‘Times have changed,’ I was told by one disgruntled Academician. Once the members were guaranteed to have their work hung ‘on the line’ (i.e., in pride of place at eye-level), and non-members would get the remaining positions if they were lucky. This year John Hoyland’s large paintings have been ‘skied’, and one of Craigie Aitchison’s
There are weeks when I even feel privileged to be a television critic. You’re vaguely aware that out there somewhere people are watching Celebrity Love Island (though not very many), those dreary Saturday-night dancing contests, and Your 100 Favourite Embarrassing TV Animal Moments on Channel 4. Then along comes a clutch of shows and you
Like every red-blooded male, I do like a gadget, and the latest pointless item of electrical flummery to adorn our absurdly small flat is a digital radio. What a wonderful machine it is. The excellence of the sound quality, the ease of use, and the fact that Radio Two is no longer blotted out by
C. R. Cockerell RA (1788–1863) The Professor’s Dream is the title of a small exhibition (until 25 September) in the Tennant Room at the Royal Academy, a relatively new space that links with the John Madejski Fine Rooms, formerly the piano nobile of old Burlington House. Who was this professor, and what was his dream?
Well, it wasn’t quite the theatrical event of the year I was expecting. Theatre of Blood is an adaptation of the 1973 cult film in which a disgruntled actor murders a group of drama critics and I was hoping that members of the current crop, like the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, would be instantly recognisable.
Glyndebourne began in what is now the traditional manner: high winds and driving rain. This year there was the further discouragement of being kept out of the theatre until 15 minutes after the performance should have begun, which seemed wantonly unprofessional. Then the overture to Rossini’s La Cenerentola began, and we were in whatever kind
The first question: why isn’t this Reynolds show at the Royal Academy, of which Sir Joshua was so famously the founding father? The short answer is that the RA mounted its own Reynolds exhibition nearly 20 years ago, in 1986, and thankfully doesn’t hold the monopoly. It’s certainly time for another in-depth look at him,
To be honest, I haven’t been watching an awful lot of TV lately. It gets in the way of bedtime reading and an early night. You think you’re safe watching a programme at 9 p.m., which is when all the best ones are on, but that means you can’t start your pre-bed countdown (lights; cat;
It seems a strange way to celebrate the centenary of Michael Tippett’s birth, as many people have remarked, to have multiple productions of his third opera The Knot Garden, while neglecting the more approachable first two, though the Royal Opera will be mounting The Midsummer Marriage next season. Yet for those who have been to
Visiting this large (172 works) retrospective for Max Ernst (1891–1976) at the Metropolitan was in a way a sign of the times. Here was revealed, in all its witty and eccentric glory, the art of the most influential German Dadaist, born in Br
George Rowlett’s new paintings have wonderfully tousled, wind-rucked surfaces, the paint stirred and whipped up in moving emulation of the effects of the elements on water and landscape — his principal subjects. He paints the Thames and the seashore of east Kent; he also records the passage of the seasons on the landscape around Deal
The most affecting programme of the week was Lost in La Mancha, a film shown as part of the Storyville series on BBC 2 (Sunday). It was about Terry Gilliam, who used to do the cartoons for Monty Python and who now has a reputation for being a ‘maverick’ director. This means that sometimes he
Throughout a newly affluent Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and under the spur of a technological revolution, people — country people, in particular — began to throw out their artefacts of wood and metal and natural fabric in favour of the exciting new plastic that never wore out and rarely needed cleaning. Newly-weds
The distinction between operas and oratorios in Handel’s output is to a large degree an academic affair, depending on such contingencies as whether a work could be staged at a certain point in the ecclesiastical calendar. Glyndebourne showed that Theodora, an oratorio, could be staged with spectacular success, thanks to Peter Sellars’s intermittent genius. A
I walked into The Philadelphia Story with a real spring in my step. Admittedly, I’d never seen this play before, but how bad could it be given that the film — surely one of the two or three greatest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood — was so closely based on Philip Barry’s
If you took a national poll on our greatest watercolourist, Turner would win hands down, Girtin would come second and Cotman might get honourable mention behind TV artists Alwyn Crawshaw and Charles Evans. Cotman’s name means nothing to the general public, and carried so little clout in his own day that his death in 1842
‘Everything looks menacing,’ Edward Burra once told the Tate’s director Sir John Rothenstein. ‘I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen.’ This was late in Burra’s career, when his by then well-known and characteristic figure paintings had mostly given way to landscapes and still lifes, though without any diminution in their imaginative power or their peculiar
On the evening of 4 May at Christie’s in New York, a previously unknown, seminal sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, probably the first of his admired ‘Bird in Space’ series produced around 1922–23, was expected to fetch a mighty $8 million– $12 million. In the event, there were at least six serious contenders for the piece,
Could Caravaggio draw? That might seem a startling, even a ridiculous, question, but it expresses a doubt with which I was left by the admittedly magnificent exhibition that is about to close at the National Gallery. It is a concern that has led on to another, even more perplexing. That is, what is good drawing
Tragically, I missed the recent reality TV show in which celebrity love rat (and, weirdly enough, brother of my old riding teacher) James Hewitt was filmed receiving hand relief from a young woman desperate (very, clearly) to win £10,000. Instead I’m going to talk about something if possible even more depressing: Armando Iannucci’s new sitcom