Arts Archives

How China’s Bayeux Tapestry differs from ours

Exhibitions

The V&A’s remarkable survey of Chinese painting begins quietly with a beautiful scroll depicting ‘Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk’, from the early 12th century, which, with its bright colours, shallow space and lack of setting, invites comparison with a western masterpiece of a similar date, the Bayeux Tapestry. The crowded urgencies and narrative drive of the English/French embroidered cloth couldn’t be further from the refined intervals and sophisticated relationships of the Chinese scroll, and yet both tell much about the cultures that produced them. However, neither should be read simply as historical documents: both offer rare aesthetic pleasures of quite different distillations.

John Spurling

What my addiction to Chinese painting made me do

Exhibitions

My addiction to Chinese landscape painting began in 1965 at the V&A, in a travelling exhibition of the Crawford Collection from America. The catalogue entries were supplied by the doyen of Chinese art historians in Britain, Michael Sullivan, who died aged 97 just a month before the opening of this latest exhibition of Chinese painting at the V&A. His particularly well-written and stimulating books on Chinese art, especially Symbols of Eternity, published in 1980, kept my addiction smouldering until at last I felt I had to do something about it and wrote a novel, The Ten Thousand Things. Its central character is a 14th-century Chinese landscape-painter, Wang Meng, whose ‘total absorption in the language of painting’ reminded Sullivan of Cézanne.

Lloyd Evans

British empire? What British empire?

Theatre

Here’s a tip for play-goers. When the curtain goes up on a garden, prepare for some feeble plotting. The glory of gardens, for the playwright, is that the characters can enter and leave without reason. The rites of welcome and valediction, the physical opening and shutting of doors, the declaration of motive are all abandoned. Anyone can wander in and out of a backyard. But that freedom of action is denied to a character who enters, say, a palace or a travel agents or a bedroom. Shaw is fond of gardens. Ayckbourn quite likes them too. Shakespeare used them more than once (but he’s forgiven) and David Storey sets his 1970 classic Home in a garden where two elderly bores bump into each other on a warm autumn day. They seem to be acquainted.

Marcus Berkmann

Morrissey can’t even moan properly — here’s a frontman who can

Music

There is much to be said for Schadenfreude. (If it was edible, it would be a meal in a very expensive restaurant, for which someone else was paying.) So it’s probably inadvertently that Morrissey has added to the gaiety of nations this past fortnight with the publication of his autobiography, winningly titled Autobiography. So catastrophically bad does the book turn out to be that Morrissey-loathing critics have queued up to give it (and him) a damn good thrashing. It has been a long time coming. While it has always been clear that The Smiths were every bit as good as we thought they were at the time, it is even clearer now that Morrissey’s symbiotic working partnership with Johnny Marr was the reason why.

Deborah Ross

Ryan Gosling couldn’t play Taki better than Taki

Cinema

Seduced and Abandoned is both a satire on film-making and a love letter to film-making and a joy. A documentary made by the director and writer James Toback, in cahoots with his friend the actor Alec Baldwin, it follows the two as they work their way round the Cannes Film Festival, trying to raise financial backing for a film inspired by Last Tango in Paris. They schmooze. They lunch. They cajole. They beg. And in the process meet, among others, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernardo Bertolucci and Ryan Gosling as well as the billionaire shipping heir and journalist Taki, who writes the High life column in this magazine, and whom they try to tap up for $20 million. Taki plays himself, but you know what? He’s so great, he may have a future in it.

Michael Tanner

Keith Warner’s Wozzeck doesn’t make me as angry as it used to

Opera

When Keith Warner’s production of Berg’s Wozzeck was first produced at the Royal Opera, nine years ago, it made me more angry than any that I had ever seen. At its first revival in 2006, my response was milder, though still outraged. Now, on its third outing, I mind it even less, partly because the musical performance is so strong. Warner has returned to oversee this revival, which, if memory serves, is little different from the last one, so he still regards Wozzeck as the portrayal of an experiment, with Wozzeck as the guinea pig, and the rest of the cast, with minor exceptions, as his tormenting experimenters. Most of the stage is a huge white room, suggesting a nightmare hospital or a morgue, and containing four large vitrines, with huge toadstools, etc. in three of them.

