The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
2012 is proving something of an annus mirabilis for Anthony Caro OM CBE RA, now 88, with no fewer than three exhibitions of his work on view around the country. And he continues to beaver away daily in his studio in Camden Town, London, with the strength of a man much younger than himself, one who has been manhandling heavy, often intractable materials throughout the course of his creative life.
Andrew Lambirth reflects on the images that help shape our perception of the Queen Her Majesty the Queen has been a global celebrity for 60 years, and she carries her status with a naturalness and dignity that many of the more tearaway celebs would do well to emulate. She graduated from being a young and glamorous queen to a happy and fulfilled mother, but then had to settle for pausing in that most difficult of categories — middle age — for rather a long time, owing to the wondrous longevity of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother. As the Queen now celebrates her Diamond Jubilee, in her own distinguished old age, it is revealing to consider how art and the mass media have helped to shape our changing perceptions of the monarch.
The Bauhaus was a sort of university of design, whose progressive ideas eventually fell foul of the Nazis. But as the exhibition Bauhaus: Art as Life is keen to impress, it was also a lifestyle, a modernist utopia, where staff and students were encouraged to mix freely, which they did with gusto. This, just as much as its reputation as a nerve centre for a new aesthetic, made it a magnet for the central European avant-garde. Among its teachers were some of the greatest artists and designers of the 20th century: Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee taught art; Marcel Breuer was responsible for furniture; Laszlo Moholy-Nagy for product design; Oskar Schlemmer for performance; and Walter Gropius, the school’s founder, lectured on architecture.
Not many dance-makers have had their art celebrated in major, award-winning feature films. Pina Bausch has. Wim Wenders’s 2011 Pina and Rainer Hoffmann’s/Anna Linsel’s 2010 Dancing Dreams offered unique insights into her creative genius, facilitating the posthumous popularisation of a dance-specific phenomenon. Yet no film, no documentary and certainly none of the countless writings that popped up after the choreographer’s untimely death has managed to draw an exhaustive picture of Bausch or dispel the vagueness that surrounds what her Tanztheater was and still is about. Three years after her demise, Bausch and her work remain shrouded in mystery, resisting and eluding scholarly labelling or convenient pigeonholing.
It’s all Kenneth Halliwell’s fault. By bashing in Joe Orton’s head with a hammer, he brought the playwright’s career to a premature halt when Orton was still experimenting with brittle and anarchic farces. Had Orton lived beyond 34, he’d have developed his technique and become a richer, truer and more rounded artist. And What the Butler Saw would now be a minor work by a major playwright. Instead it’s a major work by a minor playwright. Uneven in tone, lumpish in detail, unsure of its creative purpose, this is a problem play that doesn’t merit its status as a classic. Orton dashed it off in a few weeks and the script was discovered, after his death, lying in a drawer.
English Touring Opera ended its spring tour in Cambridge this year with three performances of The Barber of Seville and two of Eugene Onegin, both in English translation, the former done without surtitles, the latter with. Neither of them really needed them, since the Arts Theatre is small and most of the singers enunciated with a clarity one hopes they retain in the careers one hopes some of them go on to have. Barber was moderately successful, Onegin almost wholly so. Comedy is much harder to pull off than tragedy, as everyone knows, but singers don’t necessarily remember and act on that when they come to perform, and too much of this production, directed by Thomas Guthrie, consisted of people doing funny walks, sticking their stomachs out and other trappings of absurdity.
Ken Loach’s The Angels’ Share, which has just won the Jury Prize at Cannes, is part social realism, part comedy caper, and so good-natured, warm and affectionate it’s rather a joy, even though it doesn’t exactly add up; even though its climax is implausible, its tonal shifts are sometimes jarring, and it feels so familiar. It’s quite Bill Forsythian (with particular reference to his first ever feature, That Sinking Feeling, since you didn’t ask, but should have) via Whisky Galore! and The Full Monty.
