Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Fierce vision

The Guildhall Art Gallery has a well-defined policy of mounting temporary exhibitions of work by living artists, providing the subject matter is closely involved with the theme of London. David Tress, although born in the capital in 1955, has lived in Pembrokeshire, West Wales, since 1976, and has made a substantial reputation for himself as a painter of wild, not to say elemental, landscape. But, as the riverscapes of George Rowlett make abundantly clear, you don’t have to go to the country for passion and drama — the paint can swirl just as crazily or as poignantly over the Thames. Tress’s London scenes are equally robust, based upon childhood memories

Simon Hoggart

Brain power

It has been Einstein week on television — the 50th anniversary of his death, and the centenary of the theory of relativity. This has handed producers a problem as knotty in its way as proving that e=mc2. How on earth do you put the most important yet the most incomprehensible scientific thought of the past century on to our screens without, for instance, having Davina McCall come on to yell at the top of her voice that gravity is the consequence of a curvature in space/time? In The Riddle of Einstein’s Brain Channel 4 found a novel way round it. They didn’t concentrate on what Einstein’s brain came up with,

Saturday

Mark Steyn

Wishful thinking

The first thing to be said is that, if you object to swearing, copious fecal matter and vigorously inventive explicit sex between consenting and non-consenting puppets, then Team America: World Police is not for you. The climactic address to the UN, a paean to ‘pussies’, ‘dicks’ and ‘assholes’ and the interaction between the three as a model for geopolitical relations, is a tour de force and makes more sense than any of the hogwash peddled within that benighted organisation. But, if you don’t dig the naughty words, it’s best to skip it and have a glum time at Closer. The second thing to be said is that, if I were

Toby Young

Winning Lane

Since 25 October, I’ve been appearing seven times a week on stage, so getting to see anything has been extremely difficult. My last night is 15 January, so I’ll be able to resume my full reviewing duties after that, but in the meantime I thought I’d bring you up to date on the only three plays I’ve managed to see in the past 12 weeks. I first saw The Producers in New York three years ago and hated it. The songs are mediocre, the plot is ludicrous and the jokes aren’t funny. I couldn’t understand what all the fuss was about, so I talked this over with some New York

Andrew Lambirth

Alternative history

The first part of the title of the Whitechapel’s latest portmanteau show is taken from Ezra Pound’s masterpiece of compression, the two-line poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ — ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough.’ The poem is a triumph of Imagism, the short-lived movement (c.1910–17) Pound helped to launch, which was in favour of brief, musical phrases and clarity of image, and in revolt against the woolliness of Romanticism. The second part of the title reveals the outward thrust or purpose of the exhibition: to present an alternative history of modernism as seen through the evolution of realism. So, in

Michael Vestey

Hard times | 15 January 2005

For many, the workhouse, particularly the Victorian variety, still conjures up in the popular imagination an image of dread and fear. I remember being taught about them at school and shuddering at the evocation of the Dickensian horror of these institutions. Everyone remembers the vivid experiences of Oliver Twist from either the novel or the film. For my grandmother’s generation they were still the unmentionable places of shame, the frightening last resort that beckoned if all went wrong. The workhouse was bad enough for what were called the labouring classes, but too much to bear for the more aspiring lower middle classes who’d fallen on hard times, as indeed it

Marcus Berkmann

Yes man

‘Why do you buy so many CDs?’ asked my girlfriend. It was not an unreasonable question, although obviously I wasn’t going to admit that. There are all sorts of reasons why you might buy too many CDs. You are bored of the ones you have. There are things you want. You are terrified you might miss something. It was only £8.49. It was only £6.99. It was only £4.99. Alternatively, it’s a compulsion, and you need professional help. And there’s also the irrefutable truth, which may be the essence of pop music’s appeal, that you never know where the next fantastic song is going to come from. If you only

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Ring of hope

After seemingly endless drumrolls and fanfares, with the conductor Antonio Pappano and the director Keith Warner giving countless interviews on the radio and in the papers, the Royal Opera’s new cycle of Wagner’s Ring, incomparably the most ambitious thing an opera company can undertake, has finally got under way. And hardly surprisingly, a widespread sense of anti-climax has been registered. Seeing it on the second night, I felt that there were a lot of good things about it and quite an assortment of bad ones. Many of the things that were good could easily get a lot better, while some of the bad things just have to go, and others

Andrew Lambirth

Something for everyone

To get the year off to a good start is the eye-catchingly titled William Orpen — Politics, Sex & Death at the Imperial War Museum (27 January–2 May). Is this an exhibition or a manifesto? (From its title, difficult to tell.) Sir William Orpen (1878–1931) was a dazzling painter, rich and successful, Sargent’s heir as portrayer of the haut monde. Yet he has the unfortunate reputation of being brilliant but superficial, and as a consequence there has never been an exhibition of his work in a national gallery in this country. The IWM is all set to change that with a show of 80 oils and 40 drawings, focusing not

Saturday

Mark Steyn

History mystery

I always like it when some fellow has a kid late in life and two centuries later you wind up talking to some l’il ol’ lady whose gram’pa was in the War of 1812 — the long slender thread of a personal connection to history. That’s how National Treasure begins: it’s 1974 and Christopher Plummer is talking to his wee grandson about a tale he in turn heard as a young slip of a lad from his own grandfather, who in turn heard it from the last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence. It’s about hidden treasure — but not some rinky-dink nouveau-riche arriviste 18th-century treasure. No, this goes

John McEwen

Finding salvation

A tragic love story lies behind the jovial title to this delightful exhibition, which unveils the David and Liza Brown Bequest, the largest ever received by Southampton City Art Gallery. In 1967, David Brown was one of Britain’s most distinguished veterinary surgeons, the world authority on the cattle disease rinderpest, and newly appointed federal director of Veterinary Research for Nigeria. It was a daunting job, undertaken during a civil war and overseeing 400 staff, but he and his prospective wife, Liza Wilcox, eagerly accepted the challenge. Brown was divorced when he met Wilcox, a tie-dying fabric specialist. She was married, but for both it was the love of their lives.

