Culture

The World Cup, and once again people who don’t watch football from one quadrennium to the next manifest an interest in all those surreal pairings: Ecuador v. Poland, Iran v. Mexico, Togo v. Switzerland. I (and many others) have been disobliging about John Motson in the past, but he is perfect for these events, assuming no prior knowledge in his listeners, making you half-imagine that every match is the first he has ever attended. ‘Nice move!’; ‘Oh, Lampard there’; ‘England finding themselves on the back foot now...’ Real football aficionados hate all this wide-eyed simplicity; they get cross, just as trainspotters would at Crewe if crowds of housewives elbowed them off the platform.

This small but telling retrospective at Tate St Ives is one of a number of Hoyland exhibitions timed to coincide or overlap this summer. There have already been a couple of commercial shows of recent and older work in London, and another has just opened at the Lemon Street Gallery in Truro (until 24 June). At the age of 72, John Hoyland is experiencing a resurgence of interest in his work which is entirely justified. Since the 1960s he has been an international figure in the world of art, an inventive and uncompromising abstract painter who has continued to take the most extreme risks in his work, and to develop new ways of expressing his sense of wonder and delight in the world around us, and in the further reaches of the human imagination.

Listing page content here Surrealism is in the air, what with the Hayward and Max Ernst shows (reviewed in these pages last week), and it’s been lurking around in a different guise since April in an enthralling show at the Whitechapel which focuses on Outsider Art. Outsider Art, or Art Brut as Dubuffet originally termed it, is art made by ‘people free of artistic culture’; in other words, not artists, though the categories are increasingly blurred. It’s often the product of the mentally disturbed, of those beyond the fringes of society, who make drawings or paintings, sculpture or embroidery, which deal directly with their obsessions. They may not intend to make art, but their work is collected and often displayed as art.

Listing page content here It is hard to embrace Max Reger. For a start, he is surely the physically ugliest of all composers, surpassing even Prokofiev, or Zemlinsky, whose repulsiveness actually inspired an opera libretto. Reger’s slobbish face, plus pince-nez and thick sulky lips, already anticipates the music’s mix of shortsighted with greedy grossness. Still more suggestive, the notorious address to a hostile critic from the throne of his villa’s smallest room — ‘Sir, your notice is before me; in a moment it will be behind me’ —confident arrogance and asinine coarseness memorably conjoined. E.J.

‘Picasso, Miró, Masson and the vision of Georges Bataille’ is the subtitle of the latest extravaganza at the Hayward Gallery. Georges Bataille (1897–1962) is one of those buzz figures, beloved of the moment, without a quote from whom no contemporary art-speak catalogue introduction is complete. He has been influential as a philosopher as well as a writer (he penned a minor cult classic called Story of the Eye), and as a worthy opponent of André Breton, the self-styled Pope of Surrealism. Between 1929 and 1930 Bataille edited a radical surrealist magazine called Documents, which offered a heady mix of art and archaeology, ethnography and popular culture.

Here in London are two historical exhibitions which treat more of human identity, national and individual, than they do of pure painting. Each one showcases art, but in the wider context of the artefacts of a particular period. For a nation which loves to visit country houses (courtesy of that great institution, the National Trust), both exhibitions should prove reassuringly familiar in format and content. Searching for Shakespeare, at the National Portrait Gallery (until 29 May, sponsored by Credit Suisse), celebrates the 150th anniversary of the NPG appropriately, given that the very first painting presented to the gallery in 1856 was the famous ‘Chandos’ portrait of Shakespeare.

Listing page content here Twenty years ago, Britain was gripped by an architectural battle of styles. The Lloyd’s building in the City opened, representing the hopes for a resurgence of modernism, while Quinlan Terry’s classical Richmond Riverside was beginning to emerge from scaffolding like a vision by Canaletto. Since 1986, a great deal has happened, but readers of Roger Scruton’s article in The Spectator of 8 April (‘Hail Quinlan Terry: our greatest living architect’) would know nothing of it.