Culture

The Parrot in Art? Unraise your eyebrows: parrots have featured in Western European art for 500 years, depicted by Dürer, van Eyck and Mantegna; Rubens and Rembrandt; Tiepolo, Reynolds and Goya; Delacroix and Courbet; Matisse and Frieda Kahlo. It is hardly surprising. Ever since they were imported into Europe from India in the 4th century BC, parrots have been a source of marvel: their exotic plumage, their near-human mimetic voice, squawking, talking. They have intrigued Aristotle and Pliny, Aesop and Ovid.

The most exciting thing to do in Middlesbrough on a Sunday afternoon, Ronnie Scott used to say, is watch the traffic lights change. Not any longer, since the opening in January of Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art. Mima is the latest addition to the band of new public galleries stretching across Britain from the West Midlands to the north-east. In the six years since the Millennium, our old industrial heartlands have been ruthlessly rejuvenated by the erection of landmark gallery buildings designed by what my dyslexic cowboy builder used to call ‘artitects’.

I’m talking to Maggi Hambling in the downstairs studio of her south London home, because her beautifully light upstairs painting space is being given a new coat of white paint, the first for years. She always says that if she ever comes to sell this house the agents can market it as having ‘four reception rooms, two bathrooms and a ballroom. No bedrooms’. It’s a misleading description of the Hambling lifestyle: work is the order of the day, not partying, and the ballroom is of course the main studio. Hambling is not out on the tiles every night, but is more likely to retire to bed early in order to rise before dawn.

For a hundred years or so, the director of the Tate Gallery has normally been a major figure in the art world. Sir Norman Reid, director in a dynamic period between 1964 and 1979, increased the Tate’s exhibition space and acquired, for example, an important group of paintings by Mark Rothko. Sir Alan Bowness (1980–8) made many significant additions to the collection. He helped father both Tate Liverpool (a precursor of Tate St Ives) and the Clore Gallery at Millbank. He also initiated the Turner Prize. A comparatively minor figure was the bibulous bohemian J.B. Manson, theoretically responsible between 1930 and 1938.

Fifty years ago, the Royal Court theatre detonated its second H-bomb. The first had been Look Back in Anger, in 1956. The next was The Entertainer, John Osborne’s follow-up play, which opened 50 years ago in April. Out were blown the West End play’s French windows and in came the kitchen sink. The memorable first line of the play — ‘Bloody Poles and Irish! I hate the bastards’ — set the tone for an unsavoury evening which ushered in a whole new drama movement. Noël Coward loathed it. The shock back in 1957 was perhaps not so much the play itself but Laurence Olivier’s part in it.

The phrase ‘English song’ is often met with suspicion, bringing with it a whiff of the morris dance, the come, follow follow and the hey nonny no — and the work of Roger Quilter, composing in the first half of the 20th century, is no exception to this reaction. However, for those with ears to hear and prejudices to shed, there are rare treasures to be  found when a new recording of his complete songs for solo voice and piano is released at the end of February, sung  by baritone Mark Stone, accompanied by the composer and conductor Stephen Barlow. ‘Quilter and I go back a long way,’ says Stone. ‘Three of his Shakespeare songs were some of the first things I ever learnt.