Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Visual enlightenment

Leonard McComb (born Glasgow 1930, of Irish parents) is a figurative painter of rare particularity and achievement. He is also a sculptor and his work spans a broad range of utterance: polished bronze, oil on canvas, pastel, pencil and gold leaf on paper (in his affectionate portrait of fellow painter and friend, the late Carel Weight, for instance), meticulous line drawing and etching. He is represented in the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, is an acclaimed teacher (he was Keeper of the Royal Academy Schools, 1995–8), and has shown regularly in mixed exhibitions since the mid-1970s. He doubted much of the work he did before that, and destroyed a

John McEwen

Haunting melancholy

As a former winner of Britain’s most prestigious award for painters, the John Moores prize (other winners include Hamilton, Hilton, Hockney, Hoyland), a new show by Andrzej Jackowski should not be missed, especially not these notably small but powerful paintings in his latest exhibition at Purdy Hicks. The phrase ‘depth charge’ is used in the catalogue to describe their effect, in the sense that their force is densely contained and profound. It is certainly what Jackowski aspires to achieve. In his inaugural lecture as Professor of Painting at Brighton University in 2003, he said, ‘Seamus Heaney talks about poems and individual words as “depth charges” and the skill of making

Ursula Buchan

Private passions

The British have developed a number of garden styles over the centuries but none more unexpected than the ‘woodland garden’. No one in 1800, when the first rhododendrons were arriving in this country, could possibly have predicted that a sizeable number of large country gardens, situated on acid soil in rolling wooded countryside or in deep valleys, would be filled in the next century or so with the plant riches of the Himalayas and the eastern United States. But so it has turned out. At Caerhays, Heligan, Lanhydrock, Trebah, Trengwainton, Trewidden and Trewithen in Cornwall, at Leonardslee, Borde Hill and High Beeches in Sussex, at Crarae, Arduaine and Inverewe on

Michael Vestey

Changing lives

It’s always useful to be reminded of the remarkable stoicism and bravery of the generation of people that lived through the second world war. It’s hard to imagine it being repeated today. I felt it this week listening to Coming Home, a five-part series celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Charles Wheeler, who in 1945 was a Royal Marine crossing into Germany from Holland, examined how people saw the ending of the war in Europe and how the conflict had altered their lives. Across the BBC as a whole, the occasion is being marked by a plethora of programmes. The depravity of those involved in the fall of Berlin

Marcus Berkmann

Standing still

‘Art for art’s sake,’ sang 10cc in 1976, ‘Money for God’s sake.’ And promptly split in half shortly afterwards. It’s a conundrum every new young band has to grapple with sooner or later. You want creative freedom, of course you do. You want trillions of dollars, of course you do. You want to have your cake, you want to eat it, and you want to keep your lithe figure afterwards as well. And if you can also manage to marry a swan-necked Hollywood lovely and call your first baby Banana, well, so much the better. For this and several other reasons Coldplay have become the template for ambitious young bands

Michael Prodger

A true portrait

In painting, as in music and literature, artists whose work in old age is comparable to that of their youth are rare beasts: Titian, who traditionally if implausibly lived to be 99, was one; Goya, who died aged 82, was another. But of neither can it be claimed that they saved their greatest work for last. George Stubbs, on the other hand, painted the finest picture of a long and fecund career, and quite possibly the greatest equine portrait in the whole of art, at the age of 75, six years before his death in 1806. ‘Hambletonian, Rubbing Down’, which hangs in Mount Stewart House in Northern Ireland, will not,

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Heroic success

How should opera, and particular operas, be made ‘relevant’? And what kind of relevance, anyway, should they try to achieve? The questions are too big to answer in a brief review, but Birmingham Opera Company’s largely magnificent production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria heroically attempts to cope with them. Using the highly individual space of Planet Ice, they divide the building down the middle with a floor-to-ceiling wire fence with a few doors in it, and for the 110-minute-long Act I have the audience standing on one side, while the performers appear at various points on either side, and assorted people, including some audience members, have light shone

John McEwen

Visual agility

It is difficult to place oneself in the position of the pioneers of graphic art shown at the Estorick Collection: their extraordinary leaps of the imagination have become the standard vocabulary; the shift from old to new they represent now distant history. Born in the 19th century when 90 per cent of human understanding came through the naked eye, as adults they were confronted with a reality which was becoming the invisible reverse. Means of communication and commerce had been transformed beyond the scope of normal looking and common intelligence. Nothing was more spectacular in its effect than electricity, as some of these designs proclaim. This new engine of industry

Russell Chamberlin

Welsh legacy

Conwy in north Wales is among the most enchanting of our small towns. It’s like a toy fort, its encircling walls surviving intact until Thomas Telford had to breach them for his bridge. He did it elegantly, even delicately, creating a suspension bridge that actually enhanced the little town. It was for our brutal, automanic age to bulldoze through a road bridge in an act of architectural rape. But that apart, the town is a gem. Within the encircling walls there is a medley of little twisting lanes that give the impression of being in a far larger town, for the visitor is never quite certain where the lanes are

Michael Vestey

Death in Venice

When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts of Italy to solve crimes sensitive in nature; he’s a louche, corner-cutting cop with a hopeless domestic life. When I’d read the last novel, I wondered listlessly what I’d do until the next Zen book, which I surmised would be in two years’ time. And so it is: another is promised for August. Bit of

