Art

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

Peggy Guggenheim

She had come a very long way from the shtetl, but Marguerite ‘Peggy’ Guggenheim was still the poor relation of her fabulously wealthy family. Although these things are, of course, relative. It was her uncle Solomon, enriched by mining, who first made the family’s name. Peggy’s father sank with the Titanic in 1912. Eventually Solomon’s museum, a Frank Lloyd Wright design as magnificent as it was absurd, became a New York landmark. Peggy never much cared for it, so she built her own elsewhere. Guggenheim was no one’s idea of a great beauty, but possessed enough lust, fortune and ambition to compensate. She moved to France just as traffic on the New York–Paris axis was becoming the standard model of the history of modern art.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Recycling the avant-garde

One overcast afternoon in late July I took a train to Norfolk. It seemed a good time and place to catch up on the state of the avant-garde. My goal was the British Art Show 8, currently spread over several venues in the centre of Norwich and due next month to move on to Southampton, the final resting-point on its slow progress around what remains, for the moment at least, the United Kingdom. Not having caught the exhibition at its previous stopping points, Leeds and Edinburgh, I thought this would be a suitable place to see it since Norwich is a town of art historical pedigree — home to Cotman, the Cromes and Michael Andrews.

Alastair Smart

Preaching in pictures

To call Nils Büttner a killjoy is perhaps a little unfair, but not very. The professor at Stuttgart’s State Academy of Art and Design has written a revisionist biography of Hieronymus Bosch: one which tells us that the Early Netherlandish painter wasn’t, as many over the centuries have suggested, the devil incarnate or Satan’s crazed representative on earth. Instead, his graphically disturbing visions of hell — infernal soups populated by hybrid monsters — were actually the product of a devoutly Catholic, medieval mind.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Heavenly bodies | 28 July 2016

Initially it must have been a nasty surprise. On 16 August 1972 an amateur scuba diver named Stefano Mariottini was fishing in shallow waters just off the coast of Calabria. At about noon he was poking around some rocks when he saw part of an arm protruding from the sand. His first thought, a natural one, was that he had found a cadaver. On closer examination, it became clear that there was not just one body but two — and that they were made not of flesh but of metal. Mariottini’s discoveries are world-famous now, taking their name — the Riace bronzes — from the little resort near which he was swimming. In terms of classical sculpture, he had hit the jackpot. Bronze was the medium of choice for many of the most admired artists of the ancient world.

Thursday

Mary Killen

Dear Mary | 21 July 2016

Q. Since my husband began to appear in the Rich List he has become much more popular with ‘artists’ in our wider circle and we receive enough private view invitations per year to last us a lifetime. My husband is a kind man and will often buy something he doesn’t particularly want just to be supportive. He recently made an appearance at a neighbour’s local show and bought the least awful picture he could see. Now we hear the girlfriend of this artist has been telling friends she is going to challenge my husband over his meanness because ‘it would have been no skin off his nose’ to have bought one of the bigger monstrosities.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Passing through Bologna

Sooner or later, no matter where you are travelling on Italian railways, you are likely to pass through Bologna Centrale. The city is the main junction between the north and south of the country, close to the route through the mountains. It always has been. The teenage Michelangelo stopped off while journeying between Venice and Florence, and — after a contretemps at the customs office, since Bologna was then a city state — carved some small sculptures for the Basilica of San Domenico. In 1786 Goethe spent a few days in this ‘venerable, learned’ place, ‘thronged with people’. It still is all those things. In the 21st century, however, not too many linger — as Goethe did — to look at the paintings or eat the marvellous food.

Wednesday

Laura Freeman

Twists, turns and good red herrings

Jessie Burton’s first novel, The Miniaturist, set in 17th-century Amsterdam, read like a lantern-slide show. Her churches were by Pieter Saenredam, her town-houses those of Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch. Her kitchens and corridors and eaves-dropping maids came from Nicolaes Maes. She proved herself a painterly writer with an eye for the telling detail. The Miniaturist was inspired by a real work of art: Petronella Oortman’s dollshouse in the Rijksmuseum. Burton’s fictional Nella becomes the owner of a dollshouse filled with miniature furniture and family whose movements begin eerily to anticipate — perhaps exert malign influence over — events in the real house. Burton has pulled off a similar trick in her second novel, The Muse.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Cool and underground

The Keeper’s House sits in the basement of Burlington House, a restaurant in disguise. It is quite different from the grand cafés of St James’s and Mayfair, which are raging exhibitionists with banquettes splayed like limbs. It is secretive and it knows, consciously or not, the tricks of children’s literature: the looking-glass, the wardrobe and the door. It is an 18th-century basement transformed, by magical whimsy, into a restaurant. To visit the loo is a quest for which you need a Gandalf, a hobbit and a lamp. Burlington House looks like an English mansion that stared at Palladio, had a panic attack and exploded.

