Arts Archives

Perfect harmony

Arts feature

Andrew Lambirth finds paintings at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition of such a singular and pure beauty as to take the breath away The great world is humming with an event of international importance at the National Gallery: the largest number of Leonardo da Vinci’s surviving paintings ever gathered together. To see anything by this extraordinary Renaissance genius is worth turning aside for, but in recent years there have been a fair few exhibitions, principally at the V&A in 2006, at the Royal Collection in 2003, and a provincial touring show in 2002. Admittedly, these displays have consisted of Leonardo’s drawings, but the prospective visitor should be aware that this new show at the NG is also largely composed of drawings.

Lucy Vickery

Back to the future | 19 November 2011

Exhibitions

High Arctic, the inaugural exhibition in the newly opened Sammy Ofer wing at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich (until 13 January), brings a thoroughly 21st-century, technology-driven museum experience to this historic site. It’s an exhibition, Jim, but not as we know it. In 2010 Matt Clark, creative director of the art and design practice UVA, joined an expedition of artists and scientists to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard. High Arctic, which he describes as ‘a monument to an Arctic past set 100 years into the future’, is a response to this trip; an attempt to address, in a non-preachy way, the issue of man’s impact on the environment.

James Delingpole

A girdle too far

Television

Fact: in 1963, air travel was so new and exciting that the awed gasps of the passengers as the plane took flight frequently drowned out the noise of the jet engines. Fact: in 1963, air travel was so comfortable that passengers emerged from long-haul flights even more refreshed, relaxed and cheerful than when they boarded the plane. Instead of taking their suits to the dry cleaners, canny travellers of the day would often just take a plane journey instead, knowing that their clothes would emerge at the end more pressed and immaculate than before. Fact: in 1963, every woman looked and dressed like Jackie Kennedy, especially air stewardesses, all of whom could have doubled as models because they were just so hot.

Kate Chisholm

History lesson | 19 November 2011

Radio

When I was a student of history, the first book we were asked to read was E.H. Carr’s What Is History? I never understood Carr’s question. Or the answers that his book gave. If history is not about people and events, but causes and ideas, then I could see no sense in bothering to study it because for most people causes and ideas are irrelevant. They have to find ways of surviving whatever history, circumstance, events inflict upon them. I was of course born after the two world wars; Carr was born in 1892, as Victoria’s empire began to wane. On Radio 3 this week a group of historians and biographers have been looking again at Carr’s book, 50 years after its publication in 1961. What Is History, Today? they asked (produced by Katherine Godfrey).

Peter Phillips

Brain gain

Music

The arrival of the composer Eric Whitacre and his family in London as permanent residents brings a ray of Californian sunshine to our cloud-bedraggled lives. American musicians who have chosen to move to Europe to work have always made an interesting group, headed by jazz players of the calibre of Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet. Of course they had reasons for seeking work elsewhere which do not apply to the very white Whitacre. But, given that at a casual glance the US appears to offer so much opportunity to everyone, why come all this way? In Whitacre’s case I get the impression that he really likes the UK.

Michael Tanner

Continuous fun

Opera

The time of year is approaching when Nutcrackers take over from opera, and then a further round of Traviatas gets under way. But that does at least mean that it’s also the time when the schools of music put on their end-of-term operas, and this season is unusually promising. Next week Sir Colin Davis is conducting Berlioz’s Béatrice et Bénédict at the Royal Academy of Music, and the week after the Royal College of Music is staging two equally rare Bizet operas, Djamileh and Le Docteur Miracle. I doubt whether either of them will give me more, or as much, pleasure as the Guildhall School’s production of Nicolai’s Die lustigen Weiber von Windsor (The Merry Wives).

Patrick Carnegy

Bishops and ploughboys

Theatre

The delectable drama student who served dinner beforehand in the Rooftop Restaurant told us she’d much enjoyed Written on the Heart but that it was a bit intellectual. As David Edgar’s new play is about the making of the King James Bible, this wasn’t altogether surprising. How do you make a play about the deliberations of some 54 bishops and scholars who fine-tuned William Tyndale’s English translation of c.1525–34 into the KJB of 1611? One place to start is to have the scholars haggle over ‘delectable’ or ‘very pleasant’ as alternatives for Na’ ameta li meod in II Samuel 1: 26, not that they’d glimpsed our waitress in the restaurant.