Peter Phillips

Sonic shambles

The television broadcasts of the late Pope’s funeral and the marriage of Prince Charles, coming as they did on consecutive days, gave the opportunity to compare two different styles of choral singing at their most typical. Of course I am going to go on to say that the British version, as represented on that occasion by the choir of St George’s Chapel, Windsor, represented everything that is best, indeed just about everything that is humanly possible, in liturgical singing, while the choirs gathered in Rome managed to fulfil every gloomy expectation of those who care about these things. It has been many decades since the Sistine Chapel Choir was first

Saturday

Toby Young

Regime change

It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on a reckless military adventure in order to cement his historical reputation. And now Deborah Warner has directed a version of Julius Caesar in which Brutus has been cast in the Blair role, first attempting to bring about regime change through the judicious use of violence, and then gradually succumbing to the maelstrom of death and

Tom Rosenthal

French connection | 30 April 2005

When I started visiting Barcelona in 1961, its museums were both thin on the ground and impoverished, and the lingua franca between the Catalans and the British was French, without which it was, if one had neither Spanish nor Catalan, hard to survive. Today the city is awash with fine, well-funded museums and, for anyone under 40, English has replaced French as the second language. So it’s good to see that the links with French culture have not been severed and that the spring has brought two major French exhibitions to this intellectually vital city. The Picasso Museum, in addition to its unparalleled collection of his early work, has a

Andrew Lambirth

In love with paint

Peter Coker died in December last year after a long illness. He had been involved in the initial choice of material for this small but representative memorial exhibition, and would I think have approved of the final result, which succeeds in bringing together work from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s a commercial show that has been six years in the making, as the gallery’s director, Robert Travers, gradually acquired good examples of the artist’s oeuvre. The most recent find was a superb still-life, ‘Fish with Grill’ from 1954–5, which brought to the show the required gravitas to enable it to go ahead, and was inevitably among the first

Simon Hoggart

Mongolian massacres

Genghis Khan (BBC1, Monday) was a remarkable 60-minute documentary. Normally, something filmed on such a massive scale would be stretched to last several hours over many weeks. I can only assume that the Mongolian extras work for much less than their British counterparts. Mongolians playing Mongolians, eh? In television terms that’s the equivalent of people selling you double-glazing by phone from Bangalore. And the battle scenes were terrific. The standard BBC technique is to have, say, half a dozen chaps on horses filmed from below so that 24 thundering hooves come to symbolise 10,000 warriors. Here we had, well, quite a lot of chaps on horses, sweeping majestically, or at

Mark Steyn

Remembering John Mills

The Mills family, according to David Thomson, has ‘crowded us out with insipid, tennis-club talent’, which is a cruel verdict, but hard to disagree with. When the gals tried being naughty, you felt embarrassed and sorry for them. Juliet Mills’s skinnydipping in Billy Wilder’s Avanti! (1972) is the only topless scene I’ve ever wished would end, and then, when Jack Lemmon starts trying to bring it to an end by holding up wet socks and other bits of business in front of her breasts, you start wishing the laboured shtick to bring the scene to an end would end. As for dad, if Britain’s other theatrical knights had the best

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

Puppetry of the fairy band

A chill spring day in Stratford for the RSC’s launch of its summer comedies season with a new Midsummer Night’s Dream from Gregory Doran. A production to warm the heart? Certainly, for how could any half-competent staging fail to do so, and anything directed by Doran is usually rather better than that. But where so many are constantly beating a path through the Athenian forest, it’s a task of tasks to find anything new to say. On this score he chalks up few points. On the other hand, there’s perhaps some relief that no alien concept has been imposed, no abhorrent substructure excavated, no relevance insisted upon. A startling beginning

Andrew Lambirth

Literary connections

Fate has not dealt kindly with Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96). For those who are not enthusiasts of the Pre-Raphaelites, this founding member of the Brotherhood tends to be categorised as the one who ‘went populist’ with such all-too-memorable scenes as ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ (now in the Tate) and the notorious Pears Soap advert ‘Bubbles’. Or, if your mnemonic centres function best through the stimulant of scandal, you may recall that it was Millais who stole Ruskin’s wife Effie (Euphemia Gray, who modelled for his justly famous painting ‘Ophelia’), and duly wed her after her marriage to the famous art critic was annulled on the grounds of non-consummation. The

Alan Judd

Seduced by Bentley

While Rover sank (it was warned, twice, in this column), another car was launched, in Venice. An amphibian? No, a Bentley. Perhaps because it rarely advertises, Bentley’s car launches are like no other. Each is divided into three- to four-day segments designed for different audiences. The basis is driving and learning about the car, with an emphasis on culture and surroundings for the lifestyle journalists, on the business case for the financial press, on engineering for the hard-core motoring press and on who-knows-what? for the dealer network. It was Cape Town for the flagship Arnage T, Spain for the Continental GT coupe and, this month, the Grand Canal for the

James Delingpole

Look and learn

Much as I love the nostalgic idea of the original Ask the Family, the reality was rather different. The questions were way too hard and made you feel thick even when you weren’t (Robert Robinson’s smug avuncularity served mainly to rub salt into this wound), and the families were really freaky, the parents never having had sex since their children were conceived, and the kids being the weirdy, mushroom-cropped kind who aren’t allowed to watch TV, only practise the cello and solve abstruse mathematical problems. Perhaps this is why I didn’t hate Dick and Dom’s Ask the Family (BBC2, weekdays) nearly as much as I hoped I would. To fill