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Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Forging ahead

‘I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,’ the American artist David Smith told an interviewer in 1964. Tragically he was killed in a car crash the following year, and one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century sculptors was lost, at the height of his powers. (Of course, Providence may have known what it was up to — one of his friends claimed that Smith was planning a mile-high sculpture when he died, as well as things the size of railway trains. Such megalomania would have forfeited the human scale on which he habitually worked, and who’s to say whether that would have been a good idea?

Laura Gascoigne

Stone jewels

Sheffield seems to be in a constant state of redevelopment. Last time I went, the Millennium Galleries had just opened; now they’re already history, overtaken by newer developments that have turned the walk from the station into a rat maze of roadworks. But the maze is worth negotiating for the reward of Art at the Rockface, the Millennium Galleries’ latest exhibition. A joint venture with Norwich Castle Museum, Art at the Rockface is a literal blockbuster — an exhibition exploring art’s fascination with stone.

Roderic Dunnett

Picture this

The title of this absorbing, stylishly laid-out exhibition is possibly a misnomer. Extensive it is, but photo-journalism is largely excluded. Thus, except for Henryk Ross’s startling snapshots of a 1940s Polish ghetto and Emmy Andriesse’s stark conspectus of famine-ravaged wartime Amsterdam, plus uneven forays into Berlin or late Soviet Russia, the exhibition touches on politics mainly by inference. André Kertész’s tame Austro–Hungarian army snaps cannot match dramatic newsreel of key events — D-Day or Vietnam, Budapest 1956 or the fall of the Ceausescus — which featured in previous Barbican photographic exhibitions.

Tom Rosenthal

Mixed blessing | 11 November 2006

The subtitle ‘Artist, Author, Word and Image in Britain 1800–1920’ sets out the aim of one of those curator-inspired delvings into the vast stock of a great and fairly ancient museum. It repays several hours of study as the devil, as so often, is in the detail. The Fitzwilliam — unlike many other, larger art museums — is particularly strong in rare books and literary manuscripts, which provide some of the most pleasing exhibits. For those who find many of our museums a little po-faced, the visitor could do worse than start with the last section ‘Where’s the Joke?

Harry Mount

House of misery

You won’t find a grander monument to failed marriage than the Mount, the New England picture-book palace built by Edith Wharton a century ago. Wharton was a house and garden designer first, a novelist second. She wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897, almost a decade before she embarked on the novels. Belton House in Lincolnshire, a Christopher Wrenesque gem built in about 1685, was Wharton’s model for the Mount. With its accentuated centre bays and wings, dormer windows and cupola, Belton is the inspiration for the brown country-house symbol on motorway signs. Wharton kitted out this distinctly English house with French shutters and awnings to keep the Massachusetts sun — stronger than Lincolnshire’s — at bay.

Marcus Berkmann

Good time twangery

The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a remarkable variety of performers and writers, not all of whom customarily wear enormous hats. Instead both country and, in these islands, folk have become traditions on which people can draw while creating something new and distinctive of their own. Looking at my own playlist of the past few months, I see that I am starting to tend more to the folk side of things.

Ursula Buchan

Best in show

Just as embroiderers working in the late 11th century will not have appreciated the achievement that was the Bayeux Tapestry until they stood well back at the finish, so garden writers are usually too caught up with describing the details of individual gardens to consider the overall magnificence of ‘the English garden’. It was not until I really considered the matter, when writing a book on the subject, that I began fully to appreciate what a tremendous collective achievement it is. English domestic gardens (i.e., those connected to a house, however big) are as much a product of society and culture as of the individual taste and inclinations of their creators; influenced, to a very high degree, by patterns of thought and fashions at the time of creation.

James Delingpole

Growing pains

Before I go on, can I just ask: do any readers share my concern about the scrawny bum on the girl on the new Nokia billboard poster ad? For those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows a naked couple running, carefree, through the surf along a long, empty Atlantic-style beach. The chap’s backside looks absolutely fine but the girl’s one looks as if it has been doctored with Photoshop to make her buttocks seem less pert and attractive so as not to attract complaints. Well, I’m complaining. Meanwhile in TV world I have noticed that a horrid trend has become at least as annoyingly overdone as previous trends like home/garden makeover programmes and docusoaps.

Saturday

Michael Henderson

Czech mate

For a man who was told by Neville Cardus not to bother leaving Australia to find his true voice in Europe, Charles Mackerras has prospered to a degree that must have been unimaginable when he was growing up playing the oboe in Sydney. A knight of the realm, a Companion of Honour, and a recipient of the Royal Philharmonic Society gold medal, Mackerras was recently given a lifetime achievement award by Gramophone magazine in recognition of his services to the musical life of his adopted country. Few conductors have his range, and few are regarded more highly by musicians, in the concert hall and the opera house.

Andrew Lambirth

The painter as king

The first thing to be said is how good this exhibition looks upstairs in the main body of the National Gallery, hung in large, well-proportioned rooms, in natural light, rather than in the dungeons of the Sainsbury wing, where most temporary shows have been consigned in recent years. At last common sense has prevailed at the NG, and fabulous loan exhibitions may be seen in a favourable context. To have gathered together these 40 works by Velázquez — almost half his surviving output — is a remarkable achievement and not likely to be repeated during our lifetime. It is only right and proper that they are shown in the best setting.

