More from Arts

Saturday

Interconnect

Designed for living

Andrew Lambirth finds plenty to enjoy at the V&A’s Arts and Crafts show, despite the gloom International Arts and Crafts is the third of the V&A’s major 19th/20th century ‘lifestyle’ themed exhibitions, following on from the successes of Art Nouveau (2000) and Art Deco (2003). Both those shows were ingenious and loving tributes to their subjects, and spectacles of the highest order. Before that, in 1996, there was the justly famed celebration of William Morris. What the current show (until 24 July and sponsored by Heal’s) proves beyond doubt is the danger of establishing a pattern and expecting every cultural development to rise to the occasion and create a similar star turn in exhibition terms. Sometimes the raw material simply isn’t suitable.

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Secret revealed

The Flowers emporium in Shoreditch, which does such a competent job of purveying art to the chattering classes, shows an eclectic range of artists, from the geometrically abstract to the photo-realistic. Dennis Creffield (born 1931) belongs to neither extreme, but fits into that fruitful expressionist middle ground where the quondam students of David Bomberg struggle with charcoal and pigment to discover the ‘actuality’ of a subject. Flowers must be heartily congratulated on having mounted a decent retrospective of Creffield’s work, for we have seen little of it in London (besides an exhibition of the Orford Ness pictures a decade ago) since the magnificent English Cathedrals show at Camden Arts Centre in 1990.

John McEwen

A hunter’s eye for nature

For pure delight you must away to Northampton and see this admirable celebration of the centenary of Denys Watkins-Pitchford (1905–90) — amazingly, the first ever solo show of his pictures. Watkins-Pitchford was born and lived in Northamptonshire; he went abroad only a couple of times but he travelled extensively in Britain. Watkins-Pitchford and BB were one and the same. As an artist he used his own name; as a writer the pseudonym — derived from a heavy shot designed for shooting wild geese. Through illustration, BB combined his artistic and literary talents.

Robin Holloway

Label to love

Every music-lover loves Hyperion Records; our debt to this company is difficult to quantify or to overestimate. From its pioneering days in the Eighties right up to the present (for the future, read on) it has quintessentialised a mix of imaginative repertory, inspired performances, flawless technical standards, generous accompaniment of notes and texts, and (last, least, but by now an expected extra) cover-art that is enticing, appropriate, beautiful. The range has been enormous: eschewing the blockbusters of grand opera and large symphony orchestra, the company has concentrated mainly upon a bewildering multiplicity of richly rewarding specialities. Early music from Hildegard of Bingen onwards (Gothic Voices with around 20 discs!

Michael Vestey

High living

Occasionally, one stumbles across something delightfully quirky on Radio Four that one knows would never be aired anywhere else; such was the case with The Reichsmarschall’s Table, produced by Dennis Sewell and tucked away on Monday evening last week. The table in question was for the Nazi general Hermann Goering in the 1930s and 40s at Berlin’s renowned restaurant Horcher’s, named after the family that owned it. It was here that Goering courted industrialists for their support for the Nazi cause while, at another table, members of the German resistance were plotting to arrest Hitler to consign him to a lunatic asylum. The plot failed, because the day Hitler was due back in Berlin, Neville Chamberlain chose to visit him in Bavaria.

Richard Harries

Victory over death

Richard Harries reflects on how Christ’s crucifixion has been depicted over the ages The first depiction of Jesus on the cross, on a small ivory panel in the British Museum dating from 420, shows him upright, arms outstretched, eyes open and very much alive. This is Jesus victorious on the cross. The Western Church never entirely lost sight of this theme. There are a good number of small metal crucifixes which survive from the 12th and 13th centuries, particularly from Scandinavia and Britain, which show Christ hanging, half-naked, his body sagging forward and his head on one side; but this battered figure has a crown on his head. From 1930 to the 1950s, somewhat against the odds, Jesus was once again sometimes depicted as Christus Victor, reigning from the tree.

Saturday

John Spurling

Important relationships

Fox Talbot invented his ‘photogenic drawing’ process in 1834 and ten years later published The Pencil of Nature, the first book to be illustrated with photographs. There is nothing like Elisabeth Vellacott’s drawings to make you impatient with Fox Talbot’s terms. Photography, which freezes an instant in an instant, is neither nature’s pencil nor any sort of drawing. The more you study Vellacott’s delicate drawings of English and Welsh landscapes, the more you become aware of active, stretched-out time, the time nature has already taken to create this motif and the time taken by the artist to draw it, during which nature is still alive and changeable.

Tanya Harrod

Subversive needles

When Henry Moore wanted to make clear that he thought Eric Gill’s sculpture dull and unadventurous, he compared it to knitting. Times have changed, and knitting has become worryingly fashionable, hence the Crafts Council’s delightful exhibition Knit 2 Together. There is, however, a strange feeling of déjà vu about all this. Remember the barefoot California boy Kaffe Fassett, dubbed by Sir Roy Strong the ‘genius of the knitting needle’? There was a knitting renaissance back in the 1980s. Fassett had plenty of imitators with the result that a small knitwear business or an exciting yarn shop came to epitomise the brighter side of Mrs Thatcher’s enterprise culture. But fashion is fickle.

Michael Vestey

Evolution, not revolution

On the whole, Radio Four has had some good controllers over the years, the better ones being those who introduced gradual change. The two who were the least successful in my view both tried to rearrange the furniture after moving in; I’m thinking of Ian McIntyre in the late 1970s who, one felt, wanted to return radio to the 1950s, and, in the 1990s, James Boyle, who, enslaved by focus groups, brought in many pointless changes. He was succeeded by the successful Helen Boaden and last year Mark Damazer replaced her. Wisely, perhaps, he hasn’t said much about his plans for the network, though he does have a few in mind.

