More from Arts

Saturday

Richard Cork

Private passion

Right until the end of his life, Euan Uglow remained one of the most elusive English painters. An intensely private man, known only to a small circle of devoted artists, critics, models, collectors and former students, he disliked promotional exposure and the celebrity cult. His reputation has always been high, but it was largely confined to those familiar with his work from group exhibitions or visits to his studio. Uglow saw no reason to submit himself to the public gaze. Utterly absorbed in his own work, he thrived on solitude and the quiet life. But interest in his achievement keeps on growing. Now that figurative painting is no longer regarded as a hopelessly obsolete pursuit, his steadfast commitment to working from life is arousing a great deal of renewed curiosity.

Deborah Ross

Wishy washy

Water opens with a beautiful little Indian girl sitting on the back of a cart joyously chewing on sugar cane. She has luscious hair, pinchable cheeks, dark eyes, a nose-ring and tinkling silver anklets. (So cute; Madonna would kill for her.) A middle-aged man is on the cart, too, lying on his back and groaning. He is her husband and he dies. We don’t know how long she has been married for, or even if she’s had time to register that she is actually married, but now she is a widow and, as her father tells her, she must now lead a widow’s life. ‘For how long?’ she asks. She is eight years old. She has no idea that she is about to be cast off into the most excruciating, lifelong limbo.

James Delingpole

History distorted

Very sadly I couldn’t get hold of Sea of Fire (BBC2, Friday), the (reportedly superb) drama documentary about the destruction of HMS Coventry in the Falklands War, because tapes weren’t available till just before broadcast. But not to worry. I think I can still tell you with some confidence how it went. The first thing I know is that it was artfully shot, beautifully acted, had an authoritative voiceover and looked very realistic, for these BBC drama docs always are. The second thing I know is that, also like all BBC exercises in this vein, it made you feel dreadfully ashamed to be British.

Saturday

Petroc Trelawny

‘The name is Elder, not Elgar’

A large portrait of Mark Elder hangs backstage at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. It’s not a flattering representation; in it the Hallé’s music director looks tired, haggard, old. Interestingly, the picture is positioned so that the conductor doesn’t have to go anywhere near it as he passes through the corridors from his dressing room to the concert platform. On 2 June, the 150th anniversary of Edward Elgar’s birth, Elder turns 60. He could pass for a man 15 years younger. We meet outside his north London home. I arrive early, and he catches me loitering round the corner as he marches down the street after a haircut.

Mary Wakefield

Inspiration to young artists

How do you react to the news that Kay Hartenstein Saatchi, ex-wife of Charles, the woman who helped to discover (or invent) the original Brit Art brat pack, is putting on a exhibition of London’s best young artists this week? Perhaps your eyes have already begun to widen with excitement? Perhaps you feel a sudden predatory stillness, as I did, as greed, the 21st-century’s answer to aesthetic appreciation, steals across your soul? Well, then, if you’d visited the One One One gallery in London’s West End last Friday as the show, Anticipation, was being hung, you might have felt, as I did, a little chastened by the almost alarming absence of commercialism.

Andrew Lambirth

Destroying the past

Futurism was originally an Italian manifestation in art and literature, a cult of speed and movement, triumphantly urban and dynamic, a sort of souped-up Cubism, which lasted from 1909 until its deathblow in the first world war and final dissolution in the 1920s. It was pretty much invented by the poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876–1944), who liked to call himself ‘the caffeine of Europe’, and was actor-manager and travelling salesman for the group. The first international agent provocateur of modern art, expert promoter and publicist, he was for ever on the road organising confrontational meetings masquerading as art and guaranteed to grab the headlines.

Robin Holloway

Talent spotting

An officially commissioned company history: recipe for yawns! Most such hardly amount to more than an exercise in corporate piety with surreptitious window-dressing. But let me ‘declare an interest’ (which I’ll hope to convey and share). Boosey & Hawkes have been my publisher for even longer than I’ve been writing Spectator columns — 32 and 19 years respectively.

Lloyd Evans

Surtitle fatigue

Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like glimpsing the Titanic from a bathoscope. The new seating is supposed to make the Barbican’s overlarge space feel more like a theatre and less like the Nuremberg stadium. But even with fewer seats, the stage is still as large as an aircraft hangar.

Michael Tanner

Laughter unbecoming

The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic operations would soon realise. There is the obsession with cardboard boxes — in the Ring the end of the world consisted of piles of them collapsing; here, instead of Banquo’s ghost, we get a box with a smiley painted on it, jerking on to the stage and frightening Macbeth, as it would. When the curtain falls on that scene, a curtain is lowered inscribed with a much larger smiley.

Kate Chisholm

End of the world

It’s your last chance this afternoon to catch one of the best programmes on Radio Four, guaranteed to come up each week with something a bit different: an unusual voice or opinion or insight. For the last couple of years it’s been infuriatingly easy to miss, broadcast at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon when you’re either too exhausted by a week’s worth of chores to listen to anything other than Mantovani (or Monteverdi, depending on your taste) or too busy revving up for a night out to pay attention to something so densely packed with information.

