Arts feature

It is a standard narrative in all showbiz reporting, and one that arts hacks seem to be duty-bound to abide by. It is the fairy tale of ‘Making It’; the story of a star whose career took time to get off the ground but, thanks to perseverance and self-belief, went stratospheric. It goes like this: ‘I was a nobody, and I was turned down from everything. And I nearly didn’t go to that final audition, but whaddya know? I turned up and… Shazam! Oscars raining down and a mini-series on Netflix.’ There is an encyclopaedia of stars who toughed it out before making it big.

‘What a loss is the excellent Humboldt. You and Berlin will both miss him greatly,’ Prince Albert wrote to his much-beloved daughter Vicky, Crown Princess of Prussia, on news of the death of the author, explorer and celebrity Alexander von Humboldt in 1859. ‘People of this kind do not grow upon every bush [‘an den Blumen’] and they are the grace and glory of a country and a century.’ After some delays and bad luck, the grace and glory of the Humboldt name flourishes once again with the opening of the Humboldt Forum.

There are many marvellous things to be seen in the Musée des Beaux-Arts at Dijon. But when I paid a visit a couple of years ago (in those days you could just step on a train and do such things), it was a little picture of the Nativity that particularly caught my eye. Its date, artist and original owner are all uncertain, but its beauty and originality were clear at a glance. Here, for almost the first time in European art, the appearance of ordinary things and people were the subject of close, rapt observation. Not of course that there was anything ordinary about the Nativity itself, which was a miraculous, world-changing event — signalled in the painting by the bright golden sun rising over distant jagged hills.

How to sum up the legend of Marlene Dietrich? She was an actor, a singer, a style icon, even a war hero. A retrospective is under way at the BFI, where more than a dozen of her films are being shown throughout this month. Many admirers saw only the shimmering legs and forgot the sharp intellect, the wartime gallantry. But it would be wrong to deny that body image was central to her success. It was with this in mind that the critic Robin Wood christened Dietrich ‘the Venus de Marlene’. Like the statue alluded to, Dietrich is a monument of Western culture, her image cast not in stone, but in light (that marble of the modern world, made possible by the newly invented movie camera).

‘Design. Humanity’s best friend,’ proclaims a row of posters outside the Design Museum. ‘It’s the alarm that woke you up… The card you tapped on the bus… And the words you’re reading right now. So embedded in our lives we almost forget it’s there.’ It is one of the ironies of good design that the better it is, the less we notice it. This is especially true when we really need it: when lost in an airport five minutes before the gate closes or battling helplessly down the wrong road. In these instances, the woman we invariably have to thank for helping us to find our bearings is currently the subject of an overdue tribute at the Design Museum.

When talkies appeared in 1927, Hollywood went searching for talkers to write them. It turned to men like Herman J. Mankiewicz: to journalists. The greatest screenwriters of the golden age were journalists first; unlike novelists, they thrived in Hollywood — at least professionally. Good films and good journalism need brevity; novels don’t. Reading about F. Scott Fitzgerald struggling at MGM, 12 years after The Great Gatsby, is brutal, like trying to watch a man learn to walk. The film Mank, by David Fincher, tells the story of how Mankiewicz and Orson Welles created Citizen Kane — for which they shared an Oscar for the screenplay in 1942 — and how they bickered over the credit.

Antony Gormley: In the beginning was the thing! The reason I chose sculpture as a vocation was to escape words, to communicate in a physical way. It was a means of confronting the way things were, of getting to know them in material terms. The origins of making physical objects go back to before the advent of Homo sapiens, earlier even than the appearance of our Neanderthal cousins. Sculpture emerges from material culture. At the beginning there was an urge to make objects and you could argue that making them was the catalyst for the emergence of the modern mind.

The history of the word ‘offend’, from the Latin offendere, to hit, attack, injure, is a revealing one. From its starting point in physical violence to transgression against God in the Middle Ages, today ‘offence’, understood as displeasure or upset, is seemingly everywhere. The word may no longer refer to direct physical harm, but culture of all kinds, from artworks to comedy to literature to music, seems to have an upsetting quality to some. Words, we are told, are ‘violence’, images are hurtful, differing opinions are dangerous and must be suppressed. Even silence is ‘violence’, as this year’s Black Lives Matter protests reminded us.