Simon Hoggart

Unanswered questions

We still aren’t sure why, two summers ago, Dr David Kelly killed himself. I don’t believe for one moment he was murdered — cui bono? And, for example, I have no doubt the mysterious men in black near the scene really were policemen. Yet it does remain puzzling. The general view seems to be that he was a man who prized above everything his integrity and his honesty. However, faced with the loss of his job and pension he dissembled about what he had told Andrew Gilligan. At the meeting with the Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, he realised he had been rumbled — he suffered a terrible blow to his self-esteem, and he knew that his life was about to unravel.

Andrew Lambirth

Evocations of London

John Virtue (born 1947) is the sixth National Gallery Associate Artist. A great deal of fuss is being made of the exhibition which marks his two-year period in residence in a basement studio. On display are the 11 new paintings he has made, several of them vast, and the show spills out from the Sunley Room into the adjacent corridors and galleries. The accompanying catalogue is a very plush affair, published in hardback (special exhibition price £12.95) and containing essays by the historian Simon Schama, Paul Moorhouse of the Tate and Colin Wiggins of the National Gallery. The current issue of Modern Painters magazine carries a laudatory article about Virtue by the National’s director, Charles Saumarez Smith.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Crowning glory

Monteverdi’s last and greatest secular masterpiece, L’Incoronazione di Poppea, is an opera we get far too few chances to see. The last time it was performed on stage in London was in the largely brilliant ENO production of 2000, which has never been revived. That does have the consequence, however, that one is always pleasurably shocked by it anew, and though the Zurich Opera’s one-night stand at the Royal Festival Hall was only a partly acted concert performance, the impact was undimmed.

Giannandrea Poesio

Dark thoughts

Unlike Giselle, Coppelia, The Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, the romantic ballet La Sylphide does not boast a memorable score. Neither the music, composed by Schneitzhoeffer for the original 1832 Parisian version, nor that composed by Lovenskjold for Auguste Bournonville’s 1836 Danish staging — arguably, the best-known today — have the luscious musical palette found in the works by Adam, Delibes or Tchaikovsky. Apart from chunks of ‘borrowed’ music, which include quotations from Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice in Schneitzhoeffer’s work and from Rossini’s Stabat Mater in Lovenskjold’s one, both scores merely provide easily danceable, pretty, catchy tunes and a wealth of tritely conventional atmospheric solutions.

Andrew Lambirth

Visual feast

A good many years ago I wrote a short article about the recent work of an artist (who shall remain nameless), and characterised it — in a very positive way — as ‘decorative’. This did not go down at all well, and I was asked to change what I had written and remove this offending word. I refused, and the piece was not published. Such was, and still is, the stigma attached to ‘decorative’. Though it can be intended as praise, it is more often construed as damning criticism. The one great painter whose work has always defied such narrow categorisation is Henri Matisse (1869–1954).

Russell Chamberlin

A kind tyrant

Apart from its size, perhaps, there’s nothing much about the house to distinguish it from its neighbours — one of the countless, vaguely Gothic, Victorian seaside villas that fringe the coast of the Isle of Wight. Even its name, Dimbola Lodge, seems like that of a respectable boarding house, which, indeed, was what it became in the 1920s after its days of glory passed. But, like the house itself, the name has an exotic background, for it was the title of the Cameron family’s estate in Ceylon. And in the 1860s and 1870s Dimbola Lodge was home to as brilliant a circle — social, literary, scientific — as any in that immensely confident period.

Ursula Buchan

Ground force

On a mild, wet, early morning last autumn, I came across two earthworms (Lumbricus terrestris) mating on the lawn. At the vibration of my tread, they split apart and, though I try not to anthropomorphise animals (I could never have gone fox hunting if I had), such behaviour did look shifty, as if I had surprised a teenage couple entwined on the family sofa. I had never before in my life seen such a coupling, which is remarkable considering how many early mornings I have spent in gardens and how common earthworms are, but it underlines the fact that their lives are mostly spent hidden from sight underground. Their influence on our lives is usually therefore hugely underestimated — except perhaps by farmers and gardeners.

Michael Vestey

Among the aliens

I’ve long been intrigued by the language of EU-fanatics, particularly when they ascribe motives to those opposed to the EU constitution and the euro. There’ve been some fine examples on the radio recently. On Today on Monday morning, for example, Roger Liddle, a former Tony Blair adviser now working for Peter Mandelson in Brussels, suggested that opponents believed that they were ‘holding back the threatening hordes’ from Europe. At least Liddle was more honest about the nature and importance of the new constitution than any government minister, but it was a curious interview in another respect: apart from some anodyne questions from the Brussels correspondent Tim Franks, Liddle was allowed to speak without being challenged.

James Delingpole

Battle of the sexes

The programme I’m enjoying most at the moment is The Apprentice (BBC2, Wednesday), in which teams of men and women, all of whom have supposedly resigned from their high-powered jobs for this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, take part in various business-related competitions and are whittled down week by week until there is only one survivor. His prize is a highly paid job with Sir Alan Sugar. (In the American version it was Donald Trump.) I say ‘His’ because on current evidence it’s almost certainly going to be a bloke who wins. If you’d seen the boys and girls in action during the flower-selling episode, you’d know exactly what I mean.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Russian revelation

The Mariinsky Theatre of St Petersburg paid a concentrated visit to the Barbican last week, performing four theatre pieces on three evenings. I failed to see the first, a concert performance of Rimsky-Korsakov’s meretricious opera The Legend of the Invisible City of Kitezh, so my palate was clear for the second evening, a double bill of Stravinsky, two of his supreme masterpieces, both dense, compact, overpowering in the energy and intensity they conveyed.