Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Great expectations

There has been a great deal of media coverage of this exhibition of new paintings by Cecily Brown (born 1969) at the curiously named Modern Art Oxford. (It’s actually an Arts Council-funded public gallery.) Brown, though a Londoner, has lived in New York since 1994 and has made a substantial name for herself there and in Europe, showing recently at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, and at Museo d’Arte Contemporanea, Rome, in 2003. This is her first major solo exhibition in Britain. Its reception has been mixed. Magazine profiles tend to stress her impeccable pedigree (her father is the late David Sylvester, her mother the distinguished novelist Shena Mackay), and

Petroc Trelawny

Sunshine and storm

When questioned for the 1891 census, Betsy Lanyon, an 84-year-old widow from Newlyn, decided she had better register a late change of career. She told her inquisitors that she was no longer a ‘fishwife’ — her new occupation was ‘artist’s model’. In the decades around the turn of the last century, Newlyn, a fishing port a few miles west of Penzance, was overrun with artists. Stanhope Forbes had established his position as father of a local ‘school’ of painters; his followers were to be seen daily on the nearby beaches, battling against the Cornish wind as they attempted to keep their canvases upright. Villagers cashed in on the influx, renting

Stuart Nicholson

Sound effects

A couple of years ago I was invited to tour Compass Point Studios just outside Nassau in the Bahamas. Apart from its historical significance — this was once the home of Island Records, where Bob Marley recorded all his great hits — the experience was very illuminating. Compass Point is a state-of-the-art studio and I was able to talk to the recording engineer at some length. There was once a time, he said, when somebody like Paul Simon would arrive with a huge entourage of musicians, take up residence for about ten weeks and the end result was usually a hit album. Today, a vocalist like Céline Dion will arrive

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Tainted love

Otello is the most simple of Verdi’s operas, from a narrative point of view, and in the motivations of its characters, while being the most sophisticated musically, Falstaff as always excepted. Its three chief characters — and Verdi is less interested in any of the subordinate ones than usual — are almost caricatures in their single-mindedness, and Desdemona at least could be thought subnormal, she is so incapable of grasping that her husband would prefer her not to mention Cassio’s name. Iago is famously endowed with a reason for his malignancy, in the form of a demonic world-view expressed in the Credo — though in Act I he has already

Andrew Lambirth

The reality of things

The fourth in the National Gallery’s series of touring exhibitions (remember Paradise in 2003 and Making Faces last year?) comes to London after showing in Bristol and Newcastle. Entitled this time The Stuff of Life, it is a welcome excuse — should excuse be needed — to look at a group of first-rate still-life paintings, and ponder on their meaning. The merest glance at this exhibition returns us promptly to the world of things, if we ever managed to escape it. Unenlightened materialism is poor sustenance for anybody, but it is important to live in the moment with the reality of things (what Sickert called ‘gross material facts’), with cabbages

James Delingpole

Crash landing

Unfortunately I was in deepest Wales on the day when TV made me briefly famous so I missed all the phone calls from friends saying nice things. I did pop into Builth Wells the next day, wearing the same glasses I wore on my TV programme, just in case anyone felt like recognising me. But no one did because they probably don’t get Channel 4 in those parts, just S4C, which I wasn’t on. It’s a weird thing experiencing TV from the other side of the screen. On the one hand, it’s great having people notice you in a way they just don’t when, say, you’ve written only three brilliant

Selina Mills

Using our imagination

Sensory deprivation has, it would seem, become fashionable these days. As well as restaurants opening in Paris and London for seeing people to experience not seeing (dining in the dark), there is now a dating service where you meet your ‘blind’ date in the dark (supposedly avoiding image issues), and spas have created weekend packages where you can be blindfolded for 72 hours, and experience bumping into your fellow inmates on the way to the steam room — hopefully not in the nude. Whether this new-found interest in the non-seeing world stems from a need to make sense of the mass of images inundating our daily lives, or whether it

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Irrestible nights

Nicolai’s The Merry Wives of Windsor is something I have been longing to see for the whole of my opera-going life. No one, surely, can fail to fall in love with the overture, which used to be the opening item of very many concerts when they began in that kind of way. Such irresistible tunes are bound to come round again later in the work, and I found, when I first got a recording of it, that they all do apart from the most gorgeous, which only recurs in Meistersinger (as Wagner smilingly acknowledged). So I was happy to make the long trek for the first time to Buxton, hoping

Patrick Carnegy

Web of deceit

The other day on Radio Four David Hare set one of his namesakes running when he remarked that the RSC was ‘completely irrelevant to the theatrical life of the country’. Well, certainly in so far as it’s a company dedicated to the Swan of Avon rather than the Bard of Hampstead. Is it self-evident that a play by Hare about the Middle East is a more useful contribution to debate, theatrical or otherwise, about that subject than a play by Shakespeare about the Wars of the Roses? The RSC is no stranger to the slippery notion of relevance, though more wisely circumspect than Hare. Hence, at least in part, the

Simon Hoggart

Sinatra and the Mob

The height of summer is celebrated by the television networks telling us things we already know. Such as, Frank Sinatra was in hock to the Mafia. Actually, Sinatra: Dark Star (shown on Thursday, BBC1, though made as a co-production with American, German and French money) was a perfectly entertaining trot round a familiar block — the Mob threatening Tommy Dorsey with extreme violence if he didn’t release the young Sinatra from his contract; the promise to prevent From Here to Eternity being made if Sinatra didn’t get a part. I hadn’t known that his family came from the same street in Sicily as Lucky Luciano, nor perhaps realised how near