Modern Two in Edinburgh reopens this week, and what more fitting subject for a show in a time of global catastrophe than Ray Harryhausen, titan of cinema, creator of beasts, destroyer of cities, king of adventure? If you were near a screen at any point during the Cold War, you almost certainly watched Harryhausen movies. The tentacled Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, so realistic it was awarded an X certificate upon arrival in Britain; the mythical marvels of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad; and the vicious skeletons of Jason and the Argonauts captivated generations of viewers. These indelible creations, all handmade by one man, the animator, special-effects pioneer and producer Ray Harry-hausen, have become a magical fixture in our collective imagination.

Not long ago, if you asked discreetly in the right Hackney pub, you would be put in touch with a character called Syd the Squatbroker. For as little as £150, he would gain access to the roof of an abandoned council tower block with a set of fireman’s keys. Then Syd (nom de guerre of a carpenter from Harlow) would abseil down to a window, gain entry and open an empty flat. Sometimes he would cut through heavy steel squat guards using oxyacetylene cutting gear. Latter-day squatbrokers aren’t yet abseiling down the Shard or Canary Wharf’s glass and steel phalluses to liberate underused office spaces and thereby help solve London’s housing crisis, but you’d think they must be tempted. Post-Covid, home working is becoming permanent.

How much does a Michelangelo cost? It is, as they say, a good question, meaning: nobody really knows. The reason for this odd state of affairs is that almost none of them have ever been bought and sold on the open market, which is how the prices of most things are established. It’s hard to think of many examples of his sculptures being traded in that way over the past 500 years. Strangely, the main exception is the ‘Taddei Tondo’, otherwise known as ‘Virgin and Child with the Infant St John’, which, reportedly, some members of the Royal Academy are suggesting the RA should sell. If that were to happen, which I very much hope it does not, we might learn the answer to the conundrum. Probably it would be a very large sum indeed.

How many black friends do you have? Do you have any? It’s likely that black people have more white friends than the reverse. In part that’s surely down to demographics and the size of the population. No matter your colour, you’re ten times more likely to bump into a white person than a black person, more or less, depending on where you find yourself, of course. The situation is not so pronounced as in the United States where residential segregation has reinforced social apartheid. In the UK black and white people may live cheek-by-jowl, but that doesn’t necessarily indicate knowledge or even empathy. Out of just over 100 households on our street in Brighton there are three black families; ours is one of them.

To be a good illustrator, said Mervyn Peake, it is necessary to do two things. The first is to subordinate yourself entirely to the book. The second is ‘to slide into another man’s soul’. In 1933, at the age of 22, Peake did precisely that. Relinquishing his studies at the Royal Academy Schools to move to Sark, in the Channel Islands, he co-founded an artists’ colony and took to sketching fishermen and romantic, ripple-lapped coves. He put a gold hoop in his right ear, a red-lined cape over his shoulders, and grew his hair long, like Israel Hands or Long John Silver. The incredible thing was that he had yet to receive his commission to illustrate Treasure Island.

A few years ago, I was sitting in the London Library researching a book about blind people across the ages. As a semi-blind person myself, I sighed at the lack of women, other than the endlessly chipper Helen Keller, who never had a bad day. Ever. My sister, however, drew my attention to a two-line wiki entry for the 18th-century composer, singer and professor — and darling of the Viennese musical court — Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759–1824). Ten years passed, and after many hours of research in libraries and chats with music scholars, we now find ourselves — to our utter amazement — co-writing a chamber opera about her life.

It was possible to stand in the middle of the road during the lockdown without being run over. In Willow Place, near Victoria Station, I crouched over a narrow grating of stout grey iron, and caught a glimpse of light reflected from moving water deep below, as though at the bottom of a well. This was the River Tyburn, on its way from Hampstead via Buckingham Palace to the Thames. During the endlessly sunny lockdown days, I wandered the streets near my office in Victoria. The bright unpeopled silence (like a landscape by de Chirico) brought to my attention details unnoticed before. With all the galleries closed, this was street art.

Edinburgh, 3 November 1815. The university courtyard is buzzing. A band is playing. Surrounding streets are filled with thousands of excited spectators, many waiting since 10 a.m. From the Castle, from windows and rooftops, from Calton Hill, Holyrood Park and Salisbury Crags, all strain to get a glimpse. Then finally at 3 p.m., above the university, a large balloon suddenly emerges, climbing wondrously into the crisp November sky. Orchestrating this aeronautical display was pioneer English balloonist James Sadler. His balloon rose majestically as the westerly wind took it towards the sea. Sadler continued waving his flags as long as he could be seen, and the crowds applauded and gasped.