Arts feature

Paloma Faith is an unusual pop star. Her flamboyant, retro appearance is upholstered by a deep-thinking mind and she articulates herself in an uncut East London accent. She hangs out with the author Hanif Kureishi and you can expect to find her at an art opening. When we meet in London’s Soho House, she is a cocktail of reds and oranges. Her hair, held back by a neon scrunchie, is white gold after the ‘gingerness’ washed out in the sea and she’s wearing a red-and-white checked gingham skirt with Chelsea boots. Although she admits that by keeping slim she makes a concession to conformity, she otherwise seems to do things her own way.

Mark Shields is a painter of considerable versatility and skill who is unable to rest on his laurels. Born in 1963 in Northern Ireland, where he still lives, he developed a powerful realist style that owes much to the Old Masters, and scored early success with meticulous portraits and still-life paintings. If he had been happy to continue in that vein, he would no doubt have made a very good, if safe, living, but ambition and self-questioning have led him on to develop new ways of painting and drawing, from mysterious, atmospheric landscapes and complex narrative pictures to large-scale pastel drawings on canvas.

It has been a bracing start to the year at English National Opera. David Alden’s production of Peter Grimes, praised to the skies for the musical performance under Edward Gardner, returned to the Coliseum. Next up is Rigoletto (reviewed on page 50), directed by Alden’s twin, Christopher. Then comes Rodelinda, in another new production (or co-production, as is often the way these days) by Richard Jones. Audiences will be particularly keen to see the Rigoletto, and not shy of making comparisons with the celebrated production by Jonathan Miller, which has finally been stood down after three decades. Hanging over everything, though, is the realisation that Gardner’s time at the helm is drawing to a close.

The symbol engraved on Augustus’ signet ring was a sphinx. Julian the Apostate described him as ‘a chameleon’. He seized power declaring himself the saviour of the Roman Republic, but in the process abolished it. He ruled as an autocrat but maintained the fiction that he was no more than the Republic’s First Citizen — and left as his legacy a new system of imperial government that was to continue for another 400 years in the West and until 1453 in Constantinople in the East. This year marks the 2,000th anniversary of Augustus’ death in 14 AD, on the 19th of the month by then named in his honour.

With all the enormous fuss over Sherlock on the telly, David Suchet’s recent retirement from Poirot should not be forgotten. What an incredible innings! The actor finally hung up his patent-leather shoes after a quarter-century of playing the sleuth in 70 stories. The case is not closed for fans, however. Agatha Christie’s Belgian brainbox — to whom a speck of dirt on a cuff is more agonising than a bullet wound — has already returned. He is on stage in the form of Robert Powell, famous for once playing Jesus of Nazareth. The play is Black Coffee, Christie’s first play and the only one with Hercule Poirot in it. Poirot, a Belgian refugee from the first world war, made his début in her first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles.

There is, we all know, only one anniversary that matters this year: 20 March 2014, 50 years since The Twilight Zone episode ‘The Masks’ was first beamed into America’s cathode-ray tubes. Bunting will be stretched from television screen to television screen in celebration. Champagne will be spilt over remote controls. After all, ‘The Masks’ isn’t just a particularly fine episode of a particularly fine show. It is also the only episode — of 156, if we don’t count the two revival series made in later decades — to be directed by a woman. Ida Lupino.

One of the great treats of the exhibiting year will undoubtedly be Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs (17 April to 7 September) at Tate Modern. The last phase of Matisse’s productive career was devoted to making extraordinarily vivid images from painted paper cut with scissors, as the physical effort of wielding a paintbrush became too much for him. Matisse’s greatest strengths were as draughtsman and colourist, and the cut-outs combine these skills in abundant measure, releasing a new sense of joyous celebration almost unmatched in the history of art. The largest ever exhibition of the cut-outs, the Tate’s show will feature 120 works, many seen together for the first time. Unmissable.

The mood is celebratory in East Anglia: the University (UEA) marks 50 years since it opened its doors in Norwich, and the Sainsbury Centre, its visual arts flagship, is back in business after refurbishment by Foster & Partners. The first public building designed by Norman Foster, it opened originally in 1978, a huge glass and steel hangar to house the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Collection, given to the University five years earlier. This impressive collection is wide-ranging, including a substantial group of early Francis Bacon paintings, an important collection of Hans Coper ceramics, and excellent things by Moore, Giacometti, Picasso and Epstein, as well as quantities of other artefacts, ancient and modern.

Writing about Graham Sutherland in 1950, the critic Robert Melville observed: ‘When one looks at a picture one finds oneself over the frontier or one doesn’t. Criticism has no power of making converts to an experience which occurs without the intervention of reason ... Criticism considers the sensitive flesh of the image and discovers its spiritual stature: indeed, unless we pursue the meaning of the image as language, painting may well fall silent and rest content in the pride of its flesh.

