Arts Archives

Looking good

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Rameau’s Les Paladins, which arrived briefly at the Barbican Theatre, was spectacular, amazing. Or rather this production was. It was one of those occasions when so much happens on stage that you can begin to wonder whether there’s something — or nothing — to hide. I had listened to it on Radio Three a few days earlier, and been puzzled by the excitement it seemed to be generating, since most of the music struck me as being well below the best of Rameau. It turned out, at the Barbican, that we were to be happily subjected to a multimedia display, in which the visuals easily dominated.

Laura Gascoigne

Unexpected twists

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As a teenager in Cambridge, I used to have tea with a blind philosopher. One afternoon, spotting the sugar lurking behind the milk, I told it — as one does — to come out from there. My friend was aghast. ‘Are you talking to the crockery?’ he asked. Ontologically speaking, of course, I was on shaky ground, but there was an empirical logic to my remark which was lost on him. A blind man can apprehend objects in space, but not the spatial relationships between them. I’d forgotten this incident until the Estorick Collection’s new exhibition Still Life in 20th Century Italy brought it back, setting me thinking about the nature of ‘natura morta’.

Charles Spencer

The next big thing

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You’re probably sick of reading about John Peel, the Radio One disc jockey who died of a heart attack last week and whose passing was marked with the solemn, exhaustive media coverage usually reserved for great statesmen. This was, after all, only a man who played records for a living. Andy Kershaw, one of Peel’s protégés and a fellow DJ, went spectacularly over the top in the Independent. Peel, he said, was the ‘most important person in British music since the birth of rock’n’roll’. Come on, Andy, take a grip. More important than Lennon and McCartney, Jagger and Richards, David Bowie?

Simon Hoggart

Trick or cheat?

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Old formulae are desperately re-worked in order to fill the endless hours of television time. (Did you know that the BBC broadcasts five hours of TV every hour, in this country alone?) The mathematician and code expert Simon Singh, whom I bumped into the other day, suggested I watch Beg, Borrow or Steal (BBC2, Tuesdays) because he felt it illustrated some interesting intellectual problems. It comes straight after The Weakest Link and is in many ways a knock-off, since participants not only need to know the answers, but are also encouraged to swindle each other. There are five contestants. They are asked clutches of four questions, some moderately tough (‘Which is the fastest animal on two legs?’). Only people who get all four right win any money.

Peter Phillips

Beyond words

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Sitting in the Globe Theatre towards the end of last season, I began to have one of those out-of-mind experiences which only music is supposed to be able to give. The play in question was Measure for Measure, always known to be a difficult one to interpret satisfactorily, a difficulty which presumably increases if one is not in possession of all that might be of help. Full of untried concentration we welcome the players and lend them our ears. Off goes the Duke: ‘Of government the properties to unfold/ Would seem in me to affect speech and discourse,/ Since I am put to know that your own science/ Exceeds, in that, the lists of all advice/ My strength can give you...’ What? Could you possibly say that again more slowly?

John McEwen

Force for good

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This is the first in a series of short sharp shows devoted to leading British artists which Tate Britain proposes to stage over the coming years. According to Stephen Deuchar, Tate Britain’s director, Rego was easily the most popular choice, and little wonder. It is a sign of true quality that in a 50-year career she has gone from strength to strength.

30 October 2004

William Packer

Bride and prejudice

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Leighton House, Lord Leighton’s home and studio in Kensington, has a growing reputation for small and scholarly yet undaunting exhibitions. And with the house itself and its collection to be relished into the bargain, size hardly matters. That said, the current special offer, occupying only one room, is centred upon a single work that, at 10 feet by more than five, is itself pretty big. Indeed ‘The Babylonian Marriage Market’ is one of the great machines of high Victorian narrative art. Its painter Edwin Long, born in 1829, was already in his mid-40s and at the time not even an Associate RA. And this one work, two years in the painting and the sensation of the Royal Academy Summer Show of 1875, was to make his name and fortune.

