Arts Archives

A plea for painting: David Hockney 25, at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, reviewed

The exploding sails of Frank Gehry’s Louis Vuitton building in Paris are currently packed with the exhilarating visual explorations of the octogenarian artist David Hockney. The exhibition begins with a roomful of the paintings that made Hockney famous in the 1960s: his graffiti-style canvases, packed with secret codes and illicit kisses. The next gallery is full of the very different paintings that made him even more famous: swimming pools in sunshine and boys sprawled on beds. Gays straight on, square to the picture frame – images, pure and simple; no hidden hints, no text. This gallery also contains a couple of the portraits that further spread his fame. Sadly, none of the drawings for these are included.

'Play within a Play within a Play and Me with a Cigarette', 2024-2025, by David Hockney. Photograph: Jonathan Wilkinson/David Hockney, © Jonathan Wilkinson

17 July 2025

Margaret Mitchell

The joys of mudlarking

Arts feature

Imagine a London of the distant future. A mudlark combs through the Thames foreshore, looking for relics of the past. What would they find? A rusted Lime bike, a message in a takeaway soy sauce bottle? ‘Vapes,’ says Kate Sumnall, curator of the Secrets of the Thames exhibition at the London Museum Docklands. ‘Lots of vapes.’ Mudlarking – the practice of scavenging at low tide for washed-up historical treasures, oddities or mundane objects – has become a well-gatekept hobby over the past five years. More than 10,000 people are now on the waiting list for mudlarking permits. Of course, anyone can go down to the foreshore to look around and turn pebbles over with their shoe, but even if you flout the rules, mudlarking is no longer the grubby, lawless enterprise it used to be.

Rupert Christiansen

A latter-day exercise in Dada: Nature Theater of Oklahoma reviewed

Dance

What to make of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, which this week made its British debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall? The bare facts indicate that it’s a ‘crazy shit’ performance group of some repute, the brainchild of Pavol Liska and Kelly Copper, established 19 years ago, based in New York, its weird name taken from Kafka’s unfinished novel Amerika. Beyond that, it’s an enigma. The title of its current show, No President, could suggest that satire of Donald Trump is intended, but if so, quite what is being implied remains obscure to me.

Deborah Ross

Definitely the film of the week: Four Letters of Love reviewed

Cinema

In the brief lull between last week’s summer blockbuster (Superman) and next week’s (Fantastic Four) you may wish to catch Four Letters of Love. Based on the internationally bestselling novel (1997) by Niall Williams, it’s a quiet, lyrical, Irish love story featuring a superb cast (Helena Bonham Carter, Pierce Brosnan, Gabriel Byrne) and no dinosaurs marauding through town. Or none that I noticed, I should add. (See: Jurassic World Rebirth, week before last.) Williams has adapted his own book and the director is Polly Steele (The Mountain Within Me, Let Me Go).

Ian Thomson

The Alfred Hitchcock of British painting

A cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria: Bliss: The Composer Conducts reviewed

The Listener

Grade: A– There’s a classic trajectory for British composers: a five-decade evolution from Angry Young Man to Pillar of the Establishment. Right now, you can watch it happening in real time to Thomas Adès and Mark-Anthony Turnage – inevitably, unwittingly, falling unto the pattern established by Sir Arthur Bliss, who shocked critics in the 1920s but died in 1975 as a KCVO, CH and Master of the Queen’s Music. I knew musicians who played under him at the end of his life. One described him as ‘a cross between Peter Rabbit and Queen Victoria’. Bliss was a very capable conductor and this collection of live broadcasts of his own music gives us back the firebrand behind the national treasure.

Graeme Thomson

A theatrical one-woman show: Billie Eilish at the OVO Hydro, Glasgow reviewed

Pop

Like spider plants and exotic cats, certain artists are best suited to the great indoors. Lana Del Rey, for instance, proves the point that just because you can sell enough tickets to fill a stadium doesn’t mean you should necessarily perform in one. Some music blossoms in the sun, some ripens in the shadows. Billie Eilish belongs in the latter camp. Even though her biggest hit, ‘Birds of a Feather’, was the most streamed song on Spotify last year and is now approaching three billion listens, and her duet withCharli xcx on ‘Guess’ was another ubiquitous sound of 2024, her appeal remains slightly subversive.