Clarissa Tan

Come to the Spectator office, Gareth Malone, and hear our ‘Carmina Burana’

Television

They’re now televising proceedings from the Court of Appeal. Great. As if I didn’t have enough to do already, keeping tabs on Strictly Come Dancing and EastEnders, I now have to monitor what’s happening within the hallowed judicial temples of the land. The broadcasting of court cases has been much debated, with people fussing about whether it will influence the meting out of Justice, and the implications for Law and Order once these are exercised in front of the cameras, and other high-minded issues. My own worry is about my job scope. Everything is televised these days, which means everything can be reviewed.

Kate Chisholm

You lost Aled Jones and Catherine Bott, Radio Three — but all is forgiven

Radio

It’s hard to stay cross with Radio 3 for long. Just when I thought the network had stretched my loyalty too far by not only allowing Aled Jones to decamp to Classic FM but also saying goodbye to the great Catherine Bott, I had a comeback conversion. I’ll explain how that happened later. First, we should bewail the loss of Bott, who made The Early Music Show her own, with her enthusiasm, her practised authority, her ability to convey insights without being ponderous. She drew us in to share her passion for music and composers we’d never even heard of, let alone felt any desire to hear.

Freddy Gray

How we beat the Boche — at sidecar racing

1 November 2013

Steerpike

Political philosophy, Harry-style

Boy-band super-hero Harry Styles proclaimed on Twitter earlier today: ‘All social change comes from the passion of individuals.’ His shrieking fans were enthused by this insight. Some even asked if they could quote him in their exams. How sweet. Mr S is pleased to see little Harry channelling American anthropologist Margaret Mead. She is alleged to have said (although I can't discover where and when she said it), 'Never ever depend on governments or institutions to solve any major problems. All social change comes from the passion of individuals.' Clever lady, that. But what could all this philosophising from Styles, a self-confessed Labour supporter, mean? Mr S has a theory.

31 October 2013

Peter Hoskin

How I learned to start screaming and love the horror movie

Arts feature

Buddy, you can keep your Christmases and your Easters, your Hanukkahs and your Eids. For someone like me, the annual celebration that really matters is the one that falls on 31 October — Halloween. This isn’t because I’m an inveterate trick-or-treater, out for candy and larks. It isn’t because I own shares in a pumpkin patch. It’s because I am a film fan, grateful for any excuse to indulge in horror movies as night’s dark curtains draw closer. No other time of the year offers such a perfect alignment of occasion and genre. ’Tis, after all, the season to be scared. And this season is shaping up better than most.

Andrew Lambirth

Is Paul Klee really a great modern master?

Exhibitions

There is a school of thought that sees Paul Klee (1879–1940) as more of a Swiss watchmaker than an artist, his paintings and drawings too perfect, too contrived. Viewing this new exhibition at Tate Modern, one might add that they are also too mannered and precious. I had been looking forward to this show, but going round it I found myself all too frequently impatient and disappointed. Yet Klee is a great modern master, you say; can he be dismissed so easily? Perhaps it is all in the selection of work, for Klee was prolific even though he died young, with a total output of about 10,000 paintings, drawings and works on paper, more than a thousand of which he made in the last year of his life.

Sarah Wardle

Finding

Poems

(for Aidan Williams) After a difficult week at work, when I was trying too hard on a short fuse, I suddenly knew that all the hurt would have a certain way of being released, Googled stables in the centre of town and telephoned, but not to book a ride, just to have five minutes with any one of the ponies, and as he fed I cried deeply from a well I thought was dry, and while I hugged, breathed fully of his sweat, heard him intently chomping on the hay, told him I loved him and kissed his neck, I knew calm like that with you this afternoon, my head on your heartbeat, animal and true.

Patrick Carnegy

David Tennant plays Richard II like a casual hippie

Theatre

Gregory Doran, now in command at Stratford in succession to Sir Michael Boyd, launches his regime with Richard II, intending to stage the complete Shakespearean canon over the next six years, ‘making every play an event’. What’s really good is that the plays will also be seen on tour, in London, online and ‘live on screen in cinemas and classrooms nationwide’. It’s taken too long for the publically funded RSC to put live ‘streaming’ in place; Richard II, broadcast on 13 November, will be the first play so honoured. With David Tennant in the title role this may already be a sell-out, but encore screenings are already planned in many cinemas.

Lloyd Evans

Toffs rule!

