Arts Archives

David Inshaw: the great romantic

Arts feature

David Inshaw will celebrate his 70th birthday on 21 March, around the time of the spring equinox. On the eve of this grand climacteric, which will be marked by an exhibition of new and old work at the Fine Art Society, I went down to Devizes to interview him. He has lived for much of his life there, with brief interludes in Bristol, London, Cambridge and Wales. In Devizes he is surrounded by the countryside that has most inspired him — the Marlborough Downs and the open stretches of Salisbury Plain, the trees and hills of his beloved Wiltshire. Inshaw is a landscape and figure painter, known to many as a Ruralist (a group he co-founded in 1975 with his great friend Sir Peter Blake, and which he left in 1983).

William Cook

Wandering eye

Exhibitions

‘When Matisse dies,’ declared Picasso, ‘Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.’ Wandering around this splendid show you can see exactly what he meant. Chagall never used colour for cheap effect, but to convey meaning and emotion. The effect of seeing so many of his works together is almost overwhelming — a symphony hung upon a wall. But these aren’t the romantic paintings of Chagall’s later years, the visions of young lovers floating over seas of flowers. These are the urgent artworks of his youth, made at a time of immense upheaval. By focusing on these early years, to the virtual exclusion of his later work, this fascinating retrospective casts Marc Chagall in an entirely different light.

Lucy Vickery

Foundling Hospital tokens

Exhibitions

‘Dear Sir, I am the unfortunate woman that lies under sentens of Death in Newgatt...’ So begins a letter of 1757 addressed to the powers that be at the Foundling Hospital in London’s Bloomsbury. Written in a strong hand, it contains the poignant petition of a woman on death row, Margaret Larney, that her children, who have been admitted to the hospital separately, might ‘know one and other’. Even if the younger child hadn’t died shortly after admission, Margaret’s eloquent plea would certainly have been in vain. When an infant entered the hospital, its former identity was erased and siblings remained ignorant of their blood ties. But now, some 250 years later, Margaret is getting a second hearing.

Steerpike

Could Malcolm Tucker take on Alan Rusbridger?

Sad news has broken. If the online speculation is true, it appears that casting agents for the upcoming Guardian movie have overlooked Daniel Radcliffe for the part of Alan Rusbridger. Given that Harry Potter and AR are dopplegangers, Mr Steerpike reckons that the agents have missed a trick. For those who haven’t heard, the film will chart the paper's stormy relationship with Wikileaks. Benedict Cumberbatch is already getting to grips with the role of Julian Assange; the question now is, who will play Rusbridger? Incongruous rumours are circulating that the softly spoken editor will be portrayed by Scottish actor Peter Capaldi, aka Malcolm Tucker.

Nicholas Farrell

Beppe Grillo: Italy’s new Mussolini

Features

The stand-up comedian Beppe Grillo, like the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini before him, has a craving to take over the piazza and mesmerise the crowd. Where once young Italians chanted the mantra ‘Du-ce! Du-ce!’ now they chant ‘Bep-pe! Bep-pe!’. But it is not just a shared need to rant and rave at large numbers of complete strangers that hirsute Beppe and bald Benito have in common. Worryingly, for Italy and also for Europe (where democracy seems incapable of solving the existential crisis), there is a lot more to it than that. Beppe Grillo founded the MoVimento 5 Stelle (M5S) in Milan on 4 October 2009. The capital ‘V’ stands for his signature slogan ‘Vaffa!’ which roughly speaking means ‘Fuck off!

Will Gore

First Life of Pi, now Cloud Atlas. Why keep trying to film the unfilmable?

More from Arts

Whenever the possibility of a film version of a difficult or complex book is mooted, speculation mounts about how it will be done. Usually at this point some dull spark will pipe up that some novels are simply ‘unfilmable’ (though such reservations are sometimes shared by the authors of the novels in question: David Mitchell himself never believed that his novel Cloud Atlas could be turned into a movie: ‘My only film-related thought when I was writing the book was what a shame that no one would ever, ever film this,’ he said. ‘I was quite convinced it would never happen’).

Kate Chisholm

Nick Robinson’s Battle for the Airwaves

Radio and podcasts

Deep within the BBC’s inquiry into the Newsnight and Jimmy Savile affair is a comment by Jeremy Paxman so inflammatory as to demand its own investigation (lasting months and costing squillions). The trouble, he said, with BBC News is that it has become dominated by ‘radio people’. This was not, it seems, intended as a compliment. It’s as if, in Paxman’s view, the whole dreadful, dreary, demeaning muddle was the fault of those ‘radio people’, because according to Paxman they ‘belong to a different kind of culture’. You might think it’s of little importance that Paxman thinks himself cast from a different mould to, say, John Humphrys or Eddie Mair.

