More from Arts

Saturday

Susan Moore

Crisis of confidence

What do you find at the world’s great antiques fairs these days? The answer, increasingly, is modern and contemporary art. Few will lament the disappearance of doleful, second-rate period furniture in favour of Art Deco and post-war design, or the introduction of major international art galleries offering the work of 20th-century masters. But as growing numbers of dealers adjust their stock in a bid to attract a new generation of buyers — not always with conviction or success — it seems that the antiques trade is in danger of shooting itself in the foot. It is evident that the trade is suffering a crisis of confidence. Heaven knows, the business is beleaguered — under siege by both changing tastes and by the ever-growing retail might of the auction-houses.

Mark Fisher

Eastern promise

There was a time when Chinese artists walked on eggshells for fear of offending the old men of power in Beijing. Now here, in the China Pavilion that is part of the Liverpool Biennale Fringe (until 26 November), one artist, Weng Peijun (pronounced Weng Fen), is building installations from eggshells. His satirical work ‘The Triumphal Arch’ depicts the controversial building of the Three Gorges Dam across the Yangtze River, the largest hydroelectric scheme in the world, five times the size of the Hoover Dam. More than a million people are being forcibly relocated; agriculture, fisheries and wildlife are being destroyed.

Andrew Lambirth

Fresh and wild

Roger Hilton (1911–75) is one of our greatest abstract painters, an artist associated with the St Ives School (he lived in Cornwall for the last 10 years of his life, and visited regularly for a decade before that) whose work overleaps constraining categories. Abstract yes, but also profoundly figurative — he was one of the finest draughtsmen of the nude in the postwar period and his paintings more often than not make close reference to the human body. He was the most European artist of his generation and was the last major painter not to be influenced by the new wave of Americans whose work was flooding Britain.

Martin Gayford

Hug a hoodie and Gilbert & George

I know that just now people are queuing up to propose new policies to the leader of the opposition — wind turbines, green taxes and what not — but even so I have a modest proposal for the David Cameron reform agenda. Now that he has encouraged the hugging of hoodies and smiled on single-sex partnerships, I suggest that he embrace another group traditionally loathed and reviled by some of those who count themselves natural conservatives, with both upper and lower case ‘c’. I mean, of course, contemporary artists. This is an ideal Cameron issue. If he were to seize the high ground of the art world, he would at once left-foot the Labour party, and infuriate those of his own party he wishes to annoy. He would also, not a negligible consideration, be right.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Common touch

It’s difficult to believe that the golden boy of British art — as David Hockney remained for so many years — now has more than half a century of work behind him, or that he will celebrate his 70th birthday next summer. His technical versatility and immense skilfulness have seen him through many different guises along the short path from faux-naïf to sophisticate, including print-maker, photographer and set-designer, inspired draughtsman and impassioned theorist, but it is as a painter that he will surely be judged, when the verdict of posterity eventually arrives. And as a painter, there is a curious emptiness at the heart of his endeavour. In spite of all the tricks and the supreme dexterity, there is a lack of feeling, of human understanding to his art.

Alan Powers

Ignoring fossil fuels

Earlier this year, a book appeared celebrating the first ten years of the Stirling Prize for architecture. Back in 1996, recession was only just ending and the National Lottery just beginning. It was the end of a bleak time for architects, doubly afflicted by the criticisms of the Prince of Wales. One unexpected benefit of the Prince’s attentions, however, was that the public was eager for stories about architecture, and the Stirling Prize managed to change these from bad news to good. A building that wins will always be a hostage, and this year, for the first time, the glitter looks a little tarnished in places.

Tiffany Jenkins

Keep out of politics

‘Museums are the new United Nations.’ So says Jack Loman, the director of the Museum of London. He is one of many professionals, and increasingly policymakers, calling on cultural institutions to act as instruments of foreign policy. Tessa Jowell, Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, is enthusiastic about this mission and is currently floating it as a new strategy. A recently appointed programme manager has been working on the viability of the idea for the DCMS, undeterred, it seems, by the hostility towards Labour’s foreign policy and the criticism of its cultural policy enacted to date. Many think government foreign policy can only benefit from this approach.