This is the week we almost drowned in Jubilee programmes. Sadly, many of these were unavailable to reviewers, possibly because to criticise such a programme would itself amount to lèse-majesté, or perhaps they just hadn’t finished the edit. But I doubt we’ve missed much. This weekend BBC1 (Friday) was running A Jubilee Tribute to the Queen, presented by Prince Charles. Maybe he’s said that it’s all very well banging on about her sense of duty, but it didn’t do much for family life, and he still can’t get over how, after six months touring the Commonwealth, she famously didn’t kiss her little boy but shook his hand. I doubt it.
It was my first Jubilee moment — Judi Dench on Radio 4’s Today programme suddenly launching into Shakespeare mid-glam (incredibly glam) party. She was talking to Jim Naughtie at the Queen’s gala for the arts at the Royal Academy and bewailing the decline in the teaching of Shakespeare in schools. Mid-sentence, she breaks into Cleopatra’s lament: ‘I dream’d there was an Emperor Antony/O! such another sleep, that I might see/ But such another man.’ It was so natural, so heartfelt, so extraordinary that she could remember the speech line-for-line and give it to us, just like that, with no preparation, no sense of performance or theatrical delivery. I just had to stop and listen; to pause instead of rushing on with the day.
When I was growing up, the Dallas theme tune was like a call to prayer. As the Copland-esque trumpets rang out, we ran to the television set. A hushed silence descended as cattle stampeded beneath the snazzy gold title credits. To watch the glamorous travails of the Ewing family from a sofa somewhere near Coventry in the 1980s was to experience the very promise of the age. Escapism, certainly. But Dallas was also about dreams. Frontier dreams. That there was a place on earth where oil men in Stetsons plotted each other’s downfall while slurping bourbon was too fabulous. That these men were married to women with shoulder pads bigger than Darth Vader’s was beyond inspiring if you were a kid growing up not in Midland, Texas, but in The Midlands, UK.
Another of the grand old men of country and bluegrass music has picked his last. Doc Watson has died, aged 89. Here he is with Earl Scruggs at Doc's place some years back.
Good piece by Mark Lawson in The Guardian today about the ghastly Eurovision song contest, which I trust you enjoyed as much as I did. These were, by some margin, the worst songs I have heard in a contest which is renowned for its awful songs. Ours was worse than most, and delivered badly by the singer. Of course some of the voting is political and of course everybody hates us, but that’s not a reason to pull out. The reason to pull out is, as ever, the French. The contest is compered in English, because English is a second language in almost all and a third language in the rest of Europe. Why, then, should there be a simultaneous translation into a language spoken by a vanishingly small percentage of the TV audience, i.e. French?
The name of Patrick Reyntiens (born 1925) is indissolubly linked to the recent history of stained glass in this country. Reyntiens bridges the often troublesome gap between craft and art: not only is he a superb and innovative craftsman, but he is also a substantial artist. The second quality is not always recognised. Best known as John Piper’s associate, many assume that Piper was the artist behind their stained- glass collaborations, with Reyntiens as technical expert. Actually, Reyntiens played a more creative role than is generally supposed.
There are so many good exhibitions at the moment in the commercial sector that the dedicated gallery-goer can easily spend a day viewing top-quality work without paying a single museum admission fee. The following shows nicely complement some of the current or recent displays in public galleries — such as Mondrian||Nicholson at the Courtauld and the Tate’s Picasso and Modern British Art. Despite the financial squeeze and such new burdens as the bureaucratic nightmare of Artists’ Resale Right, commercial galleries continue to play an extremely important role in the nation’s artistic life, though they are not given much credit for it.
As 200 children descend on the Savoy, Niru Ratnam asks why corporations sponsor works of art In July, 200 teenagers from east London will head to the Savoy where they will take over the Lancaster Ballroom for the day. There they will be given the freedom to create a large-scale event — food and performances included. In the weeks leading up to it, they will have been prepped by Ruth Ewan, the artist behind the project, on the history of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1381. The preparation and the event itself will revolve around the teenagers’ interpretation of that historical moment when Wat Tyler led calls for the redistribution of wealth and was subsequently put to death in Smithfield by London’s mayor for his troubles.