Olivia Glazebrook

ITV’s Food Glorious Food is under the curse of Simon Cowell

Television

I sometimes worry that ITV — the middle child — doesn’t get enough of my attention and so this week I have decided to redress the balance: I devoted myself to episode one of Food Glorious Food (Wednesday, ITV). It’s a nine-part quest, hosted by Carol Vorderman, which aims to discover ‘Britain’s best-loved recipe’. O jubilate deo! This is how it goes: treasured family recipes are cooked up at regional events and tasted by one of four judges who choose a favourite and submit it to be tasted by the other three. The judges are Loyd Grossman (smooth), Anne Harrison (stern), Stacie Stewart (bubbly) or Tom Parker Bowles (apologetic).

Lloyd Evans

Losing the plot | 28 February 2013

Theatre

Who got the most out of the credit crunch? Security guards, repossession firms, bailed-out banks and, of course, playwrights. Anders Lustgarten is the latest to cash in on five years of global misery with If You Don’t Let Us Dream, We Won’t Let You Sleep. The play, like the title, is effortful, disjointed and cumbersome. In the first half, a gang of fatcat bankers sets up a new financial instrument, Unity Bonds, which will generate profits from socially useful behaviour. This intriguing idea is sidelined in the second half. The action moves to a squatter camp where the banking system is about to be put on trial. Lustgarten assumes, no doubt correctly, that the audience is more in sympathy with anti-capitalists than with high finance.

Peter Phillips

Class prejudice is keeping talented children out of classical music

Music

Musicians have always had an uncertain social status in England, the traditional reactions varying from amused condescension to mild repulsion. The former was the old class-based judgment on men who had chosen to take up a profession which at best was associated with society women and at worst seemed menial; the latter directed towards brass players from rough backgrounds whose lips juggled pint pots with mouthpieces and not much else. The most respectable practitioners were probably organists, often referred to as ‘funny little men’, but taken seriously.

Michael Tanner

Le Nozze di Figaro

Opera

I went to two of the most familiar operas in the repertoire this week, one in HD from the New York Met, the other at the Royal Opera. Both were given in decent if not, with some exceptions, outstanding performances. The experiences led me to think again about the differences between seeing an opera onstage in a theatre and seeing one ‘live’ in the cinema. Our intermission hostess, Renée Fleming, repeated the usual formula about how there is no substitute for actually being present in the theatre where the opera is taking place, but I wonder what she would say if challenged on that point.

Stephen Bayley

The new Design Museum: Prince Charles will prefer it. But should we?

More from Arts

Twenty-five years ago I went to St James’s Palace to ask the Prince of Wales if he would open the new Design Museum. Before us was the model of the building, an elegant, austere, uncompromised white box that was very much along Bauhaus lines. We knew that ‘modern’ no longer meant ‘of-the-moment’ but had become a period style label. Even at the time we acknowledged the layers of irony in this historicist gesture. The Prince, sounding pained, I recall, asked, ‘Mr Bayley, why has it got a flat roof?’ And that was the end of that. Next time it will be different. The Design Museum is moving from a creatively reused banana warehouse near Tower Bridge to a creatively reused Commonwealth Institute on the edge of Holland Park.

John Greening

X5

27 February 2013

Steerpike

Morrissey’s solution for world peace

What is it with former members of The Smiths saying stupid things? Last week it was guitarist Johnny Marr and today it’s Morrissey: ‘If more men were homosexual, there would be no wars, because homosexual men would never kill other men, whereas heterosexual men love killing other men. They even get medals for it. Women don’t go to war to kill other women. Wars and armies and nuclear weapons are essentially heterosexual hobbies.’ Perhaps Mr Steerpike should award a weekly Big Mouth Strikes Again prize.

21 February 2013

Michael Kennedy

The dark side of Benjamin Britten

Arts feature

We are only two months into the Britten centenary year and already books, articles and talks (and, of course, performances) swell the flood of existing biographical studies and the six bulky volumes of diaries and letters. Dead for less than 40 years, Britten is as copiously documented as any English composer except Elgar. Have emails wiped out areas of research? I hope that some teenage composer, a latter-day Britten, is even now baring their musical soul writing candid and maybe scurrilous opinions on the current musical scene in a diary as the young Britten did from 1928. ‘The child is father to the man’ rings true in Britten’s case. Britten the man was a Jekyll and Hyde, with Hyde perhaps too often gaining the upper hand.

