Culture

Pansy is meant to be a sympathetic figure, but I felt sorrier for those who had to put up with her The central character in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths is Pansy (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), an angry, bitter, late middle-aged woman who rages against everyone and everything. Against her husband, her son, chuggers, dogs in coats, shop assistants, babywear with pockets: ‘What’s it going to keep in its pocket?’ Everyone, Leigh has said, ‘knows a Pansy’. Or is one, he might have added. Or is in touch with their inner Pansy. Why does babywear have pockets? This is not a cheerful film and, as with Leigh generally, there is no neat redemptive arc. The first thing I said to my companion when it finished was: ‘Well, that was horrible.

A paradox of art history: to understand the artists of the past, it helps to study how, and where, they conceived of the future. If today we foresee the future in the East, previous generations looked westward. In the last century, Europeans, having inherited a seemingly aged and decrepit civilisation, determined that the future of art was to be found in the New World. That much is well known. But this did not always mean America. Indeed, the true cognoscenti had a different country in mind: Brazil.

'Immersive' exhibitions get a bad rap. And it's not hard to see why. But if, like me, you find yourself hard-pressed to concentrate on Important Art when troubled by the cares and complexities of life, then digitally amplified sensation and spectacle might be a decent alternative if your museal itch needs scratching in stressful times. There are two notable options in London right now. The first is Vogue: Inventing the Runway, at the Lightroom in King’s Cross. Drawing on Vogue's nearly 150 year old archive, it’s a show about the catwalk's flashpoints, narrated by Cate Blanchett.

When passions are aroused, all of us are liable to overstate our case. Dan Hicks, a curator at Oxford’s extraordinary Aladdin’s Cave of anthropology, the Pitt-Rivers Museum, is perhaps a case in point. A Swedish academic, Staffan Lunden, has convincingly argued that Hicks is guilty of ‘distortion’ when writing about the British raid on Benin in 1897, which brought several thousand objects, including finely wrought brass statuettes, to museums across the world. Hicks published his uncompromising views in 2020 in a prize-winning book, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution.

When first considering architects for the new Louvre in 1981, Emile Biasini, the project’s head, liked that I.M. Pei was both ‘Chinese as well as American: Chinese in his respect of the past, and American in the way of radical solutions’. His controversial glass pyramid ignited much debate about which side won out. These entanglements, between traditionalism and modernity, East and West, would come to characterise both Pei’s Louvre and his six-decade career. After a seven-year gestation, the first comprehensive retrospective of the architect, at Hong Kong’s M+ museum, finally offered a longer view. Despite calling America home, Pei felt a duty to help China find its own architectural language Pei’s prolific career had a head start.