Culture

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.

Kids, if you’re appalled by the idea of your parents’ generation having sex, look away now. I’m about to describe a scene from an acclaimed Australian drama series, Dalliance, about the antics of a group of wrinklies reunited by an unexpected death in their midst. OK, now the children are all distracted with their TikToks and what have you, I’ll describe the scene: a pair of singles in their sixties are about to have some impromptu rumpy-pumpy in the woman’s camper van after doing a few lines of coke at their mate’s funeral. Man makes awkward pass; woman seems to shy away; man apologises – but all is good: they’re just out of practice at reading the signals. Wait: does he have protection? Yes. Ever optimistic, he does. What, though, about the vexed question of lubricant?

Who Killed Marilyn? is a new show about an old subject. Sharleen Cooper Cohen’s play examines the circumstances surrounding Marilyn’s suspicious death in 1962. Three possible culprits emerge. The mob, the Feds and the Kennedys. Bobby and Jack were desperate to hide any trace of their romantic links with Marilyn. The mob may have rubbed her out by order of the Feds whose boss, J. Edgar Hoover, paid gangsters to conduct irregular assassinations. Hoover hated JFK, we’re told. And Marilyn kept a secret diary that might have ruined JKF’s career. But that gives Hoover a reason to protect Marilyn and to use her testimony against the Kennedys. The mob also hated JFK because he failed to oust Fidel Castro from Cuba. So they had a powerful motive to keep her alive as well.

Artists’ models seldom get a chance to tell their side of the story. Yet one model, Anthony Rudolf, believes they deserve to be ‘remembered for their work and their devotion’. His dazzling new book, Office Hours in the Studio of Paula Rego, celebrates one of the most remarkable artists of our time from this unique perspective. Rudolf is a poet, literary translator and the founder of the Menard Press. He and Rego were partners for the last 26 years of her life (though she preferred the less business-like French terms compagnon and compagne). About three months in, he ‘realised you could never get near Paula during office hours, which she worked strictly. I tentatively asked if I could become a model and she flung her arms around me, saying “I never dared ask you!