Culture

Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle is proving to be one of the enduring operas of the 20th century, despite its inconvenient length, or brevity, and thus the problem of what to pair it with for a full evening. I have always tended to think of it as a work of extreme orchestral sumptuousness, which provides a background to the ritual-cum-drama being worked out between Bluebeard and his latest wife Judit, ending, as it begins, in tears. Their mode of communication, Judit a kind of mythic nag, Bluebeard stonewalling, is almost elevated chanting, which gives an emotional distance to the incidents we watch, and means that, however much we register the pain on both sides, we aren’t much moved by it. That, anyway, is how I have usually responded.

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.