Andrew Lambirth

In the thick of it

Exhibitions

Man Ray, born Michael Emmanuel Radnitzky (1890–1976) in Philadelphia, was a maker of images par excellence. He made sculptures, paintings and photographs, but the medium was always secondary to the image. After all, it is the reproduction of his marvellous painting ‘Observatory Time — The Lovers’, in which Lee Miller’s lips are emblazoned across the sky, that one remembers, or the reproduction of his object ‘Gift’, a flat iron with tacks stuck to its ironing face; not the originals. Perhaps the only sculpture one recalls as a three-dimensional presence is his ‘Indestructible Object’, a metronome with a photo of a woman’s eye attached to its swinging arm; and that’s chiefly because it moves.

Sebastian Payne

The cult horror of The Room

More from Arts

The Room is an awful film. Plot lines are picked up and forgotten in seconds, stock footage is repeated continuously, actors and names change without explanation, doors are never closed and every photo frame contains a picture of a spoon. Even the second (absurd) sex scene is just a repeat with different music. But that is exactly its appeal — a film so bad it’s good. Scratch that, it’s so execrable that, to weirdos like me, it’s genius. I’m not alone: The Room has gathered a vast cult following. The Prince Charles cinema in Leicester Square has cottoned on and has frequent showings. They sell out every time. Earlier this month producer, director and star Tommy Wiseau came to entertain his nerdish legions.

Kate Chisholm

Is radio succumbing to the greed of the internet?

Radio and podcasts

‘Young people under 16 don’t want to listen to the radio unless there’s a picture to look at,’ said Annie Nightingale on the Today programme. It was Saturday morning and I was only half listening. But this woke me up sharpish. Nightingale was talking to Sarah Montague about the new ‘Harlem Shake’ craze on YouTube but she also enthused about the new Sunday-night Radio 1 show hosted by Dan and Phil, whose ‘visualised’ radio show I’ve already discussed. She’s right, of course; how can we expect young people brought up on the web, and glued to their iPhones and iPads, to be satisfied with listening to words or music or conversation without a screen to look at, filled with hectic moving images?

James Delingpole

New word order | 21 February 2013

Television

‘Don’t be evil.’ Google’s unofficial motto. ‘Evil men don’t get up in the morning saying, “I’m going to do evil.” They say, “I’m going to make the world a better place.”’ Christopher Booker. Meanwhile — while you were distracted by other things like tax bills and school fees and somehow scraping by — Google and Amazon and Apple took over the world. This, of course, is what novels by the likes of William Gibson, films such as Blade Runner and comic strips like Judge Dredd have been telling us for some time: that one day, the world will be ruled not by governments but by giant corporations.

Deborah Ross

Only disconnect

Cinema

Cloud Atlas is part-sci-fi, part-thriller, part-romance, part-comedy, part-action flick, part-this, part-that and it all adds up to? A whole lot of not very much. Based on David Mitchell’s novel, this strains, laboriously, to capture that novel’s scope and complexity, but gets nowhere near, and takes three hours to get nowhere near. (If you are going to take three hours, you can’t get somewhere, at least? Is that too much to ask?) Its problem isn’t lack of ambition. This cost $100 million, had three directors and stars multiple A-listers in multiple roles in multiple storylines.

Michael Tanner

Spurned women

Opera

I saw three operas this week, all centrally concerned with spurned women. That’s not surprising, given the general subject matter of the art form, but it sometimes makes me wonder why we prefer to see, and more importantly to hear, love-tormented women more than men. The only major exception to spring to mind is Wagner’s Ring, which gets under way with a dwarf teased and rejected by three mermaids. But even Alberich spends much more time elaborating on his plans for world domination than on lamenting lost love; the Ring is quite a big exception, but one still wonders why it is female suffering from despised love rather than the male version of the same complaint that excites operatic composers and their listeners so much.