Charles Spencer

Pain and pleasure

The so-called festive season is the time of year all serious drinkers dread. Their favourite pubs are filled with amateurs, largely consisting of braying office parties. It takes for ever to get served at the bar, and there is the ever-present danger of being sicked over by some daffy young secretary who has been overdoing the alcopops. Then when you’ve finally got your drink — my Christmas cheer used to consist of triple Scotches with a dash of ginger wine and a Guinness chaser — some moron from accounts will lean over and say, ‘Cheer up, mate, it might never happen.’ The trouble, of course, is that it already has.

Andrew Lambirth

Artistic sustenance

By no means all commercial galleries run their Christmas exhibitions on into the New Year, but several that are doing so happen to be showing some of the most interesting work that has been around in months. However, if you are venturing out in search of artistic sustenance, do check gallery opening times to avoid disappointment. A glorious show of new work (until 14 January) at Timothy Taylor Gallery, 24 Dering Street, W1 (020 7409 3344), proclaims that Craigie Aitchison (born 1926) has lost none of his magic. The familiar subjects are once more in evidence, but given imaginative new treatment. A landscape is for the first time ever over-arched

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Sheer magic

For 100 years, ballet has been represented by the image of a ballerina with a feathered headdress and an arm raised as a quivering wing. Then, in 1995, came Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake, and ballet’s icon lost its long-held supremacy. The Swan Princess met her masculine match: a bare-torsoed, bare-footed, muscled Adonis in feathery trousers. Never before, in ballet history, had the revisitation of a well-known work acquired the same iconic status as its predecessor. Almost ten years down the line, Bourne’s Swan Lake is still splendidly engaging. Central to it remains the amazing transformation of the traditional tutu-ed ladies into now fiery, now subtly ambiguous guys. Although the original

Michael Vestey

Curious timing

No time is right to announce job losses, but picking just before Christmas seems to be favoured by many companies. One can’t help wondering if there’s sound business sense behind it or if it can be attributed to the streak of sadism that runs through British life. When last week the BBC director-general, Mark Thompson, chose to unveil his plans to remove up to 5,000 people from its payroll, I imagine a number of Christmases were blighted. Assuming this figure I’ve quoted is correct. I’ve seen several different totals and interpretations: 2,900 actual losses from mainly administrative departments, such as marketing, training and human resources, with another 2,400 staff ‘outsourced’

Robin Holloway

Return to standard

As if to answer my recent complaints (Arts, 30 October) concerning the dumb deserts of Radio Three between the end of the early-evening concert and the wall-to-wall small-hour tapestry of Through the Night, two weeks in succession have provided high seriousness, requiring committed attention, yielding deep artistic rewards, reminiscent of the great old days (let’s hope this is a trend; not all trendiness need be derogatory!). Both were anniversaries. We live in a culture wherein ‘minority’ interests seem ignitable only by a birthday or deathday. First the former: Luigi Dallapiccola (given two whole sessions — three one-act dramatic pieces; a long succession of variegated smaller work interspersed with authoritative commentary,

Andrew Lambirth

The message in the glass

Collecting stained glass seems to have fallen somewhat from fashion. In the first half of the 20th century, acquisition was lively and prices soared as the Big Three — William Burrell, Pierpont Morgan and William Randolph Hearst — vied for possession of the best examples of this essentially Christian artform. (There is no stained glass recorded before the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the early 4th century. It may have become secularised later, but it was originally intended for purposes of religious instruction and adornment.) After the second world war, tastes changed and stained glass was largely ignored. In recent years, there has been something of a revival of

Saturday

Patrick Carnegy

Wild about the dog

What does anyone readily recall of the Two Gents other than the servant Launce and his magnificent dog Crab? Maybe that’s all you need to remember, for it’s really only in Launce’s observations on Crab that the unmistakeable voice of Shakespeare surfaces from the dross of a comedy that may well have been his first. Who but Shakespeare would have had Launce boast that when Crab farted under the Duke’s table he himself owned up and took the punishment on his own back? Hard to escape the feeling that the apprentice Bard was so bored with injecting a semblance of life into a stock tale of lovesick heroes and their

Selina Mills

Self-taught prodigy

…Over her paint and her colours bentCan paint what it is to be innocent.Life, add thy wisdom, and at length bring usWhere springs the fountain of her genius.Walter de la Mare A few years ago, a couple found a small but elegant drawing of a young girl playing with her pets hanging at an art dealers. Intrigued by the intricate detail of the work, they brought the drawing home. The wife, Leonie Summers, an art-historian, established that their treasure was by an artist called Pamela Bianco, who died in New York in 1994. For a while the story stopped there and searches to identify Bianco through English art books seemed

Andrew Lambirth

England’s Michelangelo

The reputation of George Frederick Watts (1817–1904) has not fared well for the past 80 years or so. He was much admired during his lifetime (his friend and fellow-artist Lord Leighton even dubbed him ‘England’s Michelangelo’), and his allegories of repentance and hope were still popular during the first world war, but his stock has slumped since then. Perhaps he was dangerously overrated while alive (the fate of so many artists, whose posthumous fall is then all the more evident — think of Graham Sutherland, whose vogue is only now returning more than 20 years after his death); certainly Watts was a shrewd self-promoter, who not only left substantial holdings