More from Arts

Saturday

Roderick Conway-Morris

Papal travels

In 1435 a young Tuscan poet and diplomat visited the court of James I in Edinburgh. The purpose of his mission remains something of a mystery. But he was impressed by the women of the country, whom he described as ‘fair, charming and easily won’. It also did not take him long to discover that ‘there is nothing the Scotch like better to hear than abuse of the English’. The writer was Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, the future Pius II, and the book in which he recorded his experiences (in the third person, in imitation of Julius Caesar) his astonishingly frank autobiography, the Commentaries, available in unexpurgated form (and translated into English by Florence Gragg) only in modern times. Piccolomini returned to the Continent, passing through England in disguise.

Andrew Lambirth

Appetite for gloom

James Pryde (1866–1941) is one of those artists who enjoyed a considerable vogue in their own lifetime, and resurface now and again but never with anything like the same success. (The last solo show of his work I saw was at the Redfern in 1988. There was a museum show in Edinburgh, his native city, in 1992, but nothing since.) He is not widely known, nor is he popular. ‘His paintings show much dramatic contrast and emphasis, not always justified by their subjects,’ opines the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists. He is perhaps more familiar as one half of the artistic partnership which produced ground-breaking poster designs under the pseudonym of the Beggarstaff Brothers.

Rani Singh

Supporting the artisan

The ancient tradition of arts patronage is being revived in Marbella, the Andalusian playground of the rich and famous. Here in the shadow of the Sierra Blanca mountains, next to the luxurious Marbella Club, built by Prince Alfonso von Hohenlohe in the 1950s, The New World Trust, organisers of the Marbella Film Festival and the Art at the Fringe programme, is bringing together artists, film-makers, dancers, writers and musicians. The buying and selling of real estate, lounging on the beach along the Golden Mile and the assiduous pursuit of fun are Marbella’s usual pastimes, with local artists complaining that the arts are not even a blip on the radar — often the most stunning literary offering of the week is an illustrated list of the latest yachts for sale.

Ursula Buchan

Just desserts

There are, as we all know, many disadvantages to going away on holiday, not least the fact — so ably nailed by Alain de Botton — that we are forced to take ourselves with us. How relaxing it would be to leave home without one’s own deficiencies and inability to enjoy oneself when doing nothing. By the same token, some absolute essentials for happiness have to be left at home: in my case, my dessert plum trees. This year, in mid-August, we went away for just one week. The ‘Denniston’s Superb’ greengages were just ripening when we left, so I picked as many as I could to put in the fridge. I topped up the sugar solution in the wasp traps hanging from the branches.

Patrick Carnegy

Wives and wooings

The programme gets it right in rating Henry VIII ‘at the edge of William Shakespeare’s drama and theatre’. It’s from the very end of his working life, co-written with John Fletcher, and is but seldom given. This, as became abundantly apparent in AandBC’s production for the RSC’s Complete Works, is because it’s a dry biscuit, and especially so when ‘staged’ along the length of the narrow centre of the nave of a church like Stratford’s Holy Trinity. Seated in raked tiers on either side, we were supposedly judge and jury in the machinations of Henry’s divorce of Katherine of Aragon and the battle royal between Catholicism in Wolsey and emergent Protestantism in Cranmer.

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

A right royal collection

The best-known exchange between artist and royalty must be George VI’s celebrated remark to John Piper, who had been painting the castle and surrounding parkland at Windsor: ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather.’ It was the early 1940s, and Piper had invested his watercolours with a brooding quality he no doubt thought appropriate to the mood of the times, and which also echoed his own essentially Romantic vision. The project was a commission from Queen Elizabeth, and extended to 26 views, a rare feat of modern topography that also turned out to be good art. But even the Queen thought Piper’s lowering skies a little overbearing, and reportedly suggested he might ‘try a spring day’.