Theatre

This is a strange one. Simon Paisley Day’s new play feels like a conventional comedy of manners. Three couples pitch up at a Welsh cottage for a relaxing weekend away from the kiddies. Trouble erupts instantly. Keith and Briony bicker over the milk that the swollen-breasted Briony has to express into plastic bottles. Keith secretly craves his wife’s ‘liquid love’ and he tiptoes around the cottage trying to glug it back without being spotted by the others. Ross and Rosy arrive. They’re an achingly smug yuppie twosome. They finish each other’s sentences. They tee up each other’s anecdotes. They stand in the kitchen entwined in each other’s arms and gaze out at their friends like kittens on a Christmas card.

Peter Phillips

How to conduct a Tallis motet in a cardboard cathedral

Music

To undertake a concert tour of New Zealand’s cathedrals at the moment is to be constantly reminded of the destructive power of nature and how dogged people can be when the chips are down. The list of buildings that the earthquake of February 2011 destroyed in the centre of Christ-church includes the Anglican cathedral, which, shorn of its bell tower and west end, will have to be entirely pulled down sooner or later. The square outside it looks like a war zone without the bullet holes. Other cities such as Napier, itself rebuilt after an earthquake in 1931 and made into an Art Deco jewel, are facing up to the reality of having to dismantle their principal buildings to make them quake-proof, as has happened in Wellington.

Deborah Ross

Philomena is Dame Judi’s film

Cinema

Philomena is based on the true story of an Irish woman searching for the son stolen from her by the Catholic Church 50 years earlier, and although, as a cinematic experience, it could so easily have felt as if you were being repeatedly slapped round the head by a copy of Woman’s Own, it is, thankfully, quite a few notches up from that. Indeed, as directed by Stephen Frears, it is quiet, restrained, unfussy, and has, at its heart, an injustice so grave it will make your blood boil. You will also cry. Seven minutes in, and I was already crying. Not proud, but it is a fact. Dame Judi Dench stars as Philomena, which is, of course, beyond wonderful, as any film starring Dame Judi Dench will be highly watchable, whatever.

Kate Chisholm

Your life is not like a Detroit assembly line — it’s worse

Radio

This year’s Free Thinking festival at the Sage in Gateshead has been asking the question, Who’s in Control?. Oddly, or perhaps presciently, as soon as I typed that last word ‘control’, the power went off in the midst of Monday’s storm. No word processor, no internet connection, no phone line, almost no radio (since the only battery-operated radio I now possess is in the bathroom). A weekend of debates and talks about who’s really in charge of our health, our imagination, our privacy soon becomes a lot of hot air in the face of hurricane-force winds.

Michael Henderson

‘I was an arrogant 18-year-old’: Daniel Harding on growing up

Music

‘Have a look at this,’ says Daniel Harding, goggle-eyed, between mouthfuls of salmon. The pictures on his smartphone show Claudio Abbado, one of his mentors, conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Schumann’s Scenes from Faust, a work that gets closer to Harding’s musical personality than any other, which he has just recorded with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and which he will conduct in Berlin in December. ‘Doing his prep’, you might call it. If ever a conductor was a child of his time it is Harding, who, at 38, remains engagingly youthful and ever curious, hence the use of technology to augment his preparation. It is 20 years now since the schoolboy trumpeter left Chetham’s School in Manchester, trailing clouds of glory.

James Delingpole

James Delingpole: All students need a ‘sense of entitlement’ — ask my fundie friend Rupert

Television

‘Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans,’ said John Lennon. Quite apposite from a man who — presumably — meant to spend a ripe old age staging increasingly embarrassing art happenings with Yoko Ono, rather than be shot dead by a nutcase. It also applies to the two things that most grabbed me on TV this week: A Very English Education (BBC2, Sunday) and the Red Wedding episode of Game of Thrones (available via Blinkbox). The first, a follow up to Public School — the BBC’s 1979 fly-on-the-wall series about Radley — sought to find out what had become of its various stars. One of them, Rupert Gather, is now a very successful fund manager. Rupert is an old friend from way back.

Lucy Vickery

Nick Cave is still raising hell

29 October 2013

Steerpike

Taking on the most dangerous job in journalism

Readers will recall the sad demise of Tatler Alan, the cute pooch who came to a sticky end in a tragic accident involving the doors of Vogue House, where the magazine is based. Well, I am the bearer of happier news this time: the girls in pearls have a new canine recruit, Geoffrey, a puppy that seems just as sweet as his unlucky predecessor. So then. Happiness restored at last and a dark chapter in Bystander’s history closed. Just watch out for those revolving doors, Geoffrey.