Mark Glazebrook

Intimate insight

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And did those feet in ancient timesWalk upon London’s suburbs green?And was a canvas full of sunOn England’s pleasant pastures seen?And did Pissarro’s light divineShine forth upon our clouded hills?And was IMPRESSIONISM builded hereAmong these dark Satanic mills? Well, up to a point, yes, if Camille and his son Lucien may be merged and those Satanic north of England mills, later to be turned a smoggy white by L.S. Lowry, kept in the distance. Although retaining Danish nationality, having been born in the Danish West Indies, Camille Pissarro’s feet, or rather one of them, in a genetic manner of speaking, may have hailed from the same vicinity as William Blake’s ‘Holy Lamb of God’. Pissarro’s mother was Creole but his father was Jewish.

Andrew Lambirth

Sweetness and Light

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People love to sniff the scandal of forgery. Didn’t that old rogue Tom Keating practically become a folk idol? The disputes of scholars are mostly dry stuff, but the notion that the National Gallery’s recently and expensively purchased ‘Madonna of the Pinks’ by Raphael could be a fake has been resurrected by arts reporters and newshounds hungry for headlines on the occasion of this eagerly awaited Raphael exhibition. I have heard artists and critics voicing their doubts about the authenticity of this painting — one of the former opining that the faces do not look sufficiently Italian to be by Raphael, but are instead ‘neurotic and unmistakably Low Countries’ — and indeed it is easy to have misgivings about such a controversial picture.

Michael Vestey

Digital watch

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Did the BBC’s creation of its Radio Four-type digital radio network BBC 7 force the commercial digital station Oneword to close? The report last week investigating the corporation’s move into digital radio seemed to think so. Tim Gardam, a former BBC and Channel 4 executive, whose report it was, said that the BBC ‘was basically unconcerned about the potential effect of BBC7 on Oneword’. The Oneword ‘assumption that it would be allowed to pursue this market alone was scuppered’ once BBC7 was launched. He thought the station’s collapse might have been avoided if the BBC had been willing to share its renowned archive with it. It is a pity that Oneword, the digital radio station that resembled Radio Four, closed.

Robin Holloway

Update on Three

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It’s several years since I’ve attempted in these columns an overview of the state of Radio Three. Perceptions are sharpened by an actual absence from these islands of some three months, followed by a season in the country, where its beams do not penetrate. So I come to it refreshed, with a wider perspective from which to measure benefits and disabilities than if, glued to the tacky Radio Times, I’d never been away. Positives first: plenty of the network’s manifold and manifest excellences remain intact. A passionate addict of ‘serious classical music’ (ugh) and the idea, and actuality, of a service wholly devoted to its dissemination, I find this ideal still holds, if precariously, despite the depradations of current ideology.

23 October 2004

Michael Tanner

Grave and glittering

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While it’s clear, from the ending-times of most of their performances, that neither of London’s major opera houses feels it is worth considering seriously their patrons who don’t live in the capital and have to use public transport, it often seems even clearer that most Londoners wouldn’t dream of going further afield for an opera than Bow Street or St Martin’s Lane. At least I can’t see any other explanation of why each visit I have paid to Sadler’s Wells this year has been to a theatre half-full, if that. And several of those visits have been far more enjoyable than almost anything to be found in the West End in recent months.

Giannandrea Poesio

Stamping feat

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Foot stamping is a common feature of many forms of dance. This is not surprising because it provides immediate rhythmical accompaniment to the dance, while being integral to the dance action. Inspired by what many consider as the most natural and first man-made rhythm-making in the world, illustrious choreographers have often drawn upon this primeval idea for their artistic creations. Footfalls, therefore, have often been extrapolated from their traditionally non-theatrical contexts and imported into ballets such as those by Maurice Béjart and Jiri Kylian, or into more radical theatre-dance works, such as Maguy Marin’s memorable May B (1981).

Andrew Lambirth

Private passions | 23 October 2004

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If travel indeed broadens the mind, much of its benign influence and inspiration must come from contact with foreign culture, very often in the form of museum collections in the country visited. (The British, perhaps surprisingly, are valued museum-goers.) The remarkable assembly of masterpieces and lesser Salon items that fills the Louvre actually says a great deal about French history, if correctly interpreted. Likewise the contents of the National Gallery reflect upon our national character and patterns of taste with no less piquancy and point.

