Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Visual poetry

It could so easily not have worked, this bold (some might say foolhardy) juxtaposition of three such dissimilar artists. Particularly if one of them was felt to be somehow of inferior power — the sick man of the trio — a position which might have been reserved (by those who judge from ignorance) for James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903). What a mistake that would have been, and what a triumph this exhibition turns out to be. It has been superlatively hung and installed in the Tate’s often unfriendly basement galleries, and is an absolute joy to look at. There are a hundred paintings, prints, pastels and watercolours on show, and

Simon Hoggart

Dull but odd

We tend to import American television as seen — comedies and cop shows, mainly — whereas they create their own versions of ours: The Weakest Link, The Office and, perhaps apocryphally, a Fawlty Towers which omitted the Basil character because he was too offensive. Now we make our own American hits. Take The Bafta Awards (BBC1), which tried to bring some glitz and pizzazz to this little island. The organisers hope that the Baftas might one day challenge the Oscars as the world’s greatest entertainment awards show. Not on this evidence. It was dull. Too few Hollywood stars had bothered to make the trip. The frocks weren’t bonkers enough. Stephen

Alan Powers

Take the yellow brick road

Ever since W.S. Gilbert’s Lady Jane lamented, ‘Oh, South Kensington!’ in Patience, 1881, the place has carried a regretful quality. Owing to the extraordinary lack of confidence shown by successive governments and Treasury officials in the educational values that Prince Albert hoped to promote through the estates of the 1851 Commission, the gentle, south-facing slope of Brompton became, over the course of time, a palimpsest of build structures, not all of which deserve the title of architecture. ‘Here tears are absolutely vain — there is no remedy,’ said Beresford Pite, the Professor of Architecture at the Royal College of Art, bewailing in 1905 the loss of the opportunity for a

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Happy with unhappiness

This is the time of year when the Royal Opera aims to keep people happy by providing standard fare, usually, it almost goes without saying, about people who are very unhappy indeed. True to form, it is alternating La Traviata and Turandot for almost a month before rising to Mozart. All the more important that these perennials should be kept fresh, and on the whole they are. There are quite a lot of odd things about both productions, especially from the musical standpoint, but no signs of inert reliance on routine. In Traviata the most controversial thing is the conducting of Maurizio Benini, now a Royal Opera favourite, though some

Andrew Lambirth

Surrealist legend

The ravishing new exhibition of Lee Miller’s portrait photographs at the NPG is prefaced by a corridor selection of shots of Miller by others — principally by the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene (whose assistant she was on French Vogue in 1930) and her long-standing friend and lover, Life photographer David E. Scherman. Miller (1907–77) was a great beauty who had considerable success as a model before taking to the camera herself. She had first wanted to be a painter, and studied lighting and stage design before travelling to Italy to study art. Edward Steichen, who photographed her, suggested she try photography, and at this point she went to Paris to

James Delingpole

Cash rich

The best pop video ever made was the one Mark Romanek directed in 2003 for Johnny Cash’s swansong — ‘Hurt’. It’s also definitely the bleakest. The Man in Black was on his last legs when he made it, a doddery, rheumy-eyed 72, and here you see him very consciously bidding farewell to his adoring wife June (who appears alongside him, choked with emotion, and who predeceased him, of cancer), his life and the trappings of wordly success. My favourite bit — actually, I’ve lots, like the perfect moment at the end where his huge hands slowly, pointedly, close the piano lid for the last time — is where you see

Marcus Berkmann

Taking a break

Tired. I am exhausted. For one reason and another the workload has been intense recently, and the pressures have been unyielding. After a while you wander through the days in a numbed haze, faintly aware of passing deadlines, and thinking only of pillows. The occasional hangovers hit as hard as Mike Tyson circa 1988. Look in the mirror in the morning and you see the way you will look in ten years’ time. Look in the mirror in the afternoon and you see that this is actually the way you look now. I even dream of sleep, which is a little weird. What is the soundtrack to this strange state?

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Short and sweet

Somehow I missed A Nitro at the Opera when it was first put on at the Royal Opera’s Linbury Studio in 2003. Last week it was revived for four performances. The title — the most irritating feature of the evening — means nothing to me, but it is a collective one for songs and music-theatrical pieces by nine young black composers, some of them making their first essay into classical music. The evening began with ‘Arias’, six songs by six composers, performed by Mary Plazas and Rodney Clarke, Stephen Higgins at the piano. Plazas is a singing actress of great intensity, and, standing on the empty stage, she was the

Andrew Lambirth

Jokes and bitterness

The first question to spring to mind concerning this most welcome and in-depth study of the Irish–British painter Sir William Orpen (1878–1931) is why the Imperial War Museum? Recently, there have been notable exhibitions of his contemporaries Augustus John and William Nicholson at the Tate and the Royal Academy respectively, but Orpen it seems does not merit a star ‘art venue’, his life’s achievement (only a fraction of which was actually devoted to the subject of war) being relegated to a repository of machines of mass destruction. I’m sure the director-general and curatorial staff of the Imperial War Museum will forgive me for pointing out that their galleries are best

Charles Spencer

Spendthrift fever

I’m trying to write a novel at the moment, which means, of course, that I am spending a great deal of time looking for other things to do. It’s amazing how attractive the washing-up seems in comparison with sitting in front of a computer screen, making things up and struggling to find the words to describe them. In fact, I have just managed to waste two hours in a painstakingly detailed examination of my collection of classical music. I only started buying classical CDs about four years ago when I got out of the Priory and started trying to get through life without alcohol. I thought it would be a

