Arts feature

In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was premièred, Henry Ford manufactured his millionth Model-T (‘a million of anything is a lot’, he said), Kafka’s Metamorphosis was published and so, too, was one of Einstein’s critical contributions to his own general theory of relativity. Mixed into this modernist cocktail of extreme achievement and harrowing perceptions was something more banal, but just as enduring: the Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle. A century old this year, it is, in a disputed field, an undisputed ‘design classic’. And, like any classic in any genre, it can be read in many ways. Long before Apple and the Messianic Steve Jobs, Coca-Cola developed a business model that was the proxy of a larger belief system.

There is an island nation, just off the main body of a continent. It gained an empire from the force of its military and the finesse of its trading contracts. The empire withered, as they all do, under the gaze of history. But that didn’t finish the island nation off. It simply took over the world in a different way, with something greater than arms and economics: popular culture. Its territory is now the television in your lounge, and the headphones in your ears. Sounds like Britain, doesn’t it? We often boast of how, from the Beatles to this year’s Oscar nominations, our country punches above its weight culturally. But I had another island nation in mind. One with twice as much weight, in terms of population, and a hell of a lot more punch: Japan.

This week a monumental exhibition, Rubens and His Legacy, is opening at the Royal Academy. It makes the case — surely correct — that the Flemish master was among the most influential figures in European art. There are few painters of the 18th or 19th century — from Joshua Reynolds to Cézanne, Watteau to Constable — who were not affected by his work. It will be interesting, however, to discover what the London art public feel about Rubens himself. The British have had a complicated relationship with the great man. Its apex is represented by his residence in London — admittedly for a brief nine months in 1629–30 — his knighthood and the pleasure expressed by Charles I at meeting ‘a person of such merit’.

Shirley Williams sits at the head of a table in a large conference room in Lib Dem HQ. She will be 85 this year, but still has a finger in many a pie, most of which we’re not to talk about here, including the predicted wipe-out of a generation of her party’s MPs at this year’s election. It’s one of the reasons she never made it to see the Tower of London poppies. Too busy. She also had to dash to Russia where she is on the board of the Moscow School of Political Studies. ‘It is all about teaching people about democracy and has fallen under the frown of Mr Putin, which is why I had to go.

‘I had no idea you were so handsome,’ Groucho Marx wrote to T.S. Eliot in 1961 on receiving from him a signed studio portrait. The Missouri-born Eliot was the Marx Brothers’ devoted fan; three years later, in June 1964, Groucho called on the 75-year-old poet at his home in London. Eliot was interested in the Marx Brothers’ first undisputed film masterpiece, Animal Crackers (1930), while Groucho wanted only to quote from ‘The Waste Land’; however, the men agreed that they shared a love of cats and fine cigars. Winston Churchill was another who admired the Marxes and their deliciously mad repartee. During an air attack on London in May 1941 he found himself watching Monkey Business (1931), and was ‘glad of the diversion’.

The New Year is a time for reflections as well as resolutions. So here is one of mine. In the art world, media and fashions come and go, but often what truly lasts — even in the 21st century — is painting. Over the past 12 months, there has been a series of triumphs for pigment on canvas, including the glorious Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery, and a demonstration by Anselm Kiefer at the Royal Academy that we still have painters of towering stature among us. What will 2015 hold? Well, as far as painting is concerned — both old master and contemporary — there are some extremely promising items.

It is cold, but not in a cheery, robin-redbreast kind of way. The sky is slate blue; the sun, a red ball, is slipping below the horizon, figures carrying heavy burdens trudge across the frozen water. Yet this far- from-festive painting, ‘The Census at Bethlehem’ by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, is one of the earliest — perhaps the very first — to set the Christmas story in a northern winter landscape. There is no attempt to pretend that this is the Holy Land. The setting is a village in the southern Netherlands. The houses are brick-built, one with a northern European crow-stepped gable. In the foreground, a pig is being slaughtered, an improbable sight in Palestine. In his poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ W.H.

The two trendiest words in classical music are ‘El Sistema’. That’s the name for the high-intensity programme of instrumental coaching that turned kids from the slums of Venezuela into the thrilling Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra (SBYO), conducted by hot young maestro Gustavo Dudamel before he was poached by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Or so the legend goes. When the SBYO was booked for the Proms in 2011, the concert sold out in three hours. Sir Simon Rattle, no less, declared El Sistema to be ‘the most important thing happening to classical music anywhere in the world’. Audiences wept at the sight of former street urchins producing a tumultuous, triumphant — and virtually note-perfect — performance of Beethoven’s Fifth.

Writing is dead. Long live writing. What do I mean when I say writing is dead? That’s a whole other article, but in brief: cinema killed the novel, email killed the letter, CGI killed cinema and Twitter killed email. The good news is that, despite this bloodbath, writing is actually alive and well and living in Texas. And the reason I know that is that I was there at the end of last month. The Austin Film Festival, where I had a script in the competition, is the only major film festival in the US that focuses primarily on the writers (as opposed to directors or actors). The result is that, for those few days while the festival takes place, you can’t stir an elbow in Austin without knocking over a writer’s pint. The place is crawling with them, seething with them.

‘I just stay here and do my thing,’ David Hockney told me soon after I arrived at his house and studio in Los Angeles this August. ‘I’m not that interested in what happens outside. I live the same way as I have for years. I’m just a worker.’ Hockney has been labouring prodigiously for more than 60 years now, since he entered Bradford School of Art at the age of 16. ‘There is something inside David,’ his assistant Jean-Pierre Gonçalves de Lima noted, ‘that drives him to make pictures.’ In the summer of 2013, after a series of disasters — including a minor stroke and the terrible death of a young assistant — Hockney moved back to California after a long period of working in Bridlington. It was a dark period.

If you follow dance or music closely, make them part of your life, you look on certain performers as your daemon. These are the artists who become part of your inner landscape. They act as a tuning fork for your emotions and imagination. And you mark their progress with particular hope that you won’t be disappointed. When the 25-year-old Sylvie Guillem arrived in London in 1989 from Paris Opera Ballet, with a flaming reputation as Rudolf Nureyev’s prodigal daughter, one’s first reaction was wariness. She seemed so flashy in her incredible bodily gifts.

Last week, 539 apartments designed by Frank Gehry and Norman Foster were made available for off-plan purchase. This was heralded by simultaneous launches in London and Kuala Lumpur and a press release announcing Sting and Trudie Styler as early buyers. Battersea Power Station has stood unused for more than 30 years but after multiple failed attempts at redevelopment progress is now well under way towards its transformation into one of London’s most desirable addresses. Ultimately due to house 3,400 homes — only 15 per cent of which are set to be affordable — the project is emblematic of a far larger reclamation of London’s waterfront as a site for luxury housing.

Allen Jones (born 1937) has been demonised. In 1969 he made a group of three sculptures of scantily-clad female figures. They were slightly larger than life and arranged in positions that enabled them (with the addition of a glass top or padded seat) to be turned into a table, a chair and a hat stand. These super-mannequins were highly modelled, wigged and leather-booted, and unavoidably realistic. When first exhibited in 1970 they provoked outrage among the feminist community. Jones’s 1978 retrospective of graphic art at the ICA caused a near riot even though the sculptures weren’t shown. In 1986, when the chair went on display, it had acid thrown over it by an incensed extremist.