Mark Glazebrook

Wonderfully mad

Everyone knows about the magnetism of Paris and New York in the annals of modern art, but Belgian painters such as Van de Velde, Toorop, Van Rysselberghe, Evenepoel, Khnopff, Rops, Magritte, Delvaux and Permeke are remarkably significant. The galleries of satellite cities such as Brussels (now only two and a quarter hours away from London by Eurostar) always repay study. On the other hand, actual works of groundbreaking art were often executed far away from large urban centres. They were produced in sleepier and more outlandish locations. Aix-en-Provence, Arles and Tahiti will conjure up the names of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Belgian port of Ostend is currently conjuring up the unique and outstanding figure of James Ensor (1860–1949).

Charles Spencer

Fresh ears

We were on holiday last week for half- term and, as so often when I have time off, I started to fret. What on earth was I going to write about in ‘Olden but golden’? Mrs Spencer gets very cross about this sort of thing. ‘If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, you can count yourself lucky,’ she said, before starting to grumble herself about her forthcoming ballet teacher’s exam. But my problem was a real one —though, to be fair, so was hers. The fact is that for the past month, instead of unearthing new delights, I’ve been continually indulging my obsession for classic Blue Note jazz, which I wrote about last month.

Simon Hoggart

Royle class

I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s Quest, featuring someone — from his accent, British — called Richard Quest, who fancies himself as a character and goes around barking at people. He also barks banalities at us. His topic was art. ‘Art. We all know it when we see it. But do we really understand it?

Saturday

Kate Chisholm

Reithian values

‘It’s a potential social menace of the first magnitude,’ declared John Reith, founding father of the BBC, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967. He was horrified by the way that his single broadcasting station, set up in 1922 by a group of techie engineers who were looking for ways to market their newly developed wireless sets, had expanded into a huge corporation with four radio and two television channels. Far too much time, he thought, was already being spent listening to a small Bakelite box. What would he make of our 24/7 access not just to radio and TV but also to the baffling new world of webcasts, podcasts, streaming and downloading?

Giannandrea Poesio

Mixed blessings

Labelling is an annoying trait. The practice, instigated by some highbrows for their own pleasure, has rapidly spread among dance-goers, generating irritating generalisations. ‘It’s post-modern stuff,’ commented a young thing last Monday at the end of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s 2006 D’un soir un jour. Whether the comment was intended as praise is difficult to say. What is certain, though, is that the dance student’s comment epitomised the arbitrary pigeon-holing that underscores today’s dance culture. After all, the debate on what is post-modern dance has been going on for more than two decades in the vain hope of finding an acceptable definition. And while the debate continues, some claim that post-modernism is either long dead or never existed.

Deborah Ross

Multiple choice

Right, here is a quiz for you. As I have said, again and again, I’m fed up with doing everything around here and, as no one at The Spectator has offered to help in any way at all, I think it’s only fair that you, the readers, do some of the work. Ready? Let’s go, then. So, there is this guy, Max (Russell Crowe), a rapacious London banker who has built an empire of greed trading bonds, and he has this uncle, Uncle Henry (Albert Finney), who dies and leaves him a beautiful estate and vineyard in Provence and so Max goes to Provence, intending to sell the beautiful estate for lots and lots of moolah — what does he care? — and then what happens to Max?

Robin Holloway

First impressions | 28 October 2006

‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case. Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in strength or Schmerz; and more, the bloom of the young animal in its pride: things soon disappearing in the no doubt deeper, more characteristic achievements of maturity, which can’t in themselves be regretted but don’t stifle a sigh for what’s lost. One composer notoriously never surpasses the tender brilliance of his early music: Mendelssohn.

Michael Tanner

Overwhelmed by Janacek

It is a tribute to various things, primarily to Janacek’s genius, that the new production of Jenufa by ENO is a triumph, an overwhelming experience, despite having some fundamental weaknesses. It is of the essence of the work that it takes place in a tightly knit, highly structured and small community, and that there is a feeling of claustrophobia about it almost from the start, reaching a peak or pit in Act II, one of the most hideously intense in opera. What does the director David Alden do?

Laura Gascoigne

Followers of fashion

The word ‘flâneur’ — from the French ‘flâner’, to stroll — is enjoying a comeback among a new generation of artists attracted to the idea that art is more about looking than doing. It was Baudelaire who first used it to describe the modern artist with his finger on the urban pulse — a ‘botanist of the sidewalk’ was how he defined him. The sidewalk in question being in Paris and the botanist being French, it’s a fair assumption that the principal objects of his naturalist interest were not the weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, but the millinery flowers adorning the hats of female passers-by.

Mary Wakefield

Beyond appearances

‘Hello, anybody here?’ The gate into Antony Gormley’s studio had slid mysteriously open as I approached, but there was no one behind it — just a courtyard, a row of trees and two metal figures. ‘Hello, hello?’ I walked across the yard up to a vast warehouse, and peered in through the double doors. Still no living people — instead, what looked like a group of aliens hovering silently in mid-air: life-size figures made of looped orbits of wire suspended from the ceiling, others, radiating metal spikes, dangling below; a brace of life-casts hanging by the neck but looking, nonetheless, pretty calm. In fact, the whole room was tremendously peaceful.