At last, BBC Radio 4 has reconciled itself to the great importance of the graffiti artist and music performer Goldie. He has been named as one of the station’s ‘New Elizabethans’, alongside the likes of Sir Edmund Hillary, Graham Greene, Margaret Thatcher and the Queen. The qualification for admission to this gilded list is as follows: they must be ‘men and women whose actions during the reign of Elizabeth II have had a significant impact on lives in these islands and given the age its character, for better or worse.’ I think Goldie qualifies for that, don’t you? But then, I was always ahead of my time.
Shadows and reflections have always triggered all sorts of fantasies. Theatre itself, in the words of many playwrights and theorists, is nothing but a game of shadows. Today, filmic and computer-generated or manipulated projections have taken the place of what was once cleverly done with candles and mirrors. Indeed, projections seem to have become a distinctive and annoyingly trendy trademark of contemporary theatre, for they seem to pop up everywhere, more or less appropriately. Tired of images that detract and distract from both the music and the meaningful or expressive physicality of dance performances, I, like many, believe that using projections to add an aura of pseudo-cultural gravitas to a piece is the main indicator of poor creativity.
It’s taken me a shockingly long time to realise how great Verdi’s Falstaff is, and I still wouldn’t agree that it is his greatest opera, which fully paid-up Verdians tend to think. It may be a measure of my progress, though, that I got a lot of pleasure out of the new production at Covent Garden, by Robert Carsen, even while recognising that it is a shallow, wilfully unsearching account of a work much of whose magic is extraordinarily subtle, not only for Verdi, but for anyone. Carsen’s production, and the musical side, too, are on a level with the Shakespeare play from which Falstaff derives, which is agreed by everyone to be a potboiler.
More than 11 years after getting sober, memories of my more disgraceful drunken nights can still make me blush with shame. Waking up in a police cell with no idea how I came to be there was a low point and so was being discovered unconscious in the pouring rain under the shrubs in a neighbour’s garden. In the mercifully rare moments when I find myself dreaming of a drink, it is the thought of such dark times that helps keep me on the straight and narrow. But of one long drunken night I have only the fondest if admittedly befuddled memories. It happened in 1996 on a press junket. Disney was opening its new animated film of The Hunchback of Notre Dame not in Paris, but in New Orleans, with its famous French Quarter.
I’m not the biggest fan of Neil Simon, I admit it. In the programme notes for The Sunshine Boys, I discovered that Time magazine once called him ‘the patron saint of laughter’. Good, I thought. When the curtain goes up I’ve got someone to pray to. The show opens with Danny DeVito slumped in a hotel room watching TV in mid-afternoon. He’s a spent vaudeville star whose feud with his comedy partner forced him into retirement 11 years earlier. His nephew, a pushy young agent, wants to revive the famous duo for one last TV special. DeVito insists that he won’t do it. (But he will, of course.
As a general rule, what to expect when you are expecting is a baby, which is always kind of miraculous, but the way everyone carries on in this film you’d think nobody had ever had one before. This is odd, particularly as the latest research has proven that having babies predates the iPod, internet and digital photography, and may even predate the Breville sandwich toaster, although this is not yet known for certain. Still, this all-star ensemble mash-up treats pregnancy as if it were the very latest news, and although it’s meant to be a comedy, did I laugh? I might never have stopped but for one small thing, which I feel obliged to mention: I never started. I sat there stony-faced like a stone, with a face.
For my holiday reading in Australia I chose Max Hastings’s brilliant but exceedingly depressing Finest Years: Churchill as Warlord 1940–45. Once you’ve read it, it’s impossible to take any pleasure from second world war history ever again. Basically, runs Hastings’s persuasively argued thesis, we were rubbish at pretty much everything. Our generals were useless, our citizen soldiers lacked dash and folded at the first opportunity, our tanks were ill-protected and undergunned. Apart, maybe, from Bletchley, we contributed nothing major whatsoever to the Allied war effort: the Soviets doing all the killing and dying for us and the Yanks providing all the materiel.
