Culture

Summer Festival Time: when the music-loving British populace flocks or straggles to concerts in a variety of unsuitable venues, all the way from mighty monuments like (dare one say) St Paul’s or the Albert Hall to Little Bethel and the Quaker Meeting House, the Old Forge, the Stately Home, ex-quaysides and industrial structures, parks, squares, pavements. I’ve several such unlikely places to report on this month. A first-ever visit to Garsington Opera was a surprise; for the gawky Heath-Robinson-ish thing run up against the old stone manor to cover audience, stage and pit proved possessed of a real acoustic — clear yet sonorous, neither too distant nor too in-your-face, and better for balance and diction than many a more permanent theatre.

Within the expanding aquatic metropolis that is Istanbul, two late-20th-century bridges straddle the continents of Europe and Asia. These traffic-laden steel bridges, spanning high above the ferries and other boats which ply the busy waters of the Bosphorus below, are visibly useful links between two civilisations. They are also symbols, perhaps, of the noble dream of bringing the mentality of the Muslim world closer to that of the non-Muslim world in a spirit of mutual admiration and respect. A cultural event like a Rodin exhibition is worthwhile for its own sake. Held in a Muslim country, it may also nurture such a noble dream.

Hard on the heels of the National Gallery’s show Rebels and Martyrs, about the changing perception of the artist, comes this exhibition of Modigliani’s paintings. The title makes a shameless and immediate reference to the myth of the decadent bohemian surrounded by lovers. This may serve to attract the punters, but it doesn’t help us take the art more seriously. Amedeo Modigliani (1884–1920) was a middle-class Italian Sephardic Jew, born in Livorno, who left home for the bright artistic lights of Paris in 1906, and tragically never found success there. As an artist he has been ill served by the legend that grew up around him, the misplaced glamour of self-destructiveness and early death.

On Monday 15 October 1906, Paul Cézanne was painting on the hillside above his Les Lauves studio on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence when he was caught in a violent rainstorm. Having sacked his coachman the week before in a row over money, the 67-year-old painter was on foot, and by the time he was picked up by a passing laundry cart and driven home to his house in Aix he was soaked to the skin. On the Tuesday, after rising at dawn to continue work on a portrait of his gardener Vallier, he collapsed into bed, and on the following Monday his wife and son were summoned from Paris. They arrived too late — according to local gossip, Mme Cézanne hadn’t wanted to miss a fitting with her dressmaker.

The gallery walls of the Level Two temporary exhibition space at Tate Britain are currently aflame with colour. The gallery is playing host to the first exhibition ever to span the entire career of Sir Howard Hodgkin (born in 1932), though there have been plenty of other shows of his work over the years. (Notable among them being displays at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1990 and 2002, the Hayward Gallery in 1996 and the Whitechapel in 1985, not to mention numerous commercial shows in between.) Despite the dazzling white surfaces of the studio in which he works, Hodgkin often exhibits his paintings on coloured walls, and the Tate show is no exception.

The Summer Exhibition is like a leviathan, a monster from the deep, that every now and again shows itself to general outcry and occasional consternation. Unfortunately, however, it’s not actually the stuff of myth and legend, but all too often of rather dismal reality. This, the 238th Summer Show, is co-ordinated by the architect Peter Cook and the sculptors David Mach and Alison Wilding, and revels in a theme which, though not ‘compulsory’, was optimistically expected to inspire those non-RA artists blessed with sufficient temerity to submit work. The chosen subject was ‘From Life’, which is unspecific enough not to make the slightest difference to anyone.

John Constable (1776–1837) is the quintessential painter of rural England. If we carry in our hearts an image of unspoilt countryside it will, more often than not, bear the lineaments of what has become known as Constable Country, that stretch of land along the river Stour in Suffolk that includes Dedham and Flatford, and the nearby village of East Bergholt. Magical names, redolent with the history imbuing Constable’s paintings of his native county. He immortalised the area in timeless images of extraordinary freshness and beauty. The Tate’s show of some 65 pictures does intelligent justice to a vision of landscape which continues to refresh the spirit.