Giannandrea Poesio

Mixed blessings | 21 February 2013

More from Arts

Last week, Sergei Polunin’s powerful entrance in Marguerite and Armand was saluted with a wave of electrically charged silence: not a cough, not a sound, all eyes glued to the stage. Whether viewers held their breath because they were waiting to see if the star who stormed out of the Royal Ballet still had it, or because they were genuinely impressed, is difficult to say. Personally, I was struck by that first appearance, as it confirmed that since leaving the company amid accusations, allegations and gossip Polunin has refined his already exceptional interpretative and technical skills. His charismatic Armand is the perfect reading of the role for today.

William Cook

The Good Life – how a 70s sitcom became a Conservative lodestar

Features

When the writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey came up with the idea for The Good Life, they were looking for a vehicle for Richard Briers, who’d just turned 40. He was well established but not quite famous — the other three actors even less so. Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith were cast on the strength of their performances in an Ayckbourn play. Paul Eddington was a ‘first eleven light-comedy actor’ (as Briers put it) but he was hardly a household name. In the opening credits, Briers’s name was above the title, the other three were below it. Briers’s Tom Good was the lead; Kendal was ensured a decent role as his wife, Barbara, but Jerry and Margo Leadbetter were initially conceived as supporting characters.

Patrick Carnegy

Moving heaven and earth

Theatre

Although I’ve some doubt — and this would be applauded by Galileo — whether in everyday life it matters very much to know whether the sun goes round the earth or vice versa, I don’t for one minute doubt that the great physicist’s conflict with Mother Church mattered profoundly and resonates to this day. To Brecht, writing Das Leben des Galilei in exile in 1938, shortly after the disastrous Chamberlain appeasement, his play asserted unprejudiced scientific inquiry not just against religious dogma but also the controls that fascism and profiteering have ever sought to impose upon it. He gets to this issue way ahead of Michael Frayn’s treatment in Copenhagen of the 1941 debate between Werner Heisenberg and the Danish physicist Niels Bohr.

Lloyd Evans

Sheer torture

Theatre

Ever been to a ‘promenade performance’? Barmy, really. The audience is conducted through a makeshift theatre space — often a disused ironworks — where the show is performed in disjointed snatches amid atmospheric clutter. Invariably hopeless as drama, promenade shows can be revealing as social anthropology. They lay bare a secret that lies at the heart of theatrical life: actors loathe play-goers. Without a paying audience, all theatre is simply am-dram. And actors have a morbid fear of slipping into the underclass of voluntary performance. So they covertly resent ticket-buying audiences who alone have the power to convert an unpaid show-off into a self-regarding thesp, with his agent and his Spotlight listing and his drink problem.

Micheal Mott

Missing | 21 February 2013

20 February 2013

Steerpike

Bigmouth Strikes Again

Johnny Marr's at it again. ‘David Cameron is not allowed to like my music,’ he fumes. He revives his disgust for Cameron's love of The Smiths at least once every three months. God knows why he bothers. A bid to get his once famous name back in the papers? Or perhaps he likes to madden Tories? Ever since Cameron appeared on Desert Island Discs, Tories have winced at the furious and occasionally bemused response from musicians name-checked by Dave. Marr was, as we know, most put out to find 'The Charming Man' on the list; and Paul Weller of The Jam was lost as to why Cameron liked 'Eton Rifles'. Weller memorably said: ‘Which part of it doesn't he get? It wasn't intended as a fucking jolly drinking song for the cadet corps.

14 February 2013

Andrew Lambirth

Ice Age art at the British Museum: Geniuses of 40,000BC

Arts feature

The best way to approach any exhibition is with a clear and uncluttered mind, without expectations or prejudices. Of course this is often impossible, for all sorts of reasons, particularly when we have some familiarity with the subject on view. Inevitably we are besieged by images and opinions before we enter an exhibition of Manet or Picasso, but with Ice Age Art I was able to approach without any troubling preconceptions. I arrived at the British Museum in a state of pleasant anticipation, and within minutes I was entirely won over. The curator, Jill Cook, has given us an extraordinary glimpse of a long-distant age which yet feels incredibly fresh and relevant to us today.

Niru Ratnam

The new seekers | 14 February 2013

Exhibitions

Over the past year or so, art world insiders have queued up to denounce the current state of the contemporary art world. Charles Saatchi started the ball rolling with a column at the end of 2011 in the Guardian. Breaking his self-imposed ban on interviews or writing, he launched a withering attack on an art world that, according to him, had descended to ‘the sport of the Eurotrashy, Hedge-fundy Hamptonites; of trendy oligarchs and oiligarchs; and of art dealers with masturbatory levels of self-regard’.