Michael Tanner

Ways with Wagner

Recently the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation interviewed me about some of my views on Wagner, as part of their featuring the first complete Ring cycle to be performed in Canada. In the course of the interview, I was asked how I would like to see the Ring and Wagner’s music dramas in general staged and produced, in the light of my expressions of distaste for all the recent Ring productions I had seen. Fortunately, that was a question I had often asked myself, so I was able to reply fairly promptly: I just don’t know. Or rather, I do know up to a limited point, but I’m bashful about saying what I think.

Peter Phillips

Bagpipes in our baggage

These have been trying times for itinerant musicians. Anybody who had already built up a dislike for the way airport staff are entitled to treat their customers would have found the recent situation testing to the point of phobia. To be fair, my fellow-citizens showed remarkable good humour in those endless and often directionless queues at Heathrow (our plane to Chicago took off six hours after I first presented myself at the terminal the other day); the staff were less accommodating, buffeted by conflicting and sometimes unjustifiable instructions, obliged to be inflexible and inclined to be stony-faced. The restrictions on hand-luggage didn’t inconvenience us as much as some, since singers’ instruments go into the cabin whether the authorities like it or not.

Michael Vestey

Poetic valediction

It is with great sadness that we heard of the sudden death of Michael Vestey on Friday. For more than ten years, he had been The Spectator’s radio critic — indeed the first and only one. His column was perceptive, authoritative, witty, sometimes caustic and opinionated, but always immensely readable. We asked him to file his column early this week because of the Bank Holiday and, professional to the last, he did. It follows below. Michael will be much missed. I’m glad Radio Four had the good sense to mark the centenary of the birth of John Betjeman as I feared the BBC might overlook it. But the network did and some fine programmes have resulted. The one I liked most was Doubts and Demons: The Inner John Betjeman (Monday), presented by A.N.

James Delingpole

Criminal mindsets

Since every mafiosi’s favourite movie is Goodfellas and favourite TV programme is The Sopranos, I suppose similar rules apply to Islamic terrorists and Sleeper Cell (Channel 4). Probably, every Wednesday night secretive groups of sinister bearded men all over Britain tune in in the eager hope that this will be the episode when scary Faris Al-Farik (Oded Fehr) finally gets to blow thousands of infidels into a million pieces. I dare say they will also be watching to see whether American scriptwriters have any useful insights into the Islamic terrorist mindset. If so, they’re going be disappointed. Sleeper Cell is just another generic action-drama series like a cross between The Dirty Dozen and a slightly slower 24.

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

A neglected Victorian

That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones), Watts has been neglected. His ambition was to be a history painter, and he spent much of his long life and considerable energies on allegorical pictures, which today find little favour. His portraits, which he often used as a means of subsidising his less popular High Art compositions, are recognised as supreme examples of the art, and were given a comprehensive showing at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004.

Wednesday

Olivia Glazebrook

Spanish rites

If you haven’t been abroad so far this summer, go and see Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver — it will have almost as invigorating an effect as a weekend in Spain. To see it is to be immersed in a strange and likeable culture, populated by agreeably batty characters whose tale is completely absorbing. So absorbing, in fact, that when I emerged from the screening I was surprised to find myself fogged in by the dull mash of London greys, and not among a blaze of Spanish colour. When I opened my mouth to speak I was amazed that a torrent of Spanish didn’t issue forth. I was puzzled (and, yes, it must be said, a little disappointed) to glance at my reflection in a shop window and find that I didn’t resemble Penélope Cruz.

Robin Holloway

Schubert’s circle

With a characteristic combination of scholar, impresario, programmer, accompanist, Graham Johnson’s latest set of three CDs explores as an appendix to Hyperion’s complete Schubert songs edition some forebears, parallels, overlaps and influences, to indicate an inviting background landscape. Songs by Schubert’s Friends and Contemporaries could have been merely an exercise in context, and this would already be interesting and worthwhile. But the discs contain plenty of decent music, plentiful surprises and insights, and one or two high-water gems.

