Arts feature

If you went on holiday to Italy this year, you may have come back with a plate, a mug or a jug — an item or two of the painted pottery still handmade (at least sometimes) by craftsmen and women, mostly in Umbria, but also in the Marche, and which you can see in the shops in Siena and Florence and in other places in Tuscany. If you went on holiday to Italy this year, you may have come back with a plate, a mug or a jug — an item or two of the painted pottery still handmade (at least sometimes) by craftsmen and women, mostly in Umbria, but also in the Marche, and which you can see in the shops in Siena and Florence and in other places in Tuscany.

As she prepares for the role of Mrs Malaprop, Penelope Keith talks to Lloyd Evans, who finds her decisive, cheerful, pragmatic and modest, with a tendency to break into fits of unexpected giggles A winter off. That’s what Penelope Keith had planned for this year. But when an opportunity arrived to play Mrs Malaprop in Sheridan’s The Rivals she couldn’t turn it down. ‘It’s one of the great women’s parts so I thought I must have a bash at that.’ We meet in a compact, slightly unloved dressing-room in the Theatre Royal, Brighton, where she sits in light-brown slacks and a soft-pink cardigan with her back to a bright mirror festooned with good luck cards. An assistant brings me a cup of coffee and Keith instantly spots that I have nowhere to put it.

How will the arts world plug the funding gap? Igor Toronyi-Lalic investigates It’s an idea so simple in concept, so elegant in execution, so bursting with potential, that you kick yourself for not thinking of it yourself. ‘You put your project here,’ explains 28-year-old solicitor and budding internet entrepreneur Michael Troughton, scrolling down the front page of his flash new website. ‘And you put your money there.’ Even his cat comes to investigate. What Troughton is describing is WeFund.co.uk, the first British attempt to apply crowdfunding to arts financing. Barack Obama used crowdfunding for his 2008 presidential bid — that is, asking a lot of people to give a small amount of money.

James Rhodes is being hailed as one of Britain’s most exciting new musicians, and has just signed a six-album deal. Here, he describes his journey from psychiatric hospital to concert hall So I’m sitting in what’s laughably called the Serenity Garden at a London psychiatric hospital that shall remain nameless, and one of the patients approaches me quietly and asks me what I do. Not what I’m locked up for (psych hospital etiquette forbids it), but what I do. She’s cute in an anorexic, self-harming kind of way, so I tell her that I play the piano. ‘What, like in a band?’ she asks, remarkably unslurred by meds. ‘No,’ I say. ‘Just me. I’m a concert pianist. Classical shit.’ ‘Wow! Seriously?

In an upstairs room in an unfrequented corner of Zurich’s Kunsthaus, there is a portrait of one of the unsung heroes of modern art. In an upstairs room in an unfrequented corner of Zurich’s Kunsthaus, there is a portrait of one of the unsung heroes of modern art. Wilhelm Wartmann was the first director of this splendid gallery, and in the autumn of 1932 he mounted the first major retrospective of the work of Pablo Picasso. This autumn, to celebrate its centenary, the Kunsthaus is mounting the same show. It’s a unique chance to see how the world saw Picasso at his peak — and how Picasso saw Picasso — for this groundbreaking exhibition was curated by the artist himself.

Andrew Lambirth finds the National Gallery’s new exhibition on Canaletto and his contemporaries both illuminating and enjoyable Giovanni Antonio Canal (1697–1768), better known as Canaletto, is a safe bet and a crowd-pleaser, and the weary critic is entitled to ask — not another Canaletto show? What can there be left to say? But note the exhibition title — Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals. Venice comes first, the great tourist trap herself, kingdom of the sea and romance-magnet, and in the placing of the words the unashamed popularism of the show emerges. Or so the cynic might think.

On the southern edge of Manchester, a few miles from the airport, there is a commuter town where the Victorian novel remains very much alive. This year Knutsford celebrates the bicentenary of its most famous daughter, who immortalised this ‘dear little town’ in several of her finest stories. More than 150 years after it first appeared, in weekly instalments in Dickens’s Household Words, Cranford remains Mrs Gaskell’s most enduring creation. And in these streets you can still trace the outline of the world that she created. Elizabeth Gaskell was born in 1810, in Chelsea, the daughter of a Unitarian minister. Her mother died when she was a few months old, and Elizabeth was packed off to an aunt in Knutsford.

Julian Perry (born 1960) paints images of genuine topicality in an immaculate high-definition realist style. Julian Perry (born 1960) paints images of genuine topicality in an immaculate high-definition realist style. His last show in 2007 dealt with the allotment sheds bulldozed by the relentless encroachment of the Olympic site. Since then he has been painting pictures of coastal erosion, visiting locations around England and composing hallucinatory images of deracination and loss. ‘Clifftop with Fridge Freezers’ was one of the first of the new series. I asked him to describe the subject.

Britain’s architects can produce the best designs in the world, says Amanda Baillieu. So why aren’t any on display at the Venice Architecture Biennale? Something has gone very wrong for the British at the Venice Architecture Biennale. This three-month event may play second fiddle to the older and larger Art Biennale, but for architects it is meant to be the only festival where they can let rip, free from the restraints of budgets, planning and bureaucracy. They come to gossip, to see what their rivals are up to and schmooze clients. Even Norman Foster has dropped by to talk up his firm’s plan for Hong Kong’s new £1.8 billion arts district. Some 30 countries show their wares in national pavilions, slugging it out for punters and prizes.

Despite the economic gloom, ENO’s John Berry is optimistic about the future of opera Opera director David Alden said in a recent interview, ‘Opera is alive, popular — and hot.’ I agree. Opera is very much in the public eye and thriving in UK opera houses, cinemas and performing arts centres. However, as we wait to see the outcome of the coalition’s spending review, the arts community has been vocal about its concerns and fears. London is not Munich or Vienna where public subsidy for the arts is a way of life and debated on the same level of necessity as health and education. Yet Britain is revered worldwide for the energy and quality of its performing arts institutions.

New York is in the grip of memorial mania, writes Tiffany Jenkins In early 1991, the construction of a federal office building in lower Manhattan was halted after an unexpected discovery. Underneath the ground, covered by a patina of concrete and steel, was the coffin of a colonial-era African. It was not alone. Construction work was halted, archaeologists called in, and it was soon established that the site was a major burial ground from the 17th and 18th centuries. As many as 15,000 to 20,000 black men, women and children were buried there, by the historians’ count, making this one of the most important archaeological finds in all America. The significance was not lost on New York’s people or its authorities.