More from Arts

Our love affair with the 1950s has been going on for years and shows no sign of abating. Pangolin London, the city arm of the Gloucestershire foundry, has cleverly used the visceral appeal of Fifties design — if ever a period merited the term gay in its original sense, this one does — to show how sculpture can be incorporated into a domestic setting (until 17 May). All too often works of sculpture, whatever their size, are put on pedestals or instinctively relegated outdoors or to public spaces.

Every so often, John Deakin, jug-eared chronicler of Soho and hanger-on at the Colony Rooms, is breathlessly rediscovered as the unknown giant behind Bacon and the forgotten man from Soho’s  generation of genius. All that is so much tosh: Deakin is no genius and he has not been forgotten. In fact, he can never be forgotten, most importantly because Bacon commissioned photographs from Deakin that he used to make his paintings but also because Deakin himself was the subject of one of Freud’s greatest portraits (above) and because Deakin’s photographs capture Bohemian Soho in aspic for the mental tourist of the future.

‘London,’ says Jean Paul Gaultier, ‘was my vitamin. I love the freedom of London...The energy, the character, all the people that are different.’ It was perhaps inevitable, then, that the first major exhibition of his work should come to the city that so inspires him. From the moment you enter the Barbican, you are struck by the sheer energy of Gaultier’s designs. He’s called the enfant terrible of fashion, and his amazingly imaginative works — from tribal feathered headdresses to bondage wear and men in skirts — demonstrate why. Gaultier has become most famous for his love of pop culture: from punk mohicans to Amy Winehouse, his influences are obvious.

In a dance world that has chosen to dispense with stylistic and semantic subtleties, ‘narrative ballet’ and ‘story ballet’ are often used as synonymous. Yet there are differences — and major ones at that. In a ‘narrative ballet’ it is the choreography that carries the story. Each movement idea is thus conceived in relation to the dramatic demands of the thread and charged with meaning. This is, at least, what the genre’s forefathers recommended back in the 18th century, and what most major dance-makers through history strive to do. A story ballet, on the other hand, mirrors and tackles the basic needs of an immediate, directly accessible and even naive story-telling that is at the core of today’s culture.

South Kensington is teeming with butterflies at the moment, or at least the specially constructed tropical enclosure at the Natural History Museum is. Sensational Butterflies (until 14 September) takes you on a journey through the life cycle of, you guessed it, the butterfly: from egg, to caterpillar, to chrysalis, to butterfly. Butterflies had a good time of it last year, because of the warm sunny weather — the best for seven years — but the year before had been one of the worst ever for these insects (and for us), with their numbers crashing. The outlook is good for this summer. Fingers crossed.

Visitors to Chatsworth House this spring might wonder if they have stumbled through the looking-glass. The estate’s rolling parkland has been invaded by an army of vibrantly coloured, outsized garden tools, whose outlines seem to hover, mirage-like, over the landscape. These painted-steel 2D ‘sculptures of drawings’ are the brainchildren of the conceptual artist Michael Craig-Martin. Craig-Martin finds poetry in the everyday and here he has taken 12 commonplace objects — a wheelbarrow; a spade; a lightbulb — and transformed them into something extraordinary. He also believes that context is everything when it comes to art and the works have been carefully positioned.

When you’re next waiting for a train at King’s Cross, don’t waste time window shopping on the concourse. Instead, pop round the corner to the British Library to see Beautiful Science: Picturing Data, Inspiring Insight (until 26 May). It’s not an enticing name for an exhibition, I grant you. But the show is beguiling: small, thoughtful and free. As ever with the British Library, the viewer is treated to rare historic publications. Robert Fludd’s The Great Chain of Being (1617) is particularly memorable for its depictions of the ‘tree of life’, a diagram that encapsulates what this show is about: data representation as a means of storytelling, as artful and beautiful as the finest novels and poetry in the library’s collection.

Roberto Rossellini shot his neorealist landmark Rome, Open City while the war still raged and rubble littered the freshly liberated capital. Based on real experiences from the ten-month German occupation, the film follows ordinary Romans, some active dissenters, some just trying to get by, as the Nazis and the Italian fascist authorities mount a search for a Resistance fighter freshly arrived from outside the city. Actress Anna Magnani established her screen persona as the indomitable battler from the streets, and renowned stage comedian Aldo Fabrizi (above) turned in a performance as great as any in cinema as Don Pietro, the priest whose faith in God and his fellow man never wavers, even in the face of death.

If Margaret Thatcher is remembered by many more as a caricature than as her actual self, then blame Spitting Image. The show, which ran from 1984 to 1996, portrayed her variously as a cross-dresser, a fascist and a bully but, to her credit, she never complained. Or, if she did, there’s no record of it. Of course it wasn’t just politicians who were targeted; anyone in the public eye was also ripe for a takedown, from Kylie to the Queen. Deference — what’s that? To mark the programme’s 30th anniversary, BBC4 has created an Arena documentary that takes viewers behind the scenes of the Spitting Image process; introducing us to the people who made the programme come to life, and the hellish hours they worked keeping the show on the road.

Artists make good critics, but do critics make good artists? It’s hard to tell, when most are too chicken to try. For over 20 years, Spectator critic Andrew Lambirth has been making collages. He caught the habit from the British Surrealist Eileen Agar in the late 1980s and kept it private, until forced to go public last year when Eileen Hogan selected six of his works for The Discerning Eye. Now 20 are going on show at the Minories in Colchester in a joint exhibition with his friend and fellow Suffolk resident Maggi Hambling (8–14 March, closed Sundays). Hambling’s contribution to the show is a new five-day series of paintings grappling with her old adversary, the ‘raging beast’ that is the North Sea.

A tip: go see Martin Creed’s retrospective at the Hayward in the company of a child. I didn’t, but I tagged on to a merry gaggle of five-year-olds being guided round by their mums. I watched as they pointed at the enormous rotating beam with a neon sign that reads ‘MOTHER’. ‘Jump up and touch it, Mummy,’ said one girl. As we carried on, we came across a machine playing rude raspberry sounds. Peals of laughter rang out. Nearby, a man was playing the piano slowly, semitone by semitone. The little girl in the tutu tapped him on the shoulder and asked if he was part of the show. He was, he said. Upstairs, the mothers heeded the warning suggesting those under 18 avoid the outdoor video installation.

Discoveries: Art, Science and Exploration at Two Temple Place (until 27 April) is like a giant cabinet of curiosities. Maps, gizmos and memorabilia are spread across two floors of this glorious high-Victorian building on the Embankment. There are drawings from doomed polar expeditions, bones and teeth of fish from the Woodwardian Collection (see above), early botanical diagrams, hoards of medieval gold, the loot of empire (the Sufi snakes-and-ladders board in ebony and mother-of-pearl is memorable) and John Maynard Keynes’s armchair. The exhibits are drawn from the eight museums of the University of Cambridge. Much is made of the fact that this is the first time the university’s museums have collaborated — not bad for an institution that is 800 years old.