Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Mark Amory

Weirdness in Washington

They don’t make ’em like The Manchurian Candidate of 1962 any more. That weird, creepy, paranoid thriller of the Cold War flopped at first, was given retrospective topicality by the assassination of President Kennedy, and became a cult. Though it is, like Citizen Kane, a brilliant film rather than a profound or serious one, those virtues, too, have been ascribed to it. It dealt with an important topic — the ruthless manipulation of power in America then — but it did not deal with it in a convincing way. For years Tina Sinatra (her father Frank had the rights) has been trying to launch an updated remake and she was

John McEwen

Poetic eye

It is not Robert Frank’s fault, but one might think from the hype — ‘arguably the world’s greatest living photographer’, etc. — that he had invented documentary photography. When Humphrey Spender, who did for Mass Observation and Picture Post in the 1930s and 1940s what Frank did for social documentation in the 1950s, was similarly praised, he pointed out that photography had been an instrument of social change since the 1870s. And the photo-journalist’s favourite camera, the 35mm Leica, was invented in 1914. Spender, who at 94 is 14 years Frank’s senior, abandoned photography for painting long ago, but coincidentally also has a photographic show, Moroccan Diary (at the Photographers’

Simon Hoggart

The great divide

Watching North and South (BBC1, Sunday), I reflected how much life had changed in Mrs Gaskell’s location. Some years ago I was doing What the Papers Say in Milton — sorry, Manchester — and during a delay I overheard the crew talking about restaurants in the wealthy commuter towns that fringe the city. One of them described a ‘plank steak’, a fillet too big to fit on its platter, which hung over the edge. They then moved on to a discussion of the best vintage champagnes. (See this week’s wine club offer if you need any help there.) This debate took place in the glory days of television when money

Lucy Vickery

On the trail of Herzog

At 8.30 a.m. on a crisp autumn Sunday a group of 20 huddled on King’s Cross station’s platform nine and three-quarters — empty but for a smattering of camera-toting Japanese Harry Potter enthusiasts — ready to embark on a journey inspired by the iconoclastic German film-maker Werner Herzog. In the harsh midwinter of 1974, Herzog made a gruelling pilgrimage, walking 500 miles from Munich to Paris in a bid to fend off the death of the distinguished film critic and historian Lotte Eisner, who had suffered a stroke. Herzog felt that he and his fellow German film-makers owed an immeasurable debt to Eisner who, by giving her blessing to their

Roger Kimball

Museum without a soul

Roger Kimball on how Yoshio Taniguchi has transformed New York’s Museum of Modern Art We are told that our individualist art has touched its limit, and its expression can go no further. That’s often been said; but if it cannot go further, it may still go elsewhere.André Malraux, The Voices of Silence ‘An institution,’ said Emerson, ‘is the lengthened shadow of one man.’ In the case of the Museum of Modern Art, the man in question is Alfred H. Barr (1902–81). Barr founded MOMA (the acronym by which the museum is universally known) in 1929. From then until Barr’s retirement in 1967, MOMA was to an extraordinary extent the incarnation

Ross Clark

Globophobia | 20 November 2004

Jonathan Dimbleby has been frightening late-night audiences on ITV with a documentary called the New World War. Using interviews with Ethiopean coffee-producers and reels of library footage of hurricanes, Dimbleby explains his thesis: ‘Global terrorism, global poverty and global warming form a toxic trio that promise a catastrophe that will make the horrors of 9/11 look like the Boston Tea Party.’ ‘Do I exaggerate?’ he asks in an accompanying article in the Observer. In a word, yes. Terrorism, poverty and global warming may be linked in the minds of the Observer-reading classes, but is al-Qa’eda really motivated by the refusal of Western consumers to buy fair-trade bananas? Inasmuch as bin

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Past master

The lack of great dance-makers that characterises contemporary dance has prompted a number of reconstructions of long-lost ballets, often with questionable results. It is utterly refreshing, therefore, to see how Frederick Ashton could evoke the past without getting entangled in an artistically sterile quest for authenticity. Few people in the history of ballet had his deep understanding of past styles, practices and atmospheres. And few people in the world could evoke all that through their individual choreographic idiom, as he did, without having to reconstruct anything. Sylvia is Frederick Ashton’s quintessential tribute to late 19th-century French ballet. The ballet is thus a triumphant plunge into that good old bad taste

Roderic Dunnett

Enlightened philanthropy

Behind this exhibition is a story of fairytale success: of the 120 Welsh shipping firms that flourished early in the last century, two of which became Wales’s largest maritime company; of the merged wealth that flowed therefrom; and of the enlightened philanthropy of one man, John Morel Gibbs (1912–96), scion of both families, who saw wealth as an obligation and drew on his Methodist beliefs to become the most significant patron of art and art education in Wales, and — with Walter Hussey — of Church-art collecting in the 20th century. The death this year of Gibbs’s like-minded wife, Sheila Newton, supplied the impetus for this public exhibition. In the