For a man who’s about to celebrate his 60th birthday, Sir David Chipperfield looks remarkably fresh-faced. His pale blue eyes are bright and piercing, his thick white hair is cut in a fashionable short crop. Clad in a dark polo neck, he looks almost boyish. This youthful vitality is reflected in his work. At an age when most of us tend to start slowing down, he’s busier than ever. His offices in London, Berlin, Milan and Shanghai employ more than 200 people. His current projects range from Paris to St Louis. I meet him in his groovy high-rise office overlooking Waterloo Station. He’s just flown in from Mexico City, where he’s built yet another new museum.

I recently met an A-level English student who had never heard of Pontius Pilate. How is it possible to reach the age of 18 — to be applying to university to read English and European Literature — and never to have come across the man who asked the unanswerable question: what is truth? This student had completed a course in theatre studies, having read hardly any Shakespeare, nor any of his contemporaries, none of the Greeks — Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides — nothing from the Restoration, no Ibsen, no Shaw, and certainly no Schiller — though he had been given the role of Hippolytus in a school production of Phaedra’s Love, which had to be cancelled when the head teacher came across a copy of the script lying on the staffroom table. Phew!

The charming East Sussex village of Ditchling lies at the foot of the South Downs, its narrow streets lined with ancient houses and pubs. For much of the 20th century it was home to a community of artists and craftsmen, the most famous of whom are Eric Gill and David Jones, master and pupil. In 1985, two sisters, Hilary and Joanna Bourne, founded a museum to preserve and celebrate the wealth of local creativity. It is this museum that reopened at the end of September after a major overhaul and redevelopment by Adam Richards Architects. The results are very fine indeed: this is one of the loveliest small museums I have visited, the lucid spaces well laid out, the plan and the detailing equally considered.

Earlier this year a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, depicting two figures stoned on the hallucinogenic drug PCP, was offered for sale at Christie’s in New York. ‘Dustheads’ was given an estimated sales tag of $25–35 million. In the end, the hammer came down at $48.8 million, a sum that easily broke the previous record for the artist, $26.4 million, which was achieved last November. It was the fourth time in 12 months that Basquiat’s record price had been smashed, and confirmed the artist’s dominance of the contemporary market. Such record-breaking at auction tends to elicit valedictory statements from auction houses and Christie’s Loic Gouzer duly obliged: ‘“Dustheads” is pure, concentrated energy, freedom and honesty.

Our legal system is pure theatre and always has been. Many barristers stand accused of being failed actors and vice versa. Judges love the dressing-up box and a chance to give their gavel a good bang. With murmuring galleries, shocking verdicts, swooning witnesses, cries of ‘all rise’ and ‘take him down’, the flummery and drama of the courtroom has always supplied a rich genre for film, theatre and telly. Now there’s a chance to see one of the more serious courtroom classics in the West End. Twelve Angry Men — originally written for the screen and directed by Sidney Lumet — is about a grumpy New York jury deciding on the fate of an ethnic kid accused of stabbing his father. If guilty, it’s the electric chair.

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin patch. It’s because I am a film fan, grateful for any excuse to indulge in horror movies as night’s dark curtains draw closer. No other time of the year offers such a perfect alignment of occasion and genre. ’Tis, after all, the season to be scared. And this season is shaping up better than most.

The Ashmolean Museum has taken the radical step of embracing contemporary art, and is currently hosting (until 30 March 2014) a mini-retrospective of Malcolm Morley’s work, curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and borrowed entirely from the prestigious American-based Hall Art Foundation. Morley (born London 1931) was the first winner of the ever-controversial Turner Prize (apparently David Sylvester threatened to resign as a judge if Morley was not awarded the prize), but has lived in America since 1958 and visits these shores rarely. The last time he was here was in 2001, for a full-scale retrospective of his work at the Hayward Gallery. We haven’t seen enough of his art in this country over the past decade, so this show is a most welcome event.

Like almost everyone else in the insane world of musical theatre, I don’t know how to create a hit. This hasn’t prevented me from contributing to, even originating, some. Most of these successes have come about by happy accident and could so easily have been disasters or stillborn but for matters or events beyond my control or totally unexpected. I suppose I could arrogantly claim that there was usually some artistic merit to the shows that did make it (and little to those that eventually flopped) but there must be many writers with wonderful musical ideas out there who have never had that vital unpredictable break. Like Napoleon, we all need lucky generals.

Dame Edna is hanging up her tiara. From now on the ‘failed comedian’, as Edna calls her alter ego Barry Humphries, will have to make do without her. Her current tour includes a run at the London Palladium but after she’s graced the provinces, it’s adios, possums. Her last ever live show is currently bringing (I paraphrase her website) a spooky old resilience to people’s lives through laughter, prayer and a life-enhancing enzyme called Vitamin E —  that’s E for Edna. The truth is, Barry can’t face touring any more. He is 79 and sick to the back teeth of trendy hotels with their moody lighting and minimalist nonsense.