Lloyd Evans

A bland, reverential portrait of a socialist martyr: Nye at the Olivier Theatre reviewed

Theatre

The memory of Nye Bevan is being honoured at the National Theatre. Having made his name as a Marxist firebrand, Nye was quick to take advantage of the privileges enjoyed by the governing classes whom he affected to despise. He entered parliament in 1929 and began to hang around the Commons bar plying female MPs with double gins. His future wife, Jennie Lee, referred to him as a ‘rutting stag’. Was he a serial bed-hopper as well as a problem drinker? It’s hard to tell from this bland, reverential portrait of a socialist martyr. The director, Rufus Norris, adds song and dance routines, requiring the services of two choreographers, as if to suggest that Nye was a gifted crooner with a great pair of pins as well. Is that true? Or just part of the packaging?

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

A startling inversion of the original opera: The Story of Billy Budd, Sailor in Aix en Provence reviewed

Opera

On the continent this summer, new operas from two of Britain’s most important composers. Oliver Leith likes guns, animals and dissolving sickly sweet sounds in acid baths of microtonality. In one recent orchestral work, the conductor becomes a pistol-wielding madman; his next, Garland, a vast pageant premiering on 18 September at Bold Tendencies, Peckham, sees a horse become a musician. He’s 35 and already has a school. Listen out for it – in the London new-music scene you can’t move for Leithians. The telltale sign is the sound of twisting metal: shiny pitches that warp and bend until brittle. He’s English but in an outsidery way – jokey, gentle, sad, eccentric. The opposite of arch, insidery Benjamin Britten.

James Delingpole

Turgid, vacuous, portentous: The Sandman reviewed

Television

One of the great things about getting older is no longer feeling under any obligation to try to like stuff you were doomed never to like. Steely Dan, Dickens, Stravinsky, Henry James, George Eliot, Wagner, the Grateful Dead, Robin Williams, the collected films of Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, Graham Greene, the Clash, The Young Ones, Seinfeld, Emily Dickinson – obviously I could go on. I don’t like them; I never did like them; but the difference between then and now is that now I know I’m right, whereas then I thought it might be a personal deficiency. Also fairly high on my ‘No’ list would be superhero comics, superhero movies and late-1980s graphic novels, including the excessively fawned-upon Watchmen.

10 July 2025

Sean Thomas

The greatest photography exhibition of all time

Arts feature

I am sitting on a neat little park bench in a tiny medieval town in rural Luxembourg, and I am enjoying a peculiar sensation for which the English language has no precise word. It is the beautiful yet bittersweet silence induced by an encounter with undeniably great art. Something so profound, moving and true, it leaves you speechless, maybe even a little breathless. I’ve experienced this feeling just a few times in my life. When I saw the Stanze of Raphael in the Vatican Museums. When I read the last pages of Joyce’s Ulysses – ‘yes I said yes I will Yes’. When I listened to the second side of Joy Division’s Closer, with its exquisitely mournful electro-chamber music. And now I am experiencing it again.

Craig Raine

What we get wrong about modernism

Grayson Perry has pulled off another coup at the Wallace Collection

Exhibitions

This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it ‘awkward and snarky’, applying that sturdy English put-down ‘arch’, and generally carping at ‘rich insider’ Sir Grayson Perry for posing as an outsider artist. Word-of-mouth reviews were completely different, however, almost as if gallery-goers, free from the necessity of taking an art-historical position, had just really enjoyed the whole bonkers experience. To get to the exhibition, which is down in the former cellars of Hertford House, you first walk through the Wallace Collection, past its gleaming ormolu and onyx treasures.

Deborah Ross

Watch the 1978 version instead: Superman reviewed

Cinema

My father took us to the cinema (Odeon, Leicester Square) once a year at Christmas and in 1978 the film was Superman. I remember it vividly, and I remember it as thrilling, but hadn’t seen it since so I rewatched it and it is everything a superhero movie should be, the gold standard. It has wit. It has intelligence. It has charm, humour, warmth. It’s as interested in the person behind the superpower as it is in the superpower itself. It does not mistake spectacle for storytelling. (Superman in all his garb doesn’t even appear until nearly an hour in.) It wasn’t noisy CGI mayhem with nothing else going for it. Like this is. James Gunn’s Superman kicks off a reboot of the entire DC cinematic universe, so there will be plenty more where this came from, alas.