Hugh Pearman

Giving Tate Modern a lift

Tate Modern, badly overcrowded, has built itself a £260 million extension to spread everyone about the place more. This means that there are more galleries and other big rooms for various modish activities — 60 per cent more space, they say. It opens on 17 June with a total rehang throughout. But having been shown round the place, I’ve become transfixed by the lifts. When it opened in 2000 they never expected nearly five million visitors a year — which is well down on its 2014 Matisse-driven peak of nearly six million, but still twice as many as it was designed for. So when they called back Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron to extend the gallery that brought them fame, moving people around better was high on their to-do list.

Friday

Fisun Güner

Dumbed-down ‘accessible’ writing is just as bad as obscurantist art-speak

When the art critic Robert Hughes died in 2012, someone from the Times turned up on Channel 4 News to sing his praises. The journalist burbled on for a few flailing, hapless minutes and you were left wondering whether she’d actually ever read him. The great critic’s strength was apparently his, wait for it, 'accessibility'. Eschewing obscurantist art-speak – the desiccated argot of the art establishment – it seemed Hughes’ critical gifts lay in not being difficult to read. But who familiar with Hughes’ robust and sinuous prose would ever call it 'accessible'? It wasn’t. His facility with language was underpinned by a ferocious intellect, and it showed. Acuity and insight made him a tremendously exciting critic, not accessibility.

Thursday

Peter Phillips

Last words | 5 May 2016

This, my 479th, is to be my last contribution as a regular columnist to The Spectator. I have written here for 33 years and 4 months, a way of life really, and one I have greatly enjoyed. I thank Auberon Waugh in absentia for suggesting me to Alexander Chancellor in the first place; and Charles Moore for keeping me on in the early years, once we were up and running. I also thank three quite exceptional arts editors: Gina Lewis, Jenny Naipaul and the doyenne of these pages, Liz Anderson. Things have moved on from my habitual think pieces, outraged rants, ad hominem demolition of palpable idiots written in the back of aeroplanes.

Matthew Dennison

Wings of desire

Maria Sibylla Merian was a game old bird of entrepreneurial bent, with an overwhelming obsession with insects. Born in Frankfurt in 1647, she sacrificed her health and financial stability in pursuit of her passion. It carried her halfway across the globe and earned her lasting renown among a handful of cognoscenti. Merian was 15 when Jan Goedart published the first of his three volumes of Metamorphosis et historia naturalis insectorum and is unlikely to have seen the book until later. Goedart’s purpose, based on close observation of a range of insects, was a fuller understanding of insect life cycles. It was the same purpose to which Maria Merian devoted herself — even resorting to selling snakes, lizards, a tortoise and a crocodile to fund her compulsion.

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Is it art or science?

William Henry Fox Talbot had many accomplishments. He was Liberal MP for Chippenham; at Cambridge he won a prize for translating a passage from Macbeth into Greek verse. Over the years he published numerous articles in scholarly journals on subjects ranging from astronomy to botany. One thing he could not do, however, was draw well — and it was this inadequacy that changed the world. While on holiday in Italy in 1832, he became so frustrated by his failure to draw Lake Como satisfactorily using a pencil and a drawing aid known as the camera lucida — his efforts were well below GCSE art standard — that he resolved to find another way to preserve such views. The results are on show in an exhibition at the Science Museum, Fox Talbot: Dawn of the Photograph.

Thursday

Claudia Massie

The delights of Hieronymus Bosch

If you hope to inspire an appreciation of Renaissance art in your children, look to Hieronymus Bosch. Ideally, your children will not be sensitive types, nor prone to nightmares, but if they can handle a little, or indeed quite a lot, of fantasy, Bosch will blow their tiny minds. My four-year-old lad, Luca, definitely not a delicate chap, was deeply impressed by ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ when I showed him reproductions. He remains unmoved by Leonardo and bored rigid by Giotto, but Bosch snared him. I should hunt down a full-size poster and hang it in his room. I read somewhere that Leonardo DiCaprio snoozed beneath one as a boy, and look where it got him. Bosch fascinates everyone though, not just impressionable infants.