Lloyd Evans

Sheer madness

Theatre

‘I’m off to see a play about a man who kills his dad,’ I told my five-year-old as I left the house. ‘Because he didn’t give him any ice-cream?’ he said. Mmm, I wondered, it’s possible that Hamlet harboured some childhood grudge against Claudius over a Mr Whippy refusal episode. But such meta-textual speculation is extremely perilous. And when I reached the Young Vic I realised just how grave the danger can be. Ian Rickson’s bumptious show sets the play in a loony bin. Banana yellow walls. Tannoy announcements. Leering staff wearing canvas security uniforms. Claudius, in a three-piece suit, setting chairs in a semi-circle for Hamlet, Gertrude and the court. Visually this is clear enough but narratively it creates disorder.

Deborah Ross

My dinner with Meryl

Cinema

Justice is a plodding and uninteresting revenge thriller starring Nicolas Cage and January Jones, and as I don’t have much else to say about it I’m going to fill the rest of the space by telling you about my dinner with Meryl Streep, who stars as Margaret Thatcher in the forthcoming The Iron Lady. This is all true, mad as it seems. And as I outstayed my welcome, as I always do — you can rely on it — I even caught Ms Streep washing up. ‘Meryl Streep washing up!’ I exclaimed. ‘Next, it’ll be Tom Cruise putting the bins out.’ She smiled graciously as she rinsed out a mug. God, she’s lovely.

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Sound and vision | 19 November 2011

Music

The 20th century was a century of musical revolutions. One of the last and most audacious ignited 50 years ago on the east and west coasts of America. And in a small but significant way The Spectator played a part in fanning the flames. In 1968 a young critic and early-music specialist by the name of Michael Nyman was sent out by the magazine to review a new work by Cornelius Cardew, a little-known British maverick. What struck Nyman about Cardew’s new piece, The Great Learning, was how different the musical language was from that of the complex and angsty European avant-garde. ‘It was very gentle, it was very modest, it wasn’t trying to make a huge technical statement,’ Nyman once explained.

12 November 2011

James Delingpole

The invisible man | 12 November 2011

Arts feature

Besides being one of the most exquisitely melodious, sensitive singer-songwriters you’re ever likely to hear, John Grant is also one of the most beautiful men you could ever hope to meet. I’m not the only married man to feel this way about the tortured gay pop star. As he tells me over lunch on London’s South Bank, male fans are constantly gushing after his shows about how utterly they worship and adore him. ‘Then they’ll go and ruin it by saying, “Oh, and by the way, may I introduce my wife?”’ And it’s not that the Michigan-born 42-year-old is excessively handsome or exquisitely ephebic or anything like that.

Andrew Lambirth

Intelligent design | 12 November 2011

Exhibitions

In 1935, Paul Nash observed that Edward McKnight Kauffer (1890–1954) was responsible for the change in attitude towards commercial art in this country. An American, Kauffer arrived in England in 1914 during a period of European study. He liked it and decided to stay, enabled to do so by his remarkable ability to design posters. In 1915 Frank Pick commissioned him to produce the first of what became a remarkable stream of some 140 posters for London Transport. Hugely impressed by Vorticism, Kauffer became a friend and ally of Wyndham Lewis and introduced the Modernist sensibility into commercial art.

Andrew Lambirth

Bird watching | 12 November 2011

Exhibitions

The setting is appropriate: Rochelle School is on Arnold Circus in Shoreditch, at the end of Club Row, once famous for its pet market, where, until it was closed down in 1983, you could buy caged birds from around the world. Now the school is hosting an exhibition entitled Ghosts of Gone Birds (till 23 November), a wide-ranging and stylistically eclectic show with a single emotive theme: extinct birds. More than 100 artists, musicians and writers, including Peter Blake, Margaret Atwood and Ralph Steadman, have made work in aid of BirdLife International’s Preventing Extinction scheme. Steadman did one picture and then found himself gripped by the theme, and went on to produce 100 witty, poignant and highly original bird portraits (‘Dodo’, above).