2 October 2004

Michael Tanner

Puzzlingly unmoving

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Hard to credit, but at the Royal Opera the new production of Massenet’s Werther begins with the prelude being played while the curtain is still lowered, no one messing around in front; and when it rises, at the point indicated in the score, we see a honeysuckle-covered wall, with a water spout spouting water, and part of a quaint old house. Old-style realism, or semi-realism, which many of us have been pleading for, if not in all cases, at least in such classic period pieces as this. When characters appear, they are dressed in period, too. Fairly soon, however, I began to wonder whether the director Benoit Jacquot, collaborating with the designer Charles Edwards, and in collusion with Antonio Pappano, had their tongues in their cheeks.

Toby Young

Who needs friends?

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Cloaca, Kevin Spacey’s debut as the artistic director of the Old Vic, must rank as one of the biggest disappointments of the year. It isn’t bad, exactly, but I was expecting so much more from the man who electrified British theatergoers with his star turn in The Iceman Cometh six years ago. I sat there in the audience thinking, ‘He put his career in Hollywood on hold for this?’ A new play by a Dutch author called Maria Goos, Cloaca is reminiscent of Art, the long-running hit about three middle-aged male friends who argue about the value of a blank canvas.

Giannandrea Poesio

Californian class

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I wish ballet companies due to visit London in the next few months could bring programmes that are as richly varied and neatly constructed as those presented by San Francisco Ballet last week. Artistic eclecticism as well as the ability to respond to a diversity of stylistic and technical demands are two of its most noticeable qualities. This 69-strong company, under the 20-year directorship of Helgi Thomasson, has matured into one of the best companies today. I do not recall the last time I saw such an impeccable rendition of George Balanchine’s The Four Temperaments, the crowning glory of the second programme.

William Packer

Salutary shock

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The experience of the critic is one of constant revision, for nothing remains ever quite the same, least of all old opinions.

Andrew Lambirth

Flower power

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Constance Spry (1886–1960) was a remarkable figure who exerted a powerful influence over the taste of generations of home-makers, particularly from the 1930s to the 1950s. Born in Derby, she was brought up in Ireland where she studied hygiene and physiology, with a view to a career in nursing. A natural communicator, she soon found herself lecturing on first aid and home nursing for the Women’s National Health Association in Ireland. From the start there was a noticeable emphasis on self-help and what can be done in the home. But Spry was always capable of working equally well with larger institutions, and at the beginning of the first world war she became secretary of Dublin Red Cross.

4 September 2004

Toby Young

Preserving our heritage

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What will happen to British culture when the United Kingdom disintegrates into half a dozen warring republics? Who will protect our museums from marauding bands of looters when the rule of law breaks down? What will become of the crown jewels when the royal family is banished to Monaco? If our cultural heritage survives at all, it’ll be thanks largely to India, judging by the loving care with which three classic works of English literature have been adapted recently. Later this year, cinema-goers have two treats in store: Bride and Prejudice, in which Elizabeth Bennett is transformed into a Bollywood heroine, and Vanity Fair, Mira Nair’s distinctly Indian take on Thackeray’s masterpiece.

29 May 2004

Petronella Wyatt

Pretty boys

22 May 2004

Andrew Lambirth

Fine Arts Special

Features

Over in Notting Hill, at England & Co., 216 Westbourne Grove, W11 (until 12 June), is a fascinating retrospective of that underrated painter Albert Herbert (born 1925). Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art with the Kitchen Sink painters, Bratby, Middleditch et al., but was less drawn to gritty social realism than to an art altogether more symbolic and concerned with states of mind. (‘Art is not about meanings but feelings,’ he has said.) An early dose of Surrealism was compounded by the influence of Francis Bacon, briefly a tutor at the RCA, and Herbert began to explore his own intensely personal narratives through shared stories, many of them taken from the Bible.