Andrew Lambirth

Celebrating William Blake

St Mary-at-Lambeth, built beside the walls of the Archbishop’s Palace, was once the parish church of Lambeth, until it fell into disuse in 1972. Thankfully, this handsome building was rescued from demolition some five years later by the foundation of the Museum of Garden History and the Tradescant Trust, appropriately named after the great family of gardeners. Three generations of Tradescants are buried in St Mary’s churchyard in an elaborately carved sarcophagus, while nearby is the tomb of Captain Bligh of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. John Tradescant the Elder (c.1570– 1638), who was gardener successively to the 1st Earl of Salisbury, the Duke of Buckingham and King Charles I,

Saturday

Celina Fox

Quest for knowledge

Sponsored by Hubert Burda Media, the Schroder Family and WestLB AG. In the sober grey vaults of Somerset House, trunk-loads of treasures from the state art collections of Saxony shimmer and sparkle. While the reconstruction of their home in the Gr

Andrew Lambirth

This green and pleasant land

Andrew Lambirth on Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrating our landscape art This summer seems to be developing into a season of British Art — with exhibitions of the quality of Stubbs at the National, Reynolds at the Tate and Sutherland at Dulwich, and now also with A Picture of Britain (until 4 September). This generously mixed landscape show in Tate Britain’s basement galleries is really an adjunct to the TV series of the same title, presented by Mr David Dimbleby, with which many readers will be familiar. I haven’t seen any of it, though I have delved into the sumptuously illustrated hardback book (a snip at £19.99) which accompanies both TV

Nicola Christie

Making the most of time

The curtain goes up late in Israel. Performances start at 8.30p.m. or 9p.m. On a Saturday this is considered so early by the partygoers of Tel Aviv that it is dubbed ‘the matinée’. Intervals are often dropped, too. Audiences go in for a short, sharp hit and are then released into the night. We could learn a thing or two from Israeli theatre. I don’t just mean start times. I am talking about the performances on stage. Fresh and interesting, stylish and slick, urgent and passionate — the dance and theatre coming out of this country, barely 50 years old, is breathtaking. I travelled to the Galilee, to disused garages

Saturday

Mark Steyn

Tame at heart

In my neck of the woods, Madagascar was the first drive-in movie of the summer. Me’n’the kids clambered on to the hood of the truck at sundown and settled in with our hot dogs and shakes. And we had a goodish time. We especially appreciated the dance number whose entire lyric is: I like to move it move itI like to move it move itI like to I like to I like to [pause] move it. It’s sung by a lemur voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen (i.e., Ali G) and he’s so insinuating we bellowed it all the way home. But the rest of the movie pretty much faded away

Michael Tanner

Surging energy

Of the Royal Opera’s Verdi productions of recent years, David McVicar’s seems likely to be the most durable. It evokes and sustains an atmosphere which is entirely suited to the particular tinta of the music that pervades this work, a combination of levity and desperation, glamour and sleaziness, ardent love and lechery. The extraordinary set by Michael Vale, a huge metal revolve which shows on one side the squalor of the Duke’s palace, and on the other the squalor of Rigoletto’s dwelling, the former glinting, the latter matt, transformed in Act III into the squalor of Sparafucile’s inn, manages to be confusing enough to make less implausible than usual the

John Spurling

Making the day go better

Collecting art is an addiction. Neither its cost nor its supposed value as an investment has much to do with it. If you are rich you buy expensive art by recognised masters and get advice from experts, but if you are poor you follow your own taste among the lesser or little known and probably enjoy yourself just as much. The addiction is not confined to individuals; it can catch businesses too, although it’s usually started by an individual, as for instance by David Rockefeller in 1959 when he set up what is now the J.P. Morgan Chase collection. He brought in a selection committee of leading American museum directors

Andrew Lambirth

The French have it

In the first room of the Royal Academy’s Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting — a strangely mixed and muted Impressionist exhibition — a Monet ‘Haystacks’ is flanked by two lively open-air scenes by Sargent, one of them depicting Monet himself at work. This group is obviously intended to set the tone and pace of the display, but it raises false hopes. Nearby, the pedestrian nature of William Morris Hunt’s gloomy copy of Millet’s ‘Three Men Shearing Sheep in a Barn’ sounds a knell of warning. Paintings by Boudin and Diaz help to rekindle the viewer’s optimism, but the show’s fundamental flaw is soon revealed. The problem with hanging French

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Slaughter of a masterpiece

I read an interview last week with David McVicar, director of Glyndebourne’s new production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, in which he stated that he is ‘very intense’. For the span of this production, he seems to have been seized by a ‘very intense’ fit of the giggles, which has led him to a quite hateful betrayal, of the most comprehensive kind, and with no avenue left unexplored, of this great opera. McVicar, who has shown himself intermittently to be a producer of genius, on this occasion has exercised his talent for gauging exactly what his audience wants, and giving it to them with compound interest. I have never known a

Toby Young

Hearts of darkness

Poor Robin Soans. His new play, Talking to Terrorists, opened just three days before the bombs exploded last week. Most playwrights hope that their work will have ‘some’ contemporary resonance, but not quite that much. Talking to Terrorists is a ‘documentary play’ in which actual terrorists explain why they’ve committed various atrocities. Anyone going to see it now will inevitably expect it to throw some light on the question of what makes someone become a suicide bomber. Can any play, however illuminating, withstand such intense scrutiny? Fortunately, Talking to Terrorists is more or less up to the task. Soans, along with director Max Stafford-Clark and the eight-strong cast, spent a