Simon Hoggart

Ritual humiliation

Television

Ricky Gervais’s latest sitcom, Life’s Too Short (BBC2, Thursday), is really a series of sketches on his favourite themes — failure, rejection, self-delusion and humiliation. I gather from friends of friends that at UCL he was often teased, not always pleasantly, for not fitting in with the right gang. Exclusion of one kind or another and the desperate need to fit in is another constant topic. You may remember the scene in Extras in which he and his friends are turfed out of the VIP area in a club to make way for David Bowie, who then makes things more horrible by improvising a song about what a pathetic and useless person Gervais’s character is.

Kate Chisholm

Democracy on trial

Radio

At the debate on parliamentary democracy recorded last week in Portcullis House for The Forum (broadcast on Sunday on the World Service) as part of Parliament Week, we in the audience were asked whether we thought democratic values were universal or whether they applied differently in different places. Most people voted for them being universal but I found myself in a dilemma. What does the question mean? Human rights must surely be everywhere the same. But does this mean that democracy should be the same wherever you are around the world? Do villagers living deep within the Swat Valley have the same democratic needs as shoppers on the Ku’Damm in Berlin?

Giannandrea Poesio

High hopes

Blood-stained humour

Theatre

I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe. The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So Bulgakov takes over Stalin’s day job, running Russia. This inspires many hilarities in the horror-slapstick genre.

Deborah Ross

Bleak and bold

Cinema

As a major admirer of all writer/director Andrea Arnold’s previous work — Wasp, Red Road, Fish Tank — I was looking forward to her version of Wuthering Heights more than I can say, and? Wow! Or, at least, mostly ‘wow!’ It is a ‘wow’ with a few reservations. It is two thirds of a ‘wow’, so perhaps a ‘wo!’? Wo! It is impressively bold. And brave. And brutish. It will rile the purists, which is always good, as riling purists is a particular hobby of mine, and I like to set aside at least half a day a week to do just that. (I favour putting them in a cage, and poking them with sticks every now and then.

Michael Tanner

Skirting the sensational

Opera

I only very recently began going to live Met relays in the cinema, but if you can get in it’s very well worthwhile. In Cambridge, where the sound is so-so, as I discovered going to Siegfried, there is no hope of getting in except on the day booking starts. In Huntingdon, where the sound is fantastic, there was just a handful of oldsters for Die Walküre in May, who were rewarded with the best Act I that I have ever seen, thanks to the electrifying conducting of James Levine and the amazing Siegmund of Jonas Kaufmann; and the rest of the performance was of a high standard. Siegfried skirted the sensational, thanks to the last-minute replacement in the title role, Jay Hunter Morris. Remember that name.

Marcus Berkmann

Pump up the volume

Music

It occurs to me sometimes that this column is, essentially, one long and painful confessional. I admit to enjoying all this unfashionable and uncool music so others don’t have to. ‘Ah, the man who likes Supertramp,’ someone once said to me at a party, just before he was stabbed by an unknown assailant. No one would say anything so sneering or discourteous to an actual member of Supertramp, current or former, which suggests that their fans must suffer on their behalf. My own suffering includes the purchase of their double live album, Paris, in or around 1980. In this they play note-perfect renditions of their hits, with added applause. If I still had the receipt, and the shop that sold it to me still existed, I would have half a mind to ask for my money back.

8 November 2011

Alex Massie

Back to the Mainland

Back on the mainland after a magical week on Jura* and, frankly, reacquainting oneself with whatever's been happening in the rest of the world is a pretty grim business. Must be done however, so expect a measure of catch-up blogging here soon. What happened last week that mattered? *Should you be tempted to visit the island I can't recommend the Ardlussa estate too highly. A special place.

7 November 2011

Kate Maltby

24-Hour Play People

This month, Mike Bartlett’s new play, 13, opens at the National. It follows the success of his play Earthquakes in London. At Paines Plough, George Perrin and James Grieve unveil the prototype for a revolutionary new theatre space, a portable in-the-round auditorium. And, at the Arcola, Tom Atkins brings us How The World Began, which comes to London after a hit run in California. The link between these may not be obvious, but it’s crucial. Like many of theatre’s fastest rising stars, each these gained vital career traction at the Old Vic’s now-legendary 24 Hour Plays, the boot camp that launches newcomers into the industry by giving them experience, contacts and confidence they wouldn’t get anywhere else.

