Culture

The Father, set in a swish Paris apartment, has a beautifully spare and elegant set. The stage is framed by a slender rectangle of dazzling white dots which impart an air of incalculable and almost intimidating opulence to the show. I felt I was lucky to be there. Here’s the plot. Kenneth Cranham plays a doddery old sausage whose daughter and her husband want to dump him in a nursing home. Will they succeed? That’s the plot. Writer Florian Zeller uses pranks and false starts to create suspense and to illustrate Dad’s scrambled mentality. Different actors play the daughter, the son-in-law and the day-nurse. At first this is gratifyingly weird but repetition makes it seem meagre and banal. Other effects stress the same point.

So, it isn't only the hammer-wielding nutters of Isis who destroy 'immoral art'. So do we, in supposedly civilised Britain. A judge's order that the artworks of convicted child abuser Graham Ovenden be destroyed, on the basis that they do not reach our 'standards of propriety', is an act of medievalism to match any of the statue-smashing antics of the Islamic State in recent months. At Hammersmith Magistrates Court, District Judge Elizabeth Roscoe advertised her philistinism for all to see. She said she was not concerned with the 'historical importance or value' of Ovenden's works.

Watch a child draw. See how she scrawls with abandon, jabs the felt tip at the paper, colours an eye so deeply the pen drives a hole through the paper. Look as she concentrates on the action of the subject, strips out unnecessary detail, toys with scale. This is pure drawing, instinctive, expressive and truthful. Children’s drawings are interesting, especially to artists, because of their honesty and their energy. Unfortunately, these qualities are frequently abandoned as they grow up and, for most teenagers, a good drawing is one that resembles a photograph, with the emphasis on precision and neatness. The result is usually a tidy drawing stripped of life; neat, dull and dead. The great challenge is to revitalize drawing. Throughout October, The Big Draw seeks to do just that.

Sometimes, contrary to a widespread suspicion, critics do get it right. On 17 August, 1798 an anonymous contributor to the Diario de Madrid, reviewing an exhibition at the Royal Spanish Academy, noted that Goya’s portrait of Don Andrés del Peral was so good — in its draughtsmanship, its freedom of brushwork, its light and shade — that all on its own it was enough to bring credit to the epoch and nation in which it was created. He (or she) was absolutely correct. [caption id="attachment_9657482" align="alignnone" width="520"] Goya's portrait of Don Andrés del Peral[/caption] The same could be said of many of the exhibits in Goya: The Portraits at the National Gallery.

The Met in HD series got off to an exciting start this year with Il Trovatore, an opera I adore but have never seen a satisfactory performance of, until this one. The production by Sir David McVicar is in his now traditional style, with a reasonable number of very solid-looking props designed by Charles Edwards, and more or less time-honoured operatic acting, but done with intensity and conviction, so that this hardened team of Verdi experts were able to give their all, and obliged by doing so. The result, to my surprise, was that I not only enjoyed this uniquely energising work, but for the first time was moved by it. This despite the Met audience's evident desire to turn it into a costume concert by protracted applause after almost every solo.

Here are some fur coats reclaiming the design canon for the sisterhood. They are draped over the back of tubular steel chairs. In this daring arrangement, they subvert the established patriarchy by partially obscuring the ‘autograph design object’ of the chair, something that represents the historic subsuming of all female creativity under male dominance. While this will be obvious enough, it must be appreciated in the greater context of the work which 'extrudes novelty from recognisability via subtle acts of transformation' and in doing so 'displaces the certainty with which we appoint function and value to objects'. I read this in the catalogue, an essential companion to Nicole Wermers’ ‘Untitled Chairs’.

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach is a one-off, a unique painter with a unique vision.