8 May 2004

Lloyd Evans

The peace movement’s fight has gone

Features

Poetry and conflict are as old as each other. From war springs suffering and from suffering song. Fourteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the ancient association is as vibrant as ever. According to the Guardian, an anthology entitled 100 Poets Against the War has outstripped the opposition and become the nation’s most frequently borrowed book of poetry. Even now I hold the volume in my hand. And I read with tremulous fascination about its torrid and telling birth-throes. Last year, on the eve of conflict, Laura Bush was favoured with a visitation from Apollo. The god of verse implanted in the First Lady’s mind the bright idea of staging a poetry recital at the White House. She consulted her husband and he duly gave his assent.

13 March 2004

Andrew Lambirth

Art for the people

Features

How do people respond to Rubens these days? Is all that lush flesh so out of fashion that he is of historical interest only? The good people of Lille evidently think not, for a large and ambitious Rubens exhibition has been organised under the special patronage of M. Jacques Chirac to celebrate the fact that this year Lille shares with Genoa the status of European Cultural Capital. Rubens is considered an apt choice for a landmark exhibition, and certainly the sumptuous display at the Palais des Beaux-Arts is impressive. It is also the first major exhibition devoted to Rubens ever to be held in France. It deserves to be a huge success.

24 January 2004

Interconnect

Apocalyptic vision

Features

The Royal Academy’s retrospective exhibition The Art of Philip Guston: 1913–1980 (until 12 April) comprises some 80 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, by one of America’s most original 20th-century painters. It’s not easy to look at, being in turn demanding, forbidding, horrific and beautiful, but it’s certainly real, and as an intensely moving human document it deserves to be seen. Guston was born of Russian-Jewish parents in Canada, and moved to America in 1919. When he began to paint in 1927, he was largely self-taught. He worked on government-funded mural projects and absorbed the drawing techniques of the Old Masters.

3 January 2004

Interconnect

Visual treats of 2004

Features

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to this year’s exhibitions — from El Greco to Ken Kiff The chief thrill of this year’s gallery-going has to be the El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery (11 February to 23 May). It will be the first major showing of his work in this country, and for many the first chance to study his visionary paintings in any depth. Domenikos Theotocopulos (1541–1614), who settled in the Spanish city of Toledo in 1577, was known as ‘the Greek’ because he hailed from Crete, whence he introduced a modern version of the Byzantine style to a shocked and admiring audience. Trained as an icon painter before studying Mannerism in Venice and Rome, he forged his own highly individual and luminous style from these components.

25 October 2003

Wf Deedes

The spoils of Waugh

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Those of us who have been cashing in on the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, which falls on 28 October, have had a good year. Stephen Fry has won acclaim for his direction of the film based on Waugh’s Vile Bodies, renamed — on orders from the marketing men, I guess — Bright Young Things. Michael Johnston has attracted attention by writing an unauthorised sequel to Brideshead Revisited, which at the behest of the Waugh estate will be available only on the Internet. My own account of adventures with Waugh in Abyssinia during Mussolini’s war in 1935 has sold more copies than I would expect any book of mine to sell.

13 September 2003

Martin Gayford

Swimming pool or work of art?

Features

One of the most amusing broadcast moments of the early 1990s was a radio debate between the painter Patrick Heron and various citizens of St Ives. The subject was the proposal to build a new art gallery in the town. Several angry Cornish voices were to be heard going on about a swimming pool – the alternative project. On the other side, plaintively upholding the cause of Modernist art, were the reedy, patrician tones of the artist (a public-school voice that Heron, a staunch socialist, was very sorry he had).

6 September 2003

Marcus Berkmann

The strange potency of bad music

Features

A lesson is learnt. Good music, as we hear it, tends to be ours and ours alone. But bad music is everyone's: we all suffer together. Last month I related the harrowing tale of a recent family holiday in St Ives, where my girlfriend and I, while not buying beach balls in a tourist-tat emporium, happened to hear Neil Diamond's singular version of the Hollies' 'He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother'. With customary lack of restraint, the old schlockmeister transforms a simple pop song into a full-blooded Broadway show-stopper. You have to hear it to believe it. It drips with goo and phoney sentiment. But it's so vile you can't ignore it. My girlfriend and I stood and listened all the way to the end, while our small children created havoc in the multicoloured-bucket-and-spade section.