Mark Glazebrook

Welcome escape

Out of a cardboard box on the exhibition poster which heralds Christmas and welcomes visitors at the gates guarding the soothing lawns of the Dulwich Picture Gallery springs a typically Quentin Blake ensemble. There are two children, three dotty adults, one of them wearing ‘specs’, and a big dog. At the top of the poster, a parrot and a bigger bird, probably a heron, both clasp some jolly red and green holly in their beaks. Once in the Gallery itself, it emerges that ‘Up With Birds!’ is the theme of the first room of this exhibition — the first of five such themes. Should a young illustrator wish to make

Ursula Buchan

Genteel ghetto

From time to time, people to whom I am introduced mishear and mistake me for a Guardian journalist. I can’t always quite be bothered to put them right. I am not ashamed of being a gardening writer — far from it — but my profession has, in recent years, become something of a genteel ghetto. There are a number of clever, talented, cultured garden writers at work, but they have a struggle to be taken seriously by the wider world. This is thanks mainly to a narrow concentration by television producers on practicalities and personalities, but is reinforced by book publishers’ obsession with photographic images. As a result, most people

James Delingpole

True courage

All last week I was in Holland with some of the splendid old boys of 4th Commando Brigade, commemorating their liberation of Walcheren island 60 years ago. I asked them whether they felt they’d benefited from their wartime experiences and most of them said yes. ‘When you’ve been through all that, you come out knowing you can handle anything,’ said a twinkly-eyed fellow called Pat Hagen. ‘And it’s a useful thing to know because what you have to realise is that life is always hard. After the war I faced obstacles every bit as tough as I did during the war. You’ve got to learn to deal with them.’ I

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Looking good

Rameau’s Les Paladins, which arrived briefly at the Barbican Theatre, was spectacular, amazing. Or rather this production was. It was one of those occasions when so much happens on stage that you can begin to wonder whether there’s something — or nothing — to hide. I had listened to it on Radio Three a few days earlier, and been puzzled by the excitement it seemed to be generating, since most of the music struck me as being well below the best of Rameau. It turned out, at the Barbican, that we were to be happily subjected to a multimedia display, in which the visuals easily dominated. Three-D persons stepped out

Laura Gascoigne

Unexpected twists

As a teenager in Cambridge, I used to have tea with a blind philosopher. One afternoon, spotting the sugar lurking behind the milk, I told it — as one does — to come out from there. My friend was aghast. ‘Are you talking to the crockery?’ he asked. Ontologically speaking, of course, I was on shaky ground, but there was an empirical logic to my remark which was lost on him. A blind man can apprehend objects in space, but not the spatial relationships between them. I’d forgotten this incident until the Estorick Collection’s new exhibition Still Life in 20th Century Italy brought it back, setting me thinking about the

Charles Spencer

The next big thing

You’re probably sick of reading about John Peel, the Radio One disc jockey who died of a heart attack last week and whose passing was marked with the solemn, exhaustive media coverage usually reserved for great statesmen. This was, after all, only a man who played records for a living. Andy Kershaw, one of Peel’s protégés and a fellow DJ, went spectacularly over the top in the Independent. Peel, he said, was the ‘most important person in British music since the birth of rock’n’roll’. Come on, Andy, take a grip. More important than Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, David Bowie? It’s a bit like saying that John Heminges and

Simon Hoggart

Trick or cheat?

Old formulae are desperately re-worked in order to fill the endless hours of television time. (Did you know that the BBC broadcasts five hours of TV every hour, in this country alone?) The mathematician and code expert Simon Singh, whom I bumped into the other day, suggested I watch Beg, Borrow or Steal (BBC2, Tuesdays) because he felt it illustrated some interesting intellectual problems. It comes straight after The Weakest Link and is in many ways a knock-off, since participants not only need to know the answers, but are also encouraged to swindle each other. There are five contestants. They are asked clutches of four questions, some moderately tough (‘Which

Peter Phillips

Beyond words

Sitting in the Globe Theatre towards the end of last season, I began to have one of those out-of-mind experiences which only music is supposed to be able to give. The play in question was Measure for Measure, always known to be a difficult one to interpret satisfactorily, a difficulty which presumably increases if one is not in possession of all that might be of help. Full of untried concentration we welcome the players and lend them our ears. Off goes the Duke: ‘Of government the properties to unfold/ Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse,/ Since I am put to know that your own science/ Exceeds, in

John McEwen

Force for good

This is the first in a series of short sharp shows devoted to leading British artists which Tate Britain proposes to stage over the coming years. According to Stephen Deuchar, Tate Britain’s director, Rego was easily the most popular choice, and little wonder. It is a sign of true quality that in a 50-year career she has gone from strength to strength. Her imaginative vitality and range, her technical command, her historical depth, above all her humanity are an inspiring and moral force for good at this sickly time, when the art world’s decadent promotion and peddling of relics is oddly reminiscent of the mediaeval Church — as witness the

Saturday

William Packer

Bride and prejudice

Leighton House, Lord Leighton’s home and studio in Kensington, has a growing reputation for small and scholarly yet undaunting exhibitions. And with the house itself and its collection to be relished into the bargain, size hardly matters. That said, the current special offer, occupying only one room, is centred upon a single work that, at 10 feet by more than five, is itself pretty big. Indeed ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’ is one of the great machines of high Victorian narrative art. Its painter Edwin Long, born in 1829, was already in his mid-40s and at the time not even an Associate RA. And this one work, two years in the