Thursday

Charles Moore

The Spectator’s notes | 7 April 2016

However wicked tax evasion is and however distasteful some tax avoidance may be, people should imagine a world without tax havens and see if they really want it. The prime reason that tax havens exist is that taxes in most countries are too high. If they did not exist, the competitive element would be reduced, and taxes would go up even more. The EU constantly complains about ‘unfair tax competition’, by which it really means just tax competition itself. Tax avoidance is what most of us try to do (see next item). Resentment about it is largely because the rich find it easier to achieve than the rest of us. In my latest Notes, I mentioned that the theme of the South of England Agricultural Society this year is sheep. Last week, sheep entered our lives dramatically.

Thursday

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Round-up of new opera

A mixed year so far for new opera. A few really dismal things have appeared from people who should know better. Did the world really need an operatic treatment of Dante’s Divine Comedy for orchestra and chorus? Louis Andriessen thought so; his La Commedia (2004–8) luckily only reared its drab head for one night at the Barbican. If you’re going to splurge as much money as opera often has to splurge, you have to ask yourself why. If you don’t, you create a situation in which operas come about merely because they can, often just to continue the tradition in the most inoffensive way possible. ‘Don’t mind me!’ says this kind of zombie opera.

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Easy to swallow

Pharmacy 2 is the reanimated child of Damien Hirst; it lives inside the Newport Street Gallery in a forsaken patch of Lambeth by the railway arches. This makes it look, inevitably, like the set of The Bill, but with a painting of Damien Hirst on a nearby wall, which would surely confuse the Bill. Pharmacy 1 was, for five years until 2003, in Notting Hill. So we are already doing better. It is said that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain complained about Pharmacy 1, and worried it would confuse people looking for a real pharmacy, but I do not know if this was true. If it was, they were too stupid to live, even if they did eventually find a pharmacy. The gallery looks like the interior of a shell. I ask a man behind a desk: is the gallery open?

Thursday

Laura Freeman

Sweet and sour | 25 February 2016

Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings off, while she rests her blistered feet. She scoops a palm of water with cupped hands and tenderly washes those of her grandfather: her feckless, gambling, on-the-lam grandfather. It is an old Oscar Wilde chestnut, but one would have to have a heart of stone to look at William Holman Hunt’s portrait of Charles Dickens’s saintly ‘Little Nell and her Grandfather’ (1845) without laughing. Likewise Arthur Hughes’s ‘The Woodman’s Child’ (1860), a portrait of a tousle-haired country mite sleeping in the woods, attended by a squirrel and robin, their red coat and breast so sweetly matching her own little ruby socks.

Thursday

Mary Keen

Viewing the view

Landskipping is about viewing the view, from the 18th century to the present. From the title (which is the only self-conscious thing about this terrific book) I feared we might be in for a heavy dose of Wordworthishness and ‘the lone enraptured male’ school of writing. But Anna Pavord, along with Kathleen Jamie, Dorothy Wordsworth and Jane Austen, is more down-to-earth than any Romantic moper. Like the author of Sense and Sensibility, she sees both sides of the coin. Romantic mopers, however, do crowd the early pages. Once a ‘correct’ taste for landscape became a desirable attainment in the mid-18th century, the way you looked at wild places was a way of demonstrating sensibility rather than sense.

Thursday

Paul Keegan

Roaming in the gloaming

One of the epigraphs to Peter Davidson’s nocturne on Europe’s arts of twilight is from Hegel: ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only at dusk’, an image of philosophy as posthumous, able to explain things only after we have experienced them. Or an image of dusk as threshold, the blue hour when light transforms itself, and other worlds become possible. The Last of the Light is a cultural companion to such notions. A cabinet of curiosities — paintings, poems, music — framed by the idea of Europe as an archipelago of regret, many of whose most vital artefacts have dealt in echo and obscure longing, translated into a feeling for light. This is a trail going back to Virgil, poet of shadows, or else starting from Christian ideas of a crepuscular fallen world.