Sculpture

I miss the New Labour years, when the government gushed money at cultural initiatives and Britain, previously a backwater in the art stakes, began to look like a serious international player. Sculpture was big and inescapable, and for a brief period it felt as though we’d found our groove: the Italians and Spanish had their old masters while New York bagged canonical modernism; France did both. But, from roughly the mid-1990s to whenever it was that Big Brother stopped airing, we had the best of the new – and ‘the new’, in character, was either ribald, bizarre or monumental. This last register, as executed by the likes of Antony Gormley and Anish Kapoor, was unashamedly populist but given legitimacy via the pseudo-philosophical rationale of its creators.

‘Cultural cringe’, that lovely Aussie coinage, perfectly describes the Roman attitude towards Greece. The curators don’t say so, but it is the theme of this inspired exhibition. By the time the Romans finally took control of mainland Greece in 146 BC with the Battle of Corinth, they had long admired everything Greek. That date marks roughly the middle of the Hellenistic period, during which Greek culture and language dominated the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it. In comparison with Greeks, Romans were oafs – and knew it After the battle, Corinth was flattened – quite an oafish thing to do – and emptied of all its works of art, which were sent to Rome.

The adherents of the American alt-right are not known for their delicate aesthetic sensibilities, but there is an exception. They love neoclassical architecture and are calling for it to be deployed in the 250th celebrations this year of what they still call ‘the country of liberty’. Judging from the desecration of the Oval Office and its surroundings, and the plans for the world’s most expensive dance hall, what they have in mind is a style derived not from ancient Greece and Rome but 1950s Technicolor movies. Donald Trump’s White House interior reminds me of Hogarth’s crisp verdict on French 18th-century rococo interiors: ‘All gilt and beshit.’ Expect more of the same.

Climb the Reading Room steps to reach the British Museum’s dazzling Hawaii exhibition, and you perform an obeisance. At the top is a representation of Ku, a larger-than-human god of war and chiefly power, carved in stylish fury from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. He once commanded a flight of stairs at the Museum of Mankind in Burlington Gardens. In Hawaii he would have looked down with royal authority from a stone temple mound. We pass below him into the show, it feels, only with his consent. This is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits For that we should offer thanks. At an important time for the museum (on which more below), this is a landmark event that tells of moving encounters with stunning exhibits.

So, the Turner Prize: where do we start? It’s Britain’s most prestigious art award, one that used to mean something and now attracts little more than indifference. Taking place every year, it grants £25,000 to a winner chosen from four shortlisted artists, all of whom are obliged to display work together either at Tate Britain, or at a regional gallery. The latest iteration, at Bradford’s Cartwright Hall, is the best in a while – but before we get to that, some context. The Turner was established in 1984, but only really grabbed anyone’s attention when Channel 4 began televising the prize-giving ceremony in the 1990s.

The DNA of Dulwich Picture Gallery is aspirational, in the sincerest sense. Opening in 1817 when private collections were still the norm, it’s the world’s first purpose-built public art gallery. (It’s also a credible contender for inspiring the design of the red telephone box.) After a significant reworking, and the addition of a new children’s space and sculpture garden, the Gallery is again hoping to redefine what it means to make art accessible. The Grade II*-listed building was Sir John Soane’s utterly original embodiment of the dying wish of the founders: for their collection of old masters to ‘go down to Posterity for the benefit of the Public’.

August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on their heels, and the galleries are filled with makeweight group shows staged to hold the fort until the end of the holidays. This year, however, even events of that kind are thin on the ground: many establishments have simply shuttered for the month – and given the dire state of the art market, I’m inclined to wonder how many will reopen come September. The doom-auguring sunflower paintings here would look great on the cover of a Metallica record Still, I caught the two Anselm Kiefer shows running concurrently.

If you came to this show accidentally, or as a layperson, it could confirm any prejudices you might have about avant-garde sculpture. Pretentious, ugly and resorting to kink. Those pendulous string bags, that enormous turd – gimme a break. Except that would be a mistake. Because the work here is the real thing: the 1960s originals that spawned a million imitations and parodies. The exhibition is perhaps a little cool about selling itself, so allow me. This is a snapshot of the work of three artists around the time they all took part in a 1966 New York show called Eccentric Abstraction. Two of the artists, Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, were nascent superstars.

