions, Oehlen has gone on to produce an increasingly authoritative body of work after

Michael Tanner

Russian rewards

The Bolshoi Opera’s production of Boris Godunov, which they brought to Covent Garden last week, is in almost all respects in a time warp, though it turned out to be a most agreeable one. For the first time in many years, we were able to hear Rimsky-Korsakov’s version of the opera, which has been so widely execrated for its well-meant efforts to ‘correct’ Mussorgsky’s barbarous harmonies, and to enrich his orchestration, that one would only admit to enjoying it to one’s most confidential musical confessor. There are of course recordings of this allegedly vandalistic act easily available, among them one featuring the great Boris Christoff, who insisted (almost always) on

Olivia Glazebrook

Cop out

I’m such a dunderhead. Everyone told me that Miami Vice would be rubbish, and I kept replying, ‘No, no it won’t; you see, it’s directed by Michael Mann and he’s brilliant. He made Manhunter, Heat, The Insider and Collateral…it’s going to be great.’ People said, ‘But it’ll be naff and embarrassing, with spivvy hairdos and loose-fitting suits.’ And I would reply, ‘No, don’t be silly, it’s not set in the Eighties. It’ll be cool, dark, gritty, urban…’ Well, don’t I feel like the prize banana. I think even subscribers to FHM magazine, at whom this film is undoubtedly aimed, will be hard pressed to enjoy themselves. My heart, which was

Michael Vestey

About turn

It must be a nightmare when you spend weeks making a current-affairs programme only to find that days before it’s broadcast the subject you’ve been exploring is turned upside-down. That’s what happened to Radio Four’s Inside Money, the sister programme to the excellent Money Box, almost a fortnight ago (Saturday, repeated Monday last week). The producers had put together a programme about the government’s ludicrous Home Information Packs, the HIPs, that are due to come into force next June, only for the crucial home inspections paid for by the vendors to be scrapped overnight as unworkable. We all knew that but at least this hopeless Labour government woke up to

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Drawing a fine line

Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of a healthily sceptical attitude to authority and self-importance. It is a great safety valve, as well. Perhaps because the British have been so effusive and inventive as satirists, as a nation we have felt less need to rebel in more active ways. Instead of dragging politicians from their seats of power and stringing them up,

Elisabeth Anderson

Nicholas Nickleby

In an interview with David Frost only three years ago, Trevor Nunn said that the highlight of his career was doing Nicholas Nickleby for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych in 1980. Now, 26 years later, Chichester Festival Theatre has revived the play, with Jonathan Church and Philip Franks directing. The original staging ran for more than eight hours; this one, also adapted by David Edgar, has been cut to just under seven, in two parts. Dickens’s story of Nicholas’s life and adventures, of good and evil, of love given and love received has been imaginatively and triumphantly brought to the stage at Chichester with a cast of 23

Robin Holloway

Unlikely situations

Summer Festival Time: when the music-loving British populace flocks or straggles to concerts in a variety of unsuitable venues, all the way from mighty monuments like (dare one say) St Paul’s or the Albert Hall to Little Bethel and the Quaker Meeting House, the Old Forge, the Stately Home, ex-quaysides and industrial structures, parks, squares, pavements. I’ve several such unlikely places to report on this month. A first-ever visit to Garsington Opera was a surprise; for the gawky Heath-Robinson-ish thing run up against the old stone manor to cover audience, stage and pit proved possessed of a real acoustic — clear yet sonorous, neither too distant nor too in-your-face, and

Wednesday

Mark Glazebrook

Bridge over troubled water

Within the expanding aquatic metropolis that is Istanbul, two late-20th-century bridges straddle the continents of Europe and Asia. These traffic-laden steel bridges, spanning high above the ferries and other boats which ply the busy waters of the Bosphorus below, are visibly useful links between two civilisations. They are also symbols, perhaps, of the noble dream of bringing the mentality of the Muslim world closer to that of the non-Muslim world in a spirit of mutual admiration and respect. A cultural event like a Rodin exhibition is worthwhile for its own sake. Held in a Muslim country, it may also nurture such a noble dream. Alas, a recent Franco–Italian diplomatic catastrophe

Andrew Lambirth

Spiritual healing

Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944) is one of the great figures of Modernism, a pioneer of abstraction, whose works are known in this country mostly from reproduction. The Tate has now gathered some 60 key paintings from important international collections (a significant portion come from Kandinsky’s native Russia) and put together a superb exhibition which it’s difficult to fault. It is particularly refreshing to be completely unaware of the galleries for a change, and focused so intently on the paintings. I was involved, drawn in, enthralled. These are paintings which seem to dematerialise the walls rather than simply hang upon them. The drama of the pictures takes over and monopolises the attention.

