Arts feature

Last month there was rejoicing that Joshua Reynolds’s ‘Portrait of Omai’ had been saved for this country at a cost of £50 million. My hat was in the air with everyone else’s. But much less attention has been given to another artwork that is in need of rescuing, one of far greater national and artistic importance: an object that proclaims the birth of the Church of England – and is available for less than a tenth of the cost of ‘Omai’. It has been described as the ‘Holy Grail of Tudor tapestry’ ‘Saint Paul Directing the Burning of the Heathen Books’ by Pieter Coecke van Aelst is a monumental tapestry, nearly 20ft long and 12ft high. It is the sole survivor of a series of nine tapestries that Henry VIII commissioned in the mid-1530s on the life of Saint Paul.

Swift and sure, the guillotine blade came down on Russians in the West on 24 February last year, the day Russia invaded Ukraine. The logic was clear as concerned Putin loyalists; cutting them off from western gravy trains in the face of their dear leader’s grotesque aggression made some sense. They could bed down with the devil, so to speak, but not on our buck. So one doesn’t weep much over the relegation to Europe’s fringes of the likes of openly pro-Putin musicians such as pianist Denis Matsuev or the former LSO and Munich Philharmonic chief conductor Valery Gergiev. Then there’s the soprano Anna Netrebko, who, seen as being close to Putin, was sacked immediately by the Met when she didn’t condemn the Russian President fast enough.

More than 40 years on, every town still has them, wandering the streets with pale skin, more make-up than you can find in Superdrug, swathed in acres of black fabric. Goths, rather unexpectedly, have turned out to be the great survivors among pop subcultures. Others have risen and faded, but the goths – laughed at, ignored, dismissed – have endured, seeing their style and their musical tastes slowly incorporated by everyone else (there’s even a goth version of hip-hop, known as ‘horrorcore’). Goth was a fitting name for the music: overbearing and foreboding; delivering ecstasy through the building and releasing of tension rather than through major chords and primary colours; drawing on punk, Bowie, the Doors and the Stooges.

A documentary by Nick Broomfield is always to some extent about Nick Broomfield. He has cultivated an image as a gonzo filmmaker, striding into shot holding a boom microphone, headphones clamped over his ears, and in the politest possible way provoking chaos. ‘Unfortunately it comes very easily to me, to be slightly out of control,’ he confesses.

‘A small, black, repulsive picture’ is not how most people today would describe Zurbaran’s haunting painting of ‘Saint Francis in Meditation’ (1635-9) in the National Gallery. But that was how one Protestant critic of its acquisition in 1853 described this image of an Italian saint satirised three centuries earlier by the German Lutheran cleric Erasmus Alber in his Koran of the Franciscans. Alber chose his title advisedly, for one of this peacemaking saint’s legendary acts of diplomacy was initiating an interfaith dialogue with the Muslim Sultan of Egypt, al-Malik al-Kamil. In 1219, so the story goes, Francis crossed to Damietta, then under siege by troops of the Fifth Crusade, slipped unarmed into the city and was arrested and brought before the Sultan.

In 1937, the Parisian communist newspaper Ce soir sent a 28-year-old would-be filmmaker on an unpromising first assignment. Henri Cartier-Bresson was to take photographs of the British coronation, an event of limited appeal either to Ce soir’s readers or to Cartier-Bresson himself. But on the streets of London, he discovered what would become his signature approach. Two Brylcreemed lads in their best suits, hoisting their girlfriends on to their shoulders for a better view He would turn away from the King, the procession, the organised magnificence, and focus solely on the crowds, looking for some fleeting moment in which the meaning of the day was concentrated.

In 1963 two Hamlets went into production: one directed by Laurence Olivier, the other by John Gielgud. The situation had been engineered by Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole. The story goes that while shooting the film Becket, Burton and O’Toole had decided they should each play the Prince under either Olivier or Gielgud and they tossed a coin over who would get which director. O’Toole got Olivier; Burton got Gielgud. Both productions – booze-drenched affairs – went ahead, but the Hamlet that became a showbiz legend was Burton’s doomed Dane. The production made a fortune; it was probably the most profitable Shakespeare ever staged Burton looked up to Gielgud.