Michael Vestey

Master orator

Apart from a strange and silly piece on Today accusing Sir Winston Churchill of being a racist over his attitude to India — he was, after all, a product of the age of Empire — it was a good week on Radio Four for our greatest prime minister. To mark the 40th anniversary of his death, the network broadcast several programmes commemorating his life, among them a repeat of Playing for Time — Three days in May 1940 (Saturday), a drama about wartime Cabinet disagreements, previously reviewed here, and later on in the evening The Archive Hour: Farewell to Winston, which looked back to his state funeral. Other programmes included

Peter Phillips

Loitering with Mozart

Evidence that we live in clichéd times is everywhere about us, but I didn’t think it would extend to The Magic Roundabout. The new film, for which several of my colleagues have recently been recording the title music, is being trailed as follows: ‘The Magic Roundabout lies in ruins: the evil ice sorcerer ZeBadDee is on the loose and the fate of the Enchanted Land hangs in the balance. As a frosty mist sweeps across the earth, four unlikely heroes, Brian, Ermintrude, Dylan and Dougal, step forward to challenge the chill…The destiny of the world rests on their shoulders. Only through teamwork, friendship and exceptional bravery will they deliver the

Saturday

Toby Young

Better left unsaid

One of the cardinal rules of theatre reviewing is that you’re not supposed to talk about the play until you’ve left the venue. This is ostensibly to stop critics influencing one another’s opinions, to force them to make up their own minds, but there’s another — better — reason, as I discovered last week. On the way out of Whose Life Is It Anyway?, a revival of Brian Clark’s hardy perennial directed by Peter Hall, I lingered in the foyer to discuss it with a colleague. I wasn’t very nice about it, but, to my astonishment, he was. ‘Shurely shome mishtake?’ I started to express myself more forcefully, but before

Alan Powers

Printing matters

This year marks the 70th anniversary of Penguin Books, a company that has done more for design in Britain than any other commercial or government organisation. The slightly improvised look of the earliest sixpenny paperbacks launched by Allen Lane in the summer of 1935 was put aside in 1947 when the German–Swiss typographer Jan Tschichold came to set new rules and standards of impeccable consistency. He was one of many émigrés in the field of design who, before and after the war, inspired laid-back English design with a new understanding of rigour and principle. Justly celebrated for his early commitment to ‘New Typography’, Tschichold was at Penguin for only two

James Delingpole

Competing children

The thing five-year-olds most dread on their first day at school, according to Child of Our Time (BBC1, Tuesday), is using the dirty, smelly, alien toilets. I remember the moment well. Peeing in the urinal all men quickly learn to dread — the middle one — I was mortified to notice that the two boys either side of me were pissing themselves laughing. ‘He doesn’t know how to use his flies,’ said one boy to the other. And I didn’t. Mummy hadn’t shown me. Instead, I had dropped my trousers round my ankles, just as I did at home. But cosy homeworld, I suddenly came to realise, no longer counted

Robin Holloway

Manically busy

Jennifer’s Diary: wild flows the Don. Who says we’re a lazy bunch of sinecure-holders? Much of this first week of a new term at Cambridge has been spent checking titles and abstracts for students’ dissertations (deadline Friday). As everyone knows, 100 words are harder to get right than 1,000, and the trenchant-yet-appropriate title harder still. The incredulity of the young faces as one slashes their woolliness, changes it’s to its and vice versa, and ties it all up in a convincing knot, continues to be of deep concern. When it ceases to be, it’ll be time to retire. And in retirement hope to continue to be as manically busy as

Interconnect

An art of surprises

Sir Anthony Caro celebrated his 80th birthday last year, and this slightly belated but determinedly triumphal exhibition marks a half-century of remarkable and sustained achievement. Caro is phenomenally successful, an international figure almost as prominent as Henry Moore, and equally if not more important historically. For it was Caro who revolutionised sculpture in the early 1960s, bringing it down off its pedestal and creating a vibrant and brightly coloured language of abstract form which swept the world with its radical values, spawning a host of imitators. But the story doesn’t end there, for Caro has continued to reinvent himself as an artist, opening up his art to the widest possible

Paul Johnson

A cure for melancholy: Parmigianino, Dickens, Schubert

My grandfather used to say, ‘Learn to like art, music and literature deeply and passionately. They will be your friends when things are bad.’ It is true: at this time of year, when days are short and dark, and one hardly dares to open the newspapers, I turn, not vainly either, to the great creators of the past for distraction, solace and help. I sit in my library, while the rain beats down on the windowpanes at either side, and the garden is so vaporous I can scarcely see the winter-flowering prunus bravely setting out her pink blossoms, and I fill my mind with the better things of long ago.

Saturday

Mark Steyn

Romantic quest

In John Buchan’s The Three Hostages, Dr Greenslade explains his theory of successful thriller writing to Richard Hannay: ‘Let us take three things a long way apart,’ he says, ‘an old blind woman spinning in the Western Highlands, a barn in a Norwegian saeter, and a little curiosity shop in North London kept by a Jew with a dyed beard. Not much connection between the three? You invent a connection.’ Jean-Pierre Jeunet would find Dr Greenslade’s examples tame stuff. For his formula, he takes a tuba player with a flatulent dog, a vengeful Corsican prostitute with death-dealing eyeglasses, a hospital housed in a giant zeppelin hangar, a postman who bicycles

Michael Tanner

Lonely insights

In his introductory note to the programme of Opera North’s new production of Don Giovanni, Richard Farnes, who has recently taken over as the company’s music director, says ‘[there] will be many for whom this is their first Don Giovanni, indeed their first opera’. Obvious but wise words, which every director should have engraved above his or her desk or drawing board. Obviously, Olivia Fuchs, who directs this production, doesn’t. She has forgotten, supposing she ever thought of it, that her first duty is to make the action clear, and that that by no means precludes subtlety, innovation, freshness to make seasoned spectators think again. But consider the trio in