6 November 2011

Patrick O’Flynn

Spotify Sunday: Going underground with The Jam

The Jam were once described as the ‘last great English singles band’. For a group that released such classic chart-toppers as ‘Going Underground’ and ‘Town Called Malice’ that might seem fair enough, but it grievously underestimates their musical canon. The quality of their output on LPs, B-sides and even on recordings that were never released while the band existed is stunning. So today I wish to take you beyond the obvious Jam anthems, glorious though they are, and present some neglected gems.

5 November 2011

William Cook

Stealing beauty

Arts feature

I’m standing alongside Angela Rosengart, in a room full of portraits Picasso drew of her, when something spooky happens. Out of the corner of my eye, the old woman beside me becomes the young woman on the wall. It’s over in an instant, but it’s still strange and rather wonderful. For a moment, Frau Rosengart is young again, just as Picasso saw her. We’re in the Rosengart Museum in Lucerne, a grand neoclassical building (formerly a branch of the Swiss National Bank) that houses Rosengart’s extraordinary art collection — more than 100 works by Klee, plus dozens of other modern masters: Léger, Kandinsky, Modigliani...

Andrew Lambirth

Sensation seeker

Exhibitions

For far too long, John Martin (1789–1854) has been dismissed as ‘Mad’ Martin, the prophet of doom. In the eyes of many, this unacademic painter was a grotesque curiosity, producing colossal pictures of apocalyptic destruction, crude dramas of catastrophe and tumult, much to the delight of the populace. The mere fact that he was so popular an image-maker made him irredeemably vulgar (rather like Lowry today), and the cognoscenti looked for faults rather than appreciating his strengths. In fact, Martin was a reforming inventor as well as a painter, much concerned with draining the marshes around London and ensuring a pure water supply for the capital, simply because he wanted, as he says in his ‘autobiography’, to improve the condition of the people.

George Hull

Fantasy auction

Theatre

Have you ever felt the urge to rush backstage, brushing aside the objections of minders, and introduce yourself to a favourite actor? Or perhaps you’ve fantasised about dressing up in the old clothes of a Hollywood star? Don’t blush and walk away! We can reveal exclusively that you have nothing to be ashamed of. On the contrary, the future of British theatre could well be in your hands… Starting out as a producer of big commercial shows like Yes, Prime Minister or South Pacific is a hazardous business. It takes not just an eye for a good idea, and a firm managerial hand, but a hefty capital investment to boot. And if putting money into new arts projects seems foolish to private investors at the best of times, at times like these it can easily appear deranged.

James Delingpole

Padding out

Television

One of the useful things about having teen and near-teenage kids is discovering what the vulgar masses watch. Last week, for example, during half-term, I got to see two hugely popular programmes which I would probably never have bothered watching on my own: Undercover Boss USA (Channel 4, Wednesday) and The X Factor (ITV, Saturday, Sunday). Yes, I suppose it is a terrible indictment of my lackadaisical attitude that it has taken me till now to watch a full episode of the most talked about programme on TV. Thing is, though, I’ve been right all along. The X Factor just isn’t as good as University Challenge. Or The Simpsons. Or South Park. Or even, frankly, Downton Abbey.

Kate Chisholm

After the tyrants

Radio

What’s the best way for a dictator to fall, wondered Owen Bennett-Jones on Saturday night’s Archive on 4 (Radio 4, produced by Simon Watts). Is sending the deposed dictator into exile better for the recovery of the abused nation than execution? Would a domestic trial lead more quickly to justice than an international tribunal? These are tricky questions. Yet the recent fall of dictatorships in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya requires us to find some way of understanding how these countries might find a way of living peaceably with the reality of their violent pasts. Gaddafi’s rule of terror in Libya ended with his brutal death, but very few dictatorships are brought to an end in this bloody way, as Bennett-Jones reminded us.

Alan Blackwood

What’s in a name? | 5 November 2011

Music

There was a time when ‘classical music’ meant something you could put your finger on. It denoted the musical period between roughly 1750 and 1800, when Haydn, Mozart and many others wrote symphonies, concertos and instrumental pieces with a sense of form and grace that were likened to the art and architecture of Classical Greece and Rome. And it sat happily between two other important musical periods, the Baroque and the Romantic. Everybody knew where they stood. Not any more. Nowadays, for some people, ‘classical music’ probably means the same as ‘highbrow music’ — something that’s not for them. Otherwise it has become a catch-all phrase or term that nearly everyone else uses without ever trying to define it.