Criss-crosses, everywhere: 300 objects covered in them. The exhausting range and depth of the world’s most famous pattern is on full display at the V&A Dundee’s vast new exhibition. Tartan is a more genuine emblem of Scottish nationhood than the famous deep-fried Mars bar, which no one really eats. But it’s not uniquely Scottish. Plaid has been worn across western Europe for hundreds of years, then was claimed by Scotland as the symbol of the nation, now recognised the world over. It’s even a political weapon. In the recent SNP leadership election, the outsider Ash Regan wore practically nothing but the fabric. Ian Blackford has in the past unnerved many a viewer when he bent down in his kilt to lay a wreath at the Cenotaph.

When Sir Christopher Wren’s servant went to rouse his master from an afternoon nap on 25 February 1723, and found that the old man would never wake again, the reputation of the nation’s greatest architect was already on the wane. He had walked away from St Paul’s in a fit of pique, with the cathedral still unfinished. He had been sacked from the royal post he held for nearly half a century, the surveyor-generalship of the king’s works. And the tide of taste was turning against his brand of restrained baroque in favour of a more rigid Palladianism. In old age he used to grumble that he wished he had stuck to medicine, one of his early interests, instead of dabbling in architecture: then he would have made some real money, he said.

The centrepiece of the exhibition at Britain’s only contemporary art gallery in a prison is an installation, consisting of two broken, stained armchairs. They’ve been placed face-to-face, as if for a therapy session. Elsewhere there are silkscreen prints and paintings. This outbuilding-cum-art studio and gallery is where prisoners are also taught dry-point etching – surprising given the needles involved, but I am assured that all potential weapons are accounted for at the end of each session. ‘For two hours a week I come here and learn new skills,’ explains the silkscreen artist and inmate of HMP Grendon. ‘I get completely absorbed in printmaking. I feel freer here than any other time in prison. I’ve recaptured my childhood love for art.

Conjure up before your mind a vision of ‘Dickensian’ London, and as likely as not you will see in your imagination a street filled with yellow fog, dimly illuminated by a gas-lit street lamp. The classic ‘pea-souper’ was caused by a natural winter fog in the Thames basin, turned yellow by the coal fires and industrial chimneys of the Victorian city and held in place for days by the phenomenon of ‘temperature inversion’, when a layer of warmer air traps the cold, damp and increasingly impenetrable atmospheric mix in the streets below.

If there’s a phrase that captures the frantic energy of the modern British B-movie, it’s the concept of the ‘heart attack shoot’. And Rhys Frake-Waterfield knows more about it than most. ‘It’s not unusual to spend more than 12 hours on set,’ says the happy-go-lucky thirtysomething director during a short break from promoting his new low-budget slasher. The breakneck pace means that the shooting of an entire feature can be wrapped up in weeks, thus ensuring the project is as cheap as possible. Cutting corners is a necessity. ‘On Winnie the Pooh, we tried to save time by not reshooting any scenes,’ he says. ‘Unless the actors made a really glaring mistake, we would just stick with the first take.

I am on the Inspector Morse walking tour in Oxford, which is led by a donnish man called Alastair. We look like the funeral cortege of a man whose death is under investigation. Oxford is a major character in Morse. I think of it as the antagonist. There is something very cold about the city, and unexpressed. Oxford’s novels are few – elves, talking lions, a bit of class. Its subconscious is rarely exposed: crime fiction must do it.  Three series grew out of Colin Dexter’s 13 novels: Inspector Morse (1987-2000); Lewis (2006-2015), in which Morse is a spectral presence, which suits him (he would be a good ghost); and Endeavour, the prequel (2012-23), which ended last week.

