Culture

Every visitor to Charleston Farmhouse will know the work of Quentin Bell even if they don’t realise it. He made the distinctive clay colander lights there, and many of the zany sculptures and ceramics. The son of Vanessa Bell, he grew up at Charleston, and later, when he was of great age – and even greater beard – he led a campaign to ensure the place was properly preserved. But what was Bell’s work really like? This exhibition gives us about 100 examples so that his singular vision emerges, and guess what, for all the progressive modernism of his background, he had a taste for Victoriana, fairground illusionism and the Belle Époque. His reliefs are dancers out of Degas, his figurines dressed like Manet’s bar attendant.

The only problem with presenting a blazing masterpiece such as Balanchine’s Symphony in Three Movements as a curtain raiser is that it will make anything that follows it look pallid or insignificant. And that’s what blights English National Ballet’s new triple bill, which starts with a massive blast of electricity and ends in a big slow yawn. Symphony in Three Movements formed part of the astonishing festival that George Balanchine masterminded in 1972 as a homage to his close friend and artistic inspiration Igor Stravinsky, who had died the previous year. Presented in one week were 31 ballets to the composer’s scores, 21 of them new, ten of them by Balanchine himself.

Aphrodite – talk about a difficult birth. Her father the Sky (Ouranos) had come to resent the fertility of his wife/mother the Earth (Gaia). They’d had 18 children already – a gamesome brood that included Titans, Cyclopes, and the 100-handed Hecatoncheires. The last of these were so hateful that Ouranos convinced himself that he would be murdered by one of them and usurped as ruler on high. Ouranos’s way of coping with his complex was to keep on having sex with his wife so as to hole up his offspring in the birth canal. Gaia urged her sons to save her, but only Kronos, the youngest of the Titans, was brave enough. While his father was still at it, Kronos went in and lopped off his genitals with a sickle.

Phrenology, eh? It’s cobblers, plainly, but Robert Schumann didn’t know that and his biographer Martin Geck tells how in 1846, near Dresden, he submitted to a full once-over from Europe’s leading cranium-fondler Robert Noel. Noel clearly knew his patient, because his analysis echoes what anyone who knows Schumann’s music might say about the personality of this supreme romantic. Noel detected ‘sense of form – modesty – strength of purpose’. Touchingly, he also detected ‘anxiety that stands in the way of happiness’. Then the clincher, the observation that grabs straight at the heart of any Schumann fan: ‘emotional through and through’. Well, we Schumann-lovers will take all the back-up we can get.

As I sat down to write this article, an artist friend phoned me to deliver a pithy but convincing defence of public art: it exists, he said, to extract high culture from its supposedly elitist setting, making it visible to an audience who might otherwise feel excluded. This made me think back to my own formative encounters with the art world in the late 1990s and 2000s, most of which I owe to public commissions in the northeast of England. At that moment, a Newcastle-based commissioning body called Locus+ was in close dialogue with some of the world’s best artists: they had Douglas Gordon set fire to a grand piano and Chris Burden sail a model ship from the Fair Isle to Newcastle. They enabled Fiona Banner to melt down a Tornado warplane and reconstitute it as a giant bell.

In the heart of Bloomsbury, deep in the bowels of the UCL geography department, down corridors floored in institutional linoleum, sticky and scuffed by generations of students, is a room full of maps. Hundreds of thousands stacked on top of each other, tidied away in sliding wooden drawers that march to the ceiling. But not only maps: there are shelves groaning with atlases, guidebooks and Baedeckers; an entire annexe given over to hundreds of wall charts. In fact, almost every conceivable way you might orient yourself on the globe, or make legible any geographical phenomenon on paper, is represented here. It’s a cartophile’s delight; an obsessive compulsive’s nightmare.