7 Up, the TV series first made in 1964, would never have worked on radio. Ten young boys and (only) four girls were interviewed as they set out on their lives, with the intention of checking up on them every seven years thereafter to see what might have happened to them. They’ve now reached 56 and the series instead of looking forward to what these children might become is looking back over where they have been. The sad, guarded eyes of the young boy in a care home in 1964 made a powerful impact in black and white (colour had not yet arrived on TV), as did the sparky smile of another boy. Words alone somehow would not have had the same impact. We needed to see their faces, and those expressions, foretelling, we could have imagined, what would happen to them.
At Home with the World, the Geffrye Museum’s latest exhibition (until 9 September), reinterprets objects from its permanent collection, highlighting those from overseas or those that have been influenced by other cultures. Because the museum concentrates on the changing styles and tastes of the urban middle class, rather than of the aristocracy, we can appreciate what became popular as a result of mass manufacturing and trade. The most obvious example is the craze for ‘taking tea’ from the mid-18th century onwards. The porcelain teapots on display throughout the period living-rooms (that range from 1600 to the present day) remind us that much of what we consider English actually originates elsewhere — in this case, China.
In 1966, under the influence of ideas about chance, the artist Tom Phillips pledged to take as the foundation for his next work the first book that he could find for threepence. That book, discovered in a junk shop on Peckham Rye, was a long-forgotten Victorian romance in journal form, A Human Document by W.H. Mallock. Phillips set about effacing the pages of this book with sketched line drawings and gouache swathes of colour. The result was A Humument, described by Evan Anthony in the early Seventies in this magazine as ‘one of the freshest and most original pieces of art-literary work you are likely to see’.
Why did Florence become a hotspot for Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century? Henry James, Edith Wharton, John Singer Sargent and a gang of other American artists and writers descended on the Arno, often for years at a time. Sargent, born in Florence, the son of a Philadelphia eye surgeon, didn’t get to see America until he was 20. This engaging — if chaotic — exhibition answers the question. The Grand Tour had been around since the 16th century, first for the aristocracy and then for the bourgeoisie of northern Europe; Americans were part of the artistic immigrant crowd from the mid-18th century.
In 1895 the Spanish art collector John Charles Robinson donated a picture to the National Gallery. ‘On the whole I think it is very much above the average of this most eccentric master’s work,’ he phrased his offer less than enticingly. ‘At the same time you know the man was mad as a hatter and his work must be taken with “all faults” of which there are plenty.’ The man was Domenikos Theotokopoulos, aka El Greco, and the picture was ‘Christ Driving the Traders from the Temple’. To an English late 19th-century audience weaned on Murillo this ‘most eccentric master’ — a Cretan-born Byzantine icon painter turned Venetian colourist turned Spanish Mannerist — looked dangerously outré.
We are standing in the wood-panelled anteroom to the state rooms at No. 10 Downing Street — myself, Mo Hussein, David Heaton and Janice Blackburn, the former curator of the Saatchi Gallery who has been putting examples of contemporary decorative art and design into No. 10 since last July. We gaze up at Michael Eden’s Wedgwood Tureen on a high mantelpiece above the fireplace. Eden used to make earthenware pots in deep Cumbria but now he designs with 3D software and his pieces are built layer by layer by a 3D printer. His Wedgwood Tureen is based on a classic Wedgwood shape, translated into a vivid red diagram of the original. It looks like a replication of a familiar object made by intelligent aliens. We are all quietly impressed.
Unimpressed by the relentless barrage of blockbusters, Andrew Lambirth singles out some small-scale gems Although it can’t be easy to run a major museum in this country, and balance the books as well as fulfil a remit to provide the best possible conspectus of past and contemporary art for the general public, our museums are becoming increasingly narrow in what they offer. The range of art on show in London, for instance, has shrunk alarmingly, as the Whitechapel, the Serpentine and the Tate pursue very similar programmes, vying to be the first to put on the same internationally fashionable artists.