Michael Tanner

Golden Gilda

Opera North’s home at the Grand Theatre Leeds now boasts a resplendent auditorium, with lacquered walls and raked stalls, so that I have now finally seen the stage; and above all greatly improved acoustics. More remains to be done, as the news release grimly informs us, stressing that Phase II of the plan ‘will have a heavy emphasis on maximising the public access to and enjoyment and interpretation of the theatre’s heritage environment’, and thereby incidentally reminding us how much of the £21 million already spent has found its way into the pockets of consultants. The new era has been launched with a production of the most ebullient and tuneful of Verdi’s tragedies, Rigoletto, by Charles Edwards.

Deborah Ross

Over the top

From its very opening scene this film is exquisitely, lavishly gorgeous and on and on it goes, being exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous — oh, the frocks, the shoes, the petit fours, the piled-high candies! — until you start thinking, enough with the exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous already. How much exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous can a movie-goer be expected to take? Let’s see some heads getting chopped off! But on and on it goes — oh, the fountains, the chandeliers, the oak-lined vistas, the sumptuous, gilded rooms ...honestly, at certain points you feel as if you’re being beaten to death by a late 18th-century copy of Hello! magazine.

Simon Hoggart

Altered images

At the Cheltenham Festival last week, Professor John Sutherland was on a panel discussing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea — which on this occasion won the mock-Booker prize for 1966, defeating The Jewel in the Crown, The Comedians and The Magus. Prof. Sutherland made the point that a prequel like WSS can exist because the author may assume in her readers a working knowledge of any book as central to the canon as Jane Eyre. Yet it also casts its modern influence back into the earlier novel. Whereas in Jane Eyre the first Mrs Rochester is fat, ugly and crazed, in WSS she has to be gorgeous and entrancing, for why else would he have married her?

Ariane Bankes

The witching hour

Twilight, the witching hour — that tantalising moment on the cusp of day and night when everything seems strange, poignant and full of possibilities. It is a gift to the photographer, whose raw material is light: its shifting subtleties, its evanescence, its poetic potential. The V&A has collected in this exhibition the work of eight contemporary photographers from around the world who have made twilight their subject. Like all the best ideas it seems strikingly obvious, yet it has apparently not been done before. Just off the bustle of the V&A’s entrance foyer, the exhibition offers a twilight zone, an area of stillness suffused with dim blue light.

Henrietta Bredin

‘There are no barriers’

There are many who might consider it an absolute crime that someone who would look so entirely delectable in a dirndl is instead about to hit the stage of the London Palladium draped from head to toe in a habit and wimple. Lesley Garrett, however, is so thrilled that she can barely contain herself. Other small girls growing up — as millions of us did — with the film of The Sound of Music spooling like an ever-present backing track to our lives might have felt a particular affinity with the rebellious Maria, the confused teenage Liesl or even the obnoxiously winsome Gretl. Not Lesley. Was she surprised to be asked to take on the role of the Mother Abbess? ‘I wasn’t asked — I volunteered.

Saturday

Rosamund Pike

Journey of the soul

It is a Monday morning, after a week’s run of Summer and Smoke, and following the example of Tennessee Williams I have just brewed myself a coffee pot of liquid dynamite, and sitting down immediately after breakfast I am hoping its pressure on my heart will stimulate this article. Tennessee Williams was a proud punisher of his heart and, if I wished to follow his example to the letter, I would just now be preparing myself a little intramuscular injection of a secret formula concocted by my doctor. While I would still hate the business of pushing a needle into my skin, the immediate rush of creative energy, combined with the calming effect of subsequent pills and a single Martini, would give me the necessary strength.