James Walton

How to holiday White Lotus-style: Billionaire Playground reviewed

Television

Today’s television is notably fond of presenting us with very rich people to both despise and wish we lived like. As well as high-end dramas like Succession and The White Lotus (a programme that’s caused a huge rise in bookings for the resorts where its characters’ dreadfulness is filmed), there are any number of documentaries in which the bling’s the thing. Netflix, for example, has a genre called ‘Lavish Reality Lifestyles’ that consists of 38 different shows. In a mildly cunning twist, Billion Dollar Playground makes some of the staff who wait on the wealthy a kind of audience surrogate: mixing enthusiastic wonder at all that money can bring with beady-eyed disdain for the sense of entitlement displayed by those it brings it to.

Richard Bratby

A contradictory staging, but the music floods the ear with splendour: Semele at the Royal opera reviewed

Opera

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there – and opera directors really, really wish they didn’t. The problem is particularly acute if, like the Royal Opera’s Oliver Mears, you believe in staging Handel’s concert works as if they were operas. Broadly speaking, Handel’s oratorios affirm the moral and political consensus of Hanoverian England – Protestantism, marriage, loyalty to Church and Crown. All deeply uncool now, of course, so when Mears staged Jephtha in 2023 he duly inverted its central premise. The good guys became the bad guys. Unfortunately, Handel missed that production meeting and the result was as incoherent as it was dour. Semele is a slightly different case. Handel is trying something altogether friskier – disarmingly so, at times.

Michael Hann

A delight: Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park reviewed

Pop

We all know, at heart, that economic theories of rational behaviour are rubbish. And that their application ruins so many areas of life. Football supporters, for example, are not ‘customers’; they are supporters. They are at the club before a new owner arrives, they remain there after that owner leaves. In the meantime, they do not make rational decisions. They do not, when QPR are rubbish, pop across west London to support Chelsea, though it might be the economically rational thing to do. Same with pop. I’m a music fan more than I am a customer.

Lloyd Evans

More drama-school showcase than epic human tragedy: Evita reviewed

Theatre

Evita, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a catwalk version of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. The actors perform on the steps of a football stadium where they race through an effortful series of dance routines accompanied by flashy lights and thumping tunes. It’s more a drama-school showcase than an epic human tragedy. There are no interiors, no furnishings and no props – not even a suitcase for ‘Another Suitcase in Another Hall’. Rachel Zegler plays the lead in black pants and a bra from M&S. In Act Two, she changes into a new bra and pants. White this time, with silvery spangles. She looks like a majorette. Why no proper clothing?

3 July 2025

Isabel Hardman

Landscape designer Tom Stuart-Smith on mistakes, sand and weeds

Arts feature

If you’re looking for an early example of Tom Stuart-Smith’s work, you’d have to go to a car park to find it. The now world-famous landscape designer started his career doing ‘awful supermarket projects’ where ‘landscape was perceived as just something they kind of had to do’. This was in the 1980s: today, if you want to see a Stuart-Smith landscape, you can go to St Paul’s Cathedral, where he has designed a public ‘reflection garden’, the walled garden at the Knepp Estate, or the Hepworth Gallery in Wakefield, where sculptures sit among naturalistic sweeps of grasses and perennials.

Sam Leith

Truly awful: Roblox’s Grow a Garden reviewed

No amount of discourse will make a good pop song into a great one

Pop

There is no higher calling than making great pop music, and no mechanism by which such an achievement can be faked or fudged. No lofty exposition, no pleading discourse, no mitigating circumstance, no ifs, buts or boo-hoo back story can bend a piece of so-so music into a great pop song. We simply know one when we hear one. Commentators may gush about Beyoncé’s genre-strafing cultural significance until the cows come home, but it doesn’t alter the plain fact that she hasn’t released a single piece of music in more than a decade that will stand the test of time come pop’s judgment day. ‘Pop’ implies freshness. Fizz. This doesn’t merely apply to the sound of the music, but the speed of delivery. It should be urgent, immediate, endlessly on tap.

Ivo Delingpole

The political climate at Glastonbury was not especially febrile

Pop

Everyone who wasn’t at Glastonbury this year knows exactly what it was like: a seething mass of hatred and rabid leftiness, characterised by an angry punk duo named Bob Vylan calling for the death of the IDF. But that’s just the tabloid hysteria talking – betraying also maybe a hint of envy towards those lucky enough to have bagged one of the £400 tickets. The truth is, the political climate was not especially febrile. Sure, the jaunty red, white, green and black of the Palestinian flag was very en vogue, but a few years back it was the blue and yellow of Ukraine and the EU. A few decades before that it was free Tibet. Flags of various communist regimes with questionable human rights records, meanwhile, dip in and out.