Saturday

Mark Fisher

Counting the cost

An estimated one in three of the world’s six billion people will watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. How will Britain fare in that global spotlight? Having committed more than £600 million to prepare our athletes and competitors, there’s not much more that the government can do on the haul-of-medals front. The Cultural Olympiad, which will present the best of our arts and culture, is another matter. Undoubtedly, Britain has some of the best museums and galleries, concert halls and theatres, and some of the finest artists in the world, so ours should, as Tessa Jowell hopes, ‘be better than any Cultural Olympiad that has ever been before’.

Andrew Lambirth

Knight vision

Sir Peter Blake is much in demand. A popular figure since he rose to fame with his unforgettable design for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album (1967), he has long been a spokesman for his generation and for the arts. His knighthood in 2002 brought a whole host of new requests and obligations, much of it figurehead stuff: his name on lists of patrons, or as the chairman of selection committees. To take these things seriously is time-consuming, and Blake has to be rigorous about preserving his hours in the studio, where typically he is busy on a number of projects at once. On the eve of a retrospective of his paintings at Tate Liverpool (29 June–23 September) I visited him in his west London studio, which is a treasure-house of objects and art.

Martin Gayford

Scraps of Van Goghiana

Having spent a chunk of my life living, mentally, in 1888 with Vincent van Gogh in Arles I find that I still have not completely left that place. The book is published, the paperback is out, my surrogate literary life is in another country and a different time — with John Constable and his wife-to-be in early 19th-century England. But still I find my attention sometimes wandering back to his little Yellow House in that dusty Provençal town. Here, then, are two little addenda to the story, scraps of Van Goghiana that have occurred to me since the text was finally proofread and published. One concerns the only meal that, according to the historical record, Vincent ever cooked.

Mark Glazebrook

Can artists save the planet?

Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the historic painting genre — a genre which reminds us of our mortality on the occasions when it includes the depiction of a human skull. The two words may also suggest sentences such as ‘Despite man’s destructive tendencies there’s still life on planet earth but we can’t take it for granted.’ Whether or not there is a double meaning here, the Sharjah theme is serious, responsible, apt and perfectly timed.

Susan Moore

Aiming high and wide

‘It is a compelling moment in the art world,’ says Robin Woodhead, Sotheby’s executive vice president and chief executive, Europe and Asia. ‘There has been a fundamental change in the market worldwide. Growing numbers of people have begun to take an interest in art, and we see continuing effective economies and new emerging markets — China, Russia, India — creating wealth on a scale that is unprecedented.’ He adds, ‘History tells us that the nouveau riche inevitably acquire works of art as symbols of wealth, power and culture.’ So do his company accounts.

Lloyd Evans

Leave well alone

Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a moss-encrusted tombstone. Interesting choice. And inside the mausoleum there’s a new version of an ancient war film by Powell and Pressburger. I love the opening premise of this movie but I’m less keen on the rest of it. A doomed airman falls in love with a radio-controller just as she’s attempting to steer his plane to safety. ‘I love you, June,’ he gushes; ‘you’re life and I’m leaving you.

Michael Tanner

Vintage quality

Second Movement: Triple Bill; Angela Gheorghiu; Pelléas et Mélisande Second Movement is a young opera company which gives singers who have graduated from their college but are not yet on the opera house circuit a chance to demonstrate their gifts, and in unusual repertoire. Since standards at Second Movement are evidently very high, it also gives enterprising opera goers, supposing they manage to spot one of the company’s rare and unobtrusive adverts, an opportunity to see things they might easily spend a lifetime without encountering. Last week, in the London Film Studios in Mercer Street, there was a triple bill, all of which would have been news to almost anyone.

James Delingpole

Trouble and strife

There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people, surfing the net, idly contemplating, searching Amazon to see whether there are any more relevant research books you haven’t yet bought. I’ve made it sound almost fun but the reason it’s not is that while all this is going on you feel terrible.

Kate Chisholm

Frank exchanges

You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the boy now in jail because he was the leader of the gang who brutally killed Mary-Ann Lenehan. (She bled to death from 40 stab wounds after being sexually assaulted; her friend survived, but only just.) There was a chilling moment as Robinson probed and needled, trying to get out of him something more than the usual bland equivocation.

Saturday

Mary Wakefield

The thinking man’s punk

Sometimes you absolutely know, beyond the gentlest breath of a doubt, that you’re not going to like a person; something you’ve heard, or read about them, has tipped you over into a flinty conviction that they’re not your type. I took a preconception of this sort with me to meet the cult film-maker Julien Temple. He’ll be arrogant, I thought, full of humourless guff about rock festivals and his days documenting the lives of the Sex Pistols (Sex Pistols Number 1 [1977], The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle [1980] and The Filth and the Fury [2000] — though all three films were good).