Russia is not the only country erasing Ukraine’s cultural heritage. Ukraine itself has been demolishing its own public statues and murals for years. Before the war, in 2015, our parliament passed legislation that criminalised communist propaganda. ‘Decommunisation’ was a deceptively simple idea: it started with the removal of our 1,300 Lenins and a few other revolutionary figures. Since the invasion, even monuments with complex histories have been removed. In Odessa, a statue of the city’s founder Catherine the Great was toppled. In Dnipro, seven monuments were torn down, including those to writer Maxim Gorky, 18th-century scientist Mikhail Lomonosov and poet Pushkin. Two months ago, a Soviet monument to the soldier Alexander Matrosov in Dnipro was also dismantled.

Labyrinth: Knossos, Myth & Reality at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford does not take the idea of a labyrinth too literally. It does not lead you through galleries to dead ends, nor are you left searching, like Theseus, for a ball of thread to find your way out again. The real enigma of the exhibition revolves around the Bronze Age civilisation at its heart. The Minoans, who occupied Crete between about 3,000 and 1,100 BC, remain some of the most mystifying people ever to have been stumbled upon in modern times. It is uncertain where they came from, what they believed, how they were governed and why they chose to paint things the colours they did in their dynamic works of art. They traded widely, including with Egypt, but the direction of cultural influence is not always clear.

In a remarkable photograph by Benjamin Stone, from around 1899, six men in breeches of a criss-cross floral pattern hold up great reindeer antlers. (Carbon dating of these objects produced the year 1066, plus or minus 80.) A man in a bowler hat holds a squeeze box and on the right a serious-faced boy stands with a hobby-horse head emerging from the cloth that swathes him. The photograph features in the exhibition Making Mischief: Folk Costume in Britain. It shows the Abbots Bromley horn dance, performed annually on the Monday after Old St Bartholomew’s Day (4 September). Never mind that the breeches were made in the 1880s by Mrs J. Manley Lowe, wife of the vicar of this Staffordshire parish.

Has any artist ever painted fewer pictures than Johannes Vermeer? At the last authenticated count there were 37 still in existence, and five more are known from references in early sources. With allowance for wastage and disappearance historians estimate that he produced no more than 50, a rate of two a year over a career spanning two decades. So when 28 are assembled in one exhibition, as currently at the Rijksmuseum, it counts as a blockbuster. Astonishingly, this is the museum’s first Vermeer exhibition. Holland’s national gallery has not always valued its most popular master: when it opened in 1885, the only Vermeer on show, ‘Woman in Blue Reading a Letter’ (c.1663-64), was a loan.

You may think that roses have always symbolised courteous romance, but art history describes their smuttier private life. Consider the pouting red blooms in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s ‘Venus Verticordia’, which the art critic John Ruskin considered so obscene that he refused to continue his friendship with the painter. Ruskin admired the execution when he first saw ‘Venus Verticordia’ in Rossetti’s studio in 1865, but later reviled the crude suggestiveness. ‘I purposely used the word “wonderfully” painted about those flowers,’ he later wrote to Rossetti with deep concern. ‘They were wonderful to me, in their realism; awful – I can use no other word – in their coarseness.’ Ruskin’s anxiety reflected a common understanding of the red rose as a symbol of lust.

Most former punks end up touring the nostalgia circuit or cropping up at conventions. Not Christopher John Millar, aka Rat Scabies. When Scabies hit middle age, the legendary drummer with the Damned began to hunt for the Holy Grail. ‘We all started off criticising government and I’ve ended up looking for pixies,’ explains Scabies. In 2005, the music journalist Christopher Dawes wrote a rollicking account of a trip he took with Scabies to the epicentre of it all, Rennes-le-Château, a tiny village atop a rock overlooking the River Aude in the Languedoc. Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail has taken its place as a minor gonzo classic. Dawes lived across the road from Scabies in Brentford and gradually got drawn into a world of odd theories and strange coincidences.

When I first saw ‘The Triumph of Death’ (1562-63), by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the painting throbbed: this land was sick, smothered in smoke; the fires on the horizon had been burning for ever, turning earth into dirt, air into haze. All was dull, lethargic, ill. When I saw the painting again some years later, the smoke had cleared. Patches of green pushed up from the canvas; the peasantry’s clothes were suddenly bright; the sun appeared to exist. In its new clarity, some of the painting’s jaded horror had been replaced by a sort of comedy. The work had been restored, but something had been lost.