Giannandrea Poesio

Russians on speed

There is more to 19th-century ballet than fluttering sylphs, spectral broken-hearted peasant girls and doomed feathery princesses. There is comedy and fun, too. Take the 1869 classic Don Quixote, a Spanish romp loosely based on Miguel de Cervantes’ literary masterpiece. The ballet was Marius Petipa’s second major work — the first being The Pharaoh’s Daughter (which I reviewed a fortnight ago) — and it gave its first Russian audiences definitive proof of Petipa’s choreographic talent and theatrical genius. Not many comic or comedy ballets have stood the test of time, thus prompting the erroneous but widespread belief that 19th-century ballet is mostly about tear-jerking stuff.

Wednesday

Robert J-Lewis

Buying power

Forgery in painting has enjoyed a long history of scandal and from time to time spills more ink than paint, in part because we all enjoy reading about an art expert or moneyed person getting taken in by a fake. Our pleasure derives from that cocky-smug common-sense feeling that no painting is worth the prices currently being fetched in the marketplace — Picasso’s ‘Boy with a Pipe’ sold for $104 million (£56.3 million) in 2004, and more recently Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1’ was snapped up for a reputed record $137 million — especially when the naked eye can’t tell the difference between the original and a well-executed copy. Forgery in the visual arts raises several interesting questions.

Andrew Lambirth

New ways of looking

Since 2003, the National Gallery has been organising a series of annual exhibitions in partnership with Bristol’s City Museum and Art Gallery and the Laing Art Gallery in Newcastle. (Readers will perhaps recall previous themed shows: Paradise, Making Faces and last year The Stuff of Life.) This initiative has proved so successful that the programme has been extended for a further three years, with Passion for Paint being the first in the new sequence. It has already been seen at Bristol and Newcastle, and now arrives in London minus the early Leon Kossoff painting ‘Children’s Swimming Pool, Autumn Afternoon’ (1971), which was shown at both other venues.

Patrick Carnegy

Magical theatre box

The story so far of the RSC’s Complete Works marathon has been largely that of performances, some wonderfully rich and strange, coming in from abroad. Unable to spend an entire summer camped out in Stratford, I have still to catch up with some of the reputedly stronger offerings by the home team. But even the prospect of having to battle for hot water and breakfast at one of Stratford’s more reputable hotels couldn’t keep me from the inauguration of the new Courtyard Theatre with Michael Boyd’s Henry VI trilogy, or from Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the unsatisfactory cinematic 1930s theatre which is shortly to be disembowelled (not before time) and reconstructed. The Courtyard Theatre is a crucial transitional step.

Olivia Glazebrook

Mean streets

It is a curious thing to watch Christian Bale now, having seen him all those years ago in Empire of the Sun play that fierce, hurt boy Jim Graham, whom no amount of deprivation seemed outwardly to wound, but who bled on the inside like the Spartan boy with his fox. The qualities of that boy’s character are usually to be found lurking in the parts that Christian Bale has played since — he has not radically altered our perception of him with, say, a string of romantic comedies. He still seems untouchable, cold, frightening, and if not amoral (Patrick Bateman in American Psycho), then certainly a little bit weird (The Machinist). We suspect demons in his past (Batman Begins).

Wednesday

Andrew Lambirth

Intelligent design

The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally. Once it opened in 1982, I visited regularly and watched the development of the collection with interest, particularly the addition of the Charles Kearley Bequest in 1989. At that point, the collection was a little gem of 20th-century art — mostly British, with some European additions. Now it has received a further boost. The house has reopened to universal acclaim with an £8.

Stuart Nicholson

Class act

Like footsteps in the sands of time, record companies have provided the raw material around which jazz history has been constructed — RCA Victor, which recorded the first bona fide jazz band in 1917 and was the first to cash in on the post-first world war jazz craze, and Columbia, which quickly followed. As a burgeoning record industry blossomed in the 1920 and 1930s, a vast array of companies with romantic-sounding names like Decca, Okeh, Vocalion, Harmony, Parlophone and Brunswick sprung up that were host to some of the great names in jazz — Billie Holiday, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Benny Goodman.