As a former winner of Britain’s most prestigious award for painters, the John Moores prize (other winners include Hamilton, Hilton, Hockney, Hoyland), a new show by Andrzej Jackowski should not be missed, especially not these notably small but powerful paintings in his latest exhibition at Purdy Hicks. The phrase ‘depth charge’ is used in the
The British have developed a number of garden styles over the centuries but none more unexpected than the ‘woodland garden’. No one in 1800, when the first rhododendrons were arriving in this country, could possibly have predicted that a sizeable number of large country gardens, situated on acid soil in rolling wooded countryside or in
It’s always useful to be reminded of the remarkable stoicism and bravery of the generation of people that lived through the second world war. It’s hard to imagine it being repeated today. I felt it this week listening to Coming Home, a five-part series celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Charles Wheeler, who in
‘Art for art’s sake,’ sang 10cc in 1976, ‘Money for God’s sake.’ And promptly split in half shortly afterwards. It’s a conundrum every new young band has to grapple with sooner or later. You want creative freedom, of course you do. You want trillions of dollars, of course you do. You want to have your
In painting, as in music and literature, artists whose work in old age is comparable to that of their youth are rare beasts: Titian, who traditionally if implausibly lived to be 99, was one; Goya, who died aged 82, was another. But of neither can it be claimed that they saved their greatest work for
How should opera, and particular operas, be made ‘relevant’? And what kind of relevance, anyway, should they try to achieve? The questions are too big to answer in a brief review, but Birmingham Opera Company’s largely magnificent production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria heroically attempts to cope with them. Using the highly individual
It is difficult to place oneself in the position of the pioneers of graphic art shown at the Estorick Collection: their extraordinary leaps of the imagination have become the standard vocabulary; the shift from old to new they represent now distant history. Born in the 19th century when 90 per cent of human understanding came
Conwy in north Wales is among the most enchanting of our small towns. It’s like a toy fort, its encircling walls surviving intact until Thomas Telford had to breach them for his bridge. He did it elegantly, even delicately, creating a suspension bridge that actually enhanced the little town. It was for our brutal, automanic
When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts
The television broadcasts of the late Pope’s funeral and the marriage of Prince Charles, coming as they did on consecutive days, gave the opportunity to compare two different styles of choral singing at their most typical. Of course I am going to go on to say that the British version, as represented on that occasion
Andrew Lambirth on an exhibition by one of the country’s foremost sculptors Forms in Light and Shade, an exhibition of Nigel Hall’s new work at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 Dering Street, W1, until 14 May), confirms him as one of our foremost sculptors, who has received too little official recognition in his country of
ENO’s production of Berg’s Lulu, first mounted three years ago, is one of its outstanding successes. Richard Jones, the director, seems to feel a special affinity with Berg, to judge from his recent and wonderful Wozzeck for WNO. Yet Berg’s two operas couldn’t be more different. Stravinsky complained, as many people have, about the big
It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on
When I started visiting Barcelona in 1961, its museums were both thin on the ground and impoverished, and the lingua franca between the Catalans and the British was French, without which it was, if one had neither Spanish nor Catalan, hard to survive. Today the city is awash with fine, well-funded museums and, for anyone
Peter Coker died in December last year after a long illness. He had been involved in the initial choice of material for this small but representative memorial exhibition, and would I think have approved of the final result, which succeeds in bringing together work from the 1950s, 60s, 70s and 80s. It’s a commercial show
Genghis Khan (BBC1, Monday) was a remarkable 60-minute documentary. Normally, something filmed on such a massive scale would be stretched to last several hours over many weeks. I can only assume that the Mongolian extras work for much less than their British counterparts. Mongolians playing Mongolians, eh? In television terms that’s the equivalent of people
A chill spring day in Stratford for the RSC’s launch of its summer comedies season with a new Midsummer Night’s Dream from Gregory Doran. A production to warm the heart? Certainly, for how could any half-competent staging fail to do so, and anything directed by Doran is usually rather better than that. But where so
Fate has not dealt kindly with Sir John Everett Millais (1829–96). For those who are not enthusiasts of the Pre-Raphaelites, this founding member of the Brotherhood tends to be categorised as the one who ‘went populist’ with such all-too-memorable scenes as ‘The Boyhood of Raleigh’ (now in the Tate) and the notorious Pears Soap advert
While Rover sank (it was warned, twice, in this column), another car was launched, in Venice. An amphibian? No, a Bentley. Perhaps because it rarely advertises, Bentley’s car launches are like no other. Each is divided into three- to four-day segments designed for different audiences. The basis is driving and learning about the car, with
Much as I love the nostalgic idea of the original Ask the Family, the reality was rather different. The questions were way too hard and made you feel thick even when you weren’t (Robert Robinson’s smug avuncularity served mainly to rub salt into this wound), and the families were really freaky, the parents never having