Martin Gayford

The greatest decade for British painting since Turner and Constable? The 1970s

Exhibitions

Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and on it went, a flurry of paint marks and brush strokes, yellow, green and occasionally blue, like a cornfield at harvest time. By the time we got to the end some seven metres of it lay stretched out at our feet. It was the first time anyone had seen this unknown magnum opus by Gillian Ayres since it was rolled up in 1974 – and it looked sensational. Recently I’ve been reflecting on the 1970s for a couple of reasons. One is that I’m working on a book about art in London at that time, the other is that I’ve been helping to organise an exhibition of Ayres’s work from that era at the Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge. Of course, as L.P.

Deborah Ross

Jurassic Park Rebirth is the dumbest yet

Cinema

Midway through Jurassic World Rebirth the scientist character played by Jonathan Bailey, whom we can all immediately spot as a scientist (he wears glasses), tells us that intelligence is not especially useful for a species. Look at dinosaurs, he continues, ‘who are dumb but survived for 165 million years’. These Jurassic films have been going for 32 years so intelligence may not be necessary for the long-term survival of a movie franchise either. More worryingly, as each of these films is dumber than the last it could go on for ever. I say all this as a fan of the first film who has been perpetually disappointed ever since. This is the seventh film and after the especially pitiful fifth and sixth ones we were promised a rebirth. It’s in the title.

Lloyd Evans

Scooby-Doo has better plots: Almeida’s A Moon for the Misbegotten reviewed

Theatre

A Moon for the Misbegotten is a dream-like tragedy by Eugene O’Neill set on a barren farm in Connecticut. Phil Hogan and his daughter Josie have worked the rocky soil for 20 years and they’ve come up with a joke. ‘If cows could eat stones this would be a grand dairy farm.’ Phil is a coarse, shifty bully who starts the play by assaulting his neighbour and threatening to murder him. For some reason this crime goes unpunished and the incident isn’t mentioned again. Very odd. The elements of this lop-sided story are clumsily arranged by O’Neill. His cold, narcissistic characters don’t make much sense and the subplot concerning a property deal is so complicated that it doesn’t affect the narrative one way or another.

Rupert Christiansen

Depressingly corny: Quadrophenia, a Mod Ballet, reviewed

Dance

It’s all very well for people like me to sneer at dance makers for drawing on classic rock as a quick way of pulling in the punters, but the trick clearly does the business. Sadler’s Wells was pretty well full on the night I saw Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia, a concept album that has endured several iterations and rewrites since the recording was first released on vinyl by the Who in 1973. An audience of all shapes and ages seemed to be having a good time, but although there’s nothing disgraceful about the show that director Rob Ashford has overseen, it seemed to me depressingly corny and laboured – a bumpy ride hitched to a creaky old bandwagon.

James Delingpole

The Simpsons may be genius – but it’s also evil

Television

Marge Simpson is dead. But does anyone care? I’ve written loads of pieces over the years about the genius of The Simpsons – how extraordinarily prescient it is (most famously when, in 2000, it predicted a Trump presidency), how delightful the subplots are, how it works on so many levels – but I’m now beginning to suspect that all along it was a honeytrap designed to seduce you and your children into screen zombiedom. Obviously I don’t want to push the ‘TV is bad for you’ argument too hard because I might be out of a job.

Richard Bratby

Brave and beautiful: Longborough’s Pelléas et Mélisande reviewed

Opera

King Arkel, in Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, is almost blind, and he rules over a kingdom of darkness. Debussy’s score is so luminous that it’s easy to forget just how dark it supposedly is, this mythical realm of Allemonde – even despite the libretto’s references to gloomy caves, shadowy castles and forests that block out the sunlight. Many productions take their visual cues from the music rather than the words, providing endless opportunity for shimmering effects and the subtle play of light and shade. Jenny Ogilvie’s staging for Longborough Festival Opera doesn’t just embrace the darkness; it goes all in. Shadows texture the huge, brutalist wall of Arkel’s castle and occasionally – briefly – it’s pierced by shafts of sunlight.

26 June 2025

George Young

The French sculptors building the new Statue of Liberty

Arts feature

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.