Andrew Lambirth

Masterpieces in miniature

Regular readers of this column will be aware that I champion small exhibitions which combine judicious selection with sufficient breadth to give an adequate representation of the artist under discussion. With Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610) there is no choice: the fullest retrospective must needs be a small exhibition. An artist who worked slowly, suffered from depression and died young, his total output was 34 paintings. Thirty of these have been gathered together at Dulwich, supported by a lavish publication from Paul Holberton Publishing (£35 hardback and £22.50 soft cover), which is the first decent book on Elsheimer in English for some 30 years.

Roderick Conway-Morris

An ancient modernist

In 1944 an Allied bomb fell into the circular courtyard of the ancient Roman-inspired house that Andrea Mantegna had built for himself in Mantua, bouncing off its frescoed frieze. It failed to detonate. On 11 March of the same year, another landed on the Eremitani church in Padua, blowing the Ovetari chapel, whose walls were decorated with the precocious young Mantegna’s first fresco cycles, to smithereens. By then the only other surviving monumental work executed by the artist in Padua was the San Zeno altarpiece, destined from the beginning for Verona. It was delivered there on the eve of his departure for Mantua, where, from 1460 until his death in 1506, he was to stay as court painter to the Gonzagas.

Mark Glazebrook

Carr’s coup

Dawson Carr is the approachable but authoritative curator of Later Italian and Spanish Painting at the National Gallery. Talking to him you soon sense a total engagement with his work. He was born in Miami and worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 16 years. Armed with a tape recorder I met him mid-morning in a quiet corner of the Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing restaurant. I knew that he had studied stage design and written a book on Mantegna. He also curated the National Gallery’s recent show of late Caravaggios, an event which attracted a quarter of a million visitors. It is surely a crowning moment in his career that he is currently the curator of the major Velázquez exhibition which opens on Wednesday — the first ever to be held in Britain.

Giannandrea Poesio

Soggy in the corps

There are many different ways to start a ballet season, but an artistically disjointed triple bill is not the ideal one. Even on paper the Royal Ballet’s opening programme for 2006/7 looks awkward, and the rationale behind joining Balanchine’s Violin Concerto (1972), Jirí Kyliàn’s Sinfonietta (1978) and Glen Tetley’s Voluntaries (1973) remains unclear. Little matters if each work boasts an important, non-dance-specific score — something that prompted the most welcome presence of Antonio Pappano in the pit. And little matters when each of the three works represents a significant moment in late 20th-century ballet history. But to come across as successfully woven, a mixed programme requires much stronger artistic, cultural and stylistic links.

Marcus Berkmann

Enjoy it while it lasts

My friend Mitch rings up. ‘Guess what my album of the year is?’ He is trying to fool me into suggesting Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat, for Mitch and I are both Steely Danoraks of long standing. But I know he was a little disappointed by the album, and he knows I wasn’t. I can’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Don’t know,’ I say. ‘What is your album of the year?’ ‘The Lily Allen album.’ I am dumbfounded. Mitch is staring down the barrel of 50. Lily Allen could be his daughter or, at the very least, the louche older girlfriend of one of his sons. Which, of course, is the explanation.

Michael Tanner

Trivial brilliance

Each time I see Shostakovich’s once controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk I am impressed by what brilliant performances it seems to incite, fascinated by it dramatically and musically, but left unsatisfied by its unevenness and what I think is finally its incoherence. As far as productions go, it is hard to imagine that any could be more compelling than Richard Jones’s at the Royal Opera, and what is amazing is that it has improved considerably since its triumphant first run in 2004. There are probably very few operas which so suit Jones’s temperament, offering him every opportunity to juxtapose the hideous and the tender, the grotesque and the painful, high spirits and terminal torpor.

Peter Phillips

Colour coding

The recently concluded Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern was widely appreciated for showing how music influenced the artist’s move towards abstraction. Two concerts featuring seminal compositions by Schoenberg were held alongside talks which explained how abstract forms hit painting and music at about the same time. What was not so fully explored was the blissfully eccentric international movement devoted to synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another, which preceded Kandinsky’s work and gave it a context. The vogue for Colour-Music was thoroughly a child of its time.