At a miserable-looking rally for the centre-left Place Publique in mid-March, its co-president, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, made international headlines calling for the Trump administration to return the Statue of Liberty, gifted by the French in 1886 to commemorate the Declaration of Independence: ‘It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us.’ The predictably sensationalist headlines dissipated in a flurry of Republican outrage against ‘the low-level French politician’ as quickly as they had arrived. But Glucksmann’s demand – sincere or not – caught the attention of a group of sculptors who, in their words, have ‘taken up the dream of civilisation’ to produce monumental civic sculpture.

The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a magnificently cheesy 1980s adaptation of India’s national epic. The show has a status in India that’s hard to overstate. Something like 80 per cent of the entire population watched its original run; in rural areas entire villages would crowd around a single television hooked up to a car battery. When the show ended, omitting the ‘Uttara Kanda’, the fairly controversial last book of the original poem, street sweepers across the country went on strike, demanding the government fund more episodes. The government caved. But while every country has its pieces of cult media, in India the cult is literal. Some viewers would take a ritual bath before tuning in.

The Royal Collection Trust has had a rummage in the attic and produced a fascinating show. Displayed in the palatial gallery adjacent to Buckingham Palace, and described on headsets in the reassuring tones of Hugh Bonneville, are public tokens and personal treasures of two generations: Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and George V and Queen Mary. Frocks, clocks and diplomatic gifts; purchases and mementoes that give the illusion that the royal family might be, after all, not so unlike us. There’s an unusual tea set, with odd, red photos: as princess, Alexandra took family snaps and had them printed on to these porcelain teacups in 1892, more than 100 years before Moonpig.

Not many artists engage in the maintenance of a private militia, and it seems fair to assume that those who do may be bound to polarise. The Scottish poet, sculptor, ‘avant-gardener’ and would-be revolutionary Ian Hamilton Finlay was just such a figure: and boy, did he polarise. To his fans, he is a cult figure in the true sense, a limitlessly inventive visionary whose Lanarkshire home and garden remain a site of pilgrimage. To his detractors – notably, a number of vocal Finlay-bashers in the English press – he was a crank, a provincial megalomaniac possessed of artistic, literary and dictatorial pretensions quite out of proportion to his ability.

Towards the end of the British Museum’s Silk Roads show, there is a selection of treasures found in England. Among them is a copper flagon made in Syria and buried in Essex in the late 500s. It is believed that the flagon belonged to an English mercenary who went to fight for the Byzantines against the Sassanians in the 570s. The flagon’s looping handle would have held it tight to a saddle, so perhaps it came to England attached to the warrior’s horse as he rode home from his adventures in the East. There are many spectacular objects in this exhibition. Very many If objects are to inspire more than awe in us, we also need a handle.

The story goes that one day early in the 16th century Leonardo da Vinci was strolling through Florence with a friend. Near the Ponte Santa Trinita they came across a group of gentlemen disputing a point in Dante’s Divine Comedy. Seeing Leonardo, they asked him to explain the passage. At that same moment, Michelangelo Buonarroti also happened to hurry by, and Leonardo beckoned the sculptor over to interpret it for them. But Michelangelo, feeling he was being mocked, rounded on Leonardo: ‘Explain it yourself, you who tried to cast a horse in bronze, and couldn’t do it, and had to abandon the project in shame!’ With that he turned on his heels and stalked off, leaving Leonardo standing in the street embarrassed and furious.

George Orwell took a dim view of competitive sport; he found the idea that ‘running, jumping and kicking a ball are tests of national virtue’ absurd. ‘Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play,’ he wrote in Tribune after scuffles broke out during the Russian Dynamo football team’s 1945 tour. ‘It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war without the shooting.’ Suzanne Lenglen’s loose-fitting knee-length tennis dresses inspired the new ‘style sportif’ of Coco Chanel Baron Pierre de Coubertin, visionary founder of the modern Olympics, took the opposite view: to him the three words ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’ represented ‘a programme of moral beauty’.

‘It had nothing to endow it with the title of studio at all,’ was Edward James’s first impression of Leonora Carrington’s Mexico City workspace in 1946. ‘The place was combined kitchen, nursery, bedroom, kennel and junk store. The disorder was apocalyptic: the appurtenances of the poorest. My hopes and expectations began to swell.’ Carrington blended Egpytian, Mayan, Mesopotamian and Celtic legends learned at her nanny’s knee Over six decades in the creative chaos of this house on Calle Chihuahua, Carrington would paint some of her best-known works and write her quirky serio-comic novella The Hearing Trumpet, which is narrated by a 92-year-old woman.