John McEwen

Treasures of the South Seas

The enlarged, updated and now undivided Sainsbury Centre has reopened with the most comprehensive selection of Polynesian art ever assembled; and yet, shamefully, it has received not a single review. It would be a waste of space to wonder why, better to state that the stunning Pacific Encounters, curated by Dr Steven Hooper of the University of East Anglia, utterly confounds the supposition that Oceanic art is largely a matter of shell and feather knick-knacks. These superlative objects from British collections (testimony to those pioneers of the scientific Enlightenment who went exploring with Captain Cook), three-quarters of them resurrected from the limbo of museum stores, prove that Polynesian (Greek for

Michael Tanner

Great expectations | 19 July 2006

PUSH! is the first opera about childbirth, so Tête à Tête claims, and I’m sure rightly. Opera usually likes to concentrate on the other end of life, audiences much preferring to see people leaving than arriving. It would be absurd to make very large claims for PUSH!, and I’m sure Tête à Tête wouldn’t want to. It is a brilliantly entertaining and in two prolonged scenes moving piece, with a dazzling text by Anna Reynolds and effective music by David Bruce. The action takes place in a delivery room, five women giving birth, interspersed with a couple of cleaners mopping up, and finally and triumphantly the female cleaner herself gives

Patrick Carnegy

Prince Hal goes to Chicago

On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan It was really rather a surprise to stumble across Shakespeare in his native tongue after the revelatory pleasures (I do not jest) of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a cornucopia of Indian languages and of Titus Andronicus in a phenomenally eloquent guttural Japanese. On a perfect summer’s day by the Avon it was the turn of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to take the stage at the Swan for its contribution to the RSC’s international exploration of the complete works of the bard. My only previous experience

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Easy on the eye

Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us take the art more seriously. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was a middle-class Italian Sephardic Jew, born in Livorno, who left home for the bright artistic lights of Paris in 1906, and tragically never found success there. As an artist he has been ill served by the legend that grew up around him, the misplaced glamour of

Russell Chamberlain

In search of Alfred

I sat behind the bicycle shed of Winchester’s Historic Resources Centre, holding a fragment from what was probably the coffin of the greatest of all our monarchs, the king who founded our nation and gave it a moral purpose and direction: Alfred, surnamed by posterity the Great. Labled ‘HA99 22041’, the fragment was visually unimpressive: no inscription, no painting, simply a small piece of light-coloured stone, evidently broken from a larger mass. But it had solved a centuries’ old mystery, for it told us where Alfred had finally been buried. Alfred died in 899 and was buried, together with his wife and son, in the Old Minster in the heart

Lloyd Evans

Distaste for authority

The highlights of Brecht’s Life of Galileo are packed into the opening hour. As the astronomer glimpses new worlds through his telescope, we get a palpable sense of his wonder and astonishment. The effect of these revelations on the mediaeval mind comes through in simple, thundering utterances. ‘The moon has no light of its own.’ ‘The earth is a star like any other.’ ‘Heaven has been abolished.’ It’s thrilling to see aeons of Aristotelian tradition being shattered and remade in the space of a couple of cloudless evenings on an Italian hillside. But the play drags once Galileo comes into conflict with the Church. The Faith versus Reason ding-dong becomes

Marcus Berkmann

A lost cause

Wailing and gnashing of teeth appear not to have greeted the news that Top of the Pops is to end after 42 glorious years. Indeed, as far as I can see, no one gives a monkey’s. I have to admit, I am disappointed. Of all those newspaper columnists with nothing to write about, you would have thought at least one would have embraced the cause. And where are the elderly pop-pickers hoisting banners outside Television Centre and brandishing tear-stained photos of Jimmy Savile? Instead, public reaction has been muted and resigned, and possibly tempered by surprise that the show was still going on at all. BBC2, did you say? Early