28 October 2013

Rod Liddle

Educating Yorkshire was, for the most part, self-indulgent pap

I don’t know if you’ve seen the documentary series, Educating Yorkshire, which has been as depressing as you might imagine from the title. Some of the teachers in the film were excellent, but the overall feeling one got was of inadequate individuals endlessly indulging their arrogant and stupid charges. As described here, rather brilliantly, in The Daily Mail. The headmaster in particular got my goat. I don’t think heads should address the pupils as ‘mate’ and suck up to them. There was an especially emetic final scene for the end of year address from the headmaster to the year 11 pupils, in which the staff all started crying.

24 October 2013

Andrew Lambirth

Welcome home, Malcolm Morley

Arts feature

The Ashmolean Museum has taken the radical step of embracing contemporary art, and is currently hosting (until 30 March 2014) a mini-retrospective of Malcolm Morley’s work, curated by Sir Norman Rosenthal and borrowed entirely from the prestigious American-based Hall Art Foundation. Morley (born London 1931) was the first winner of the ever-controversial Turner Prize (apparently David Sylvester threatened to resign as a judge if Morley was not awarded the prize), but has lived in America since 1958 and visits these shores rarely. The last time he was here was in 2001, for a full-scale retrospective of his work at the Hayward Gallery. We haven’t seen enough of his art in this country over the past decade, so this show is a most welcome event.

Matilda Bathurst

Braque in full flight

Exhibitions

Towards the end of his life, Georges Braque described his vision in the following terms: ‘No object can be tied down to any one sort of reality; a stone may be part of a wall, a piece of sculpture, a lethal weapon, a pebble on a beach… Everything is subject to metamorphoses.’ Since then, set ideas of Braque’s oeuvre have crusted over like dry impasto: Braque the cubist, Braque the inventor of the papier-collé, Braque whose blue birds soar on the ceiling of the Louvre. The Grand Palais now hosts the first retrospective of the artist’s work to be held in Paris for 40 years, setting those metamorphoses back in flux. A retrospective demands a narrative of progression.

Ariane Bankes

The big tease

Exhibitions

Perhaps the greatest irony of many in this first solo London show of Sarah Lucas is that it is sponsored by Louis Vuitton. ‘Symbolising French elegance and joie de vivre, the Maison LV has always collaborated with the best engineers, decorators and artists,’ it claims. Well, welcome to a new world. Soiled mattresses provocatively pierced by fruit’n’veg, two dessicated hams shoved into a pair of knickers, a mechanical ‘wanking’ machine, a primeval soup of penises — you get the drift. It is of course vintage Lucas, a retrospective of work drawn from two decades of artistic confrontation, and the site she has chosen for this engagement is the human body. And how cleverly she articulates it.

Lloyd Evans

The Light Princess badly needs a mission

Theatre

There are many pleasures in The Light Princess, a new musical by Tori Amos. George MacDonald’s fairy story introduces us to a beautiful red-haired royal, Althea (Rosalie Craig), who has a mysterious resistance to gravity. After various tribulations she abandons life on dry land and becomes a mermaid. The show meets these technical challenges with some brilliance. Althea seems to float mysteriously across the stage in midair while being supported on the limbs of black-clad gymnasts. Later she moves to a lake, which is suggested by intricate layers of shimmering blue cloth. But despite the sumptuous and ingenious special effects, the show hasn’t a powerful enough storyline or sufficient character interest to become a hit. The engine-room is absent.

Giannandrea Poesio

A rich, colourful romp

Damian Thompson: I may be in danger of becoming an opera queen

Music

It’s taken 40 years, but I’ve finally developed a taste for the one type of classical music that I couldn’t stand. And last week I broke the news to the man responsible: Roger Hewland, owner of Gramex, the world’s finest second-hand classical CD and record shop, just behind Waterloo Station. ‘Roger, I’ve suddenly got into Italian opera,’ I said. He raised an eyebrow in mock concern. ‘Oh dear, now that is serious. It’s an incurable addiction and [rubbing his hands together — he’s a shopkeeper, after all] a most expensive one. May I ask what you were listening to when the symptoms first appeared?’ ‘Donizetti. Lucia di Lammermoor with Sutherland and Pavarotti.’ ‘All is lost!