Culture

‘Psst! Someone’s coming!’ the skinny man with the ragged breeches and the bandaged jaw warns his fat companion out of the corner of his mouth. The two men, busy bundling sticks in a wood, look around apprehensively while a third man up a ladder attacks a tree with a billhook. The three of them are clearly up to no good, and we’ve caught them at it. The focus of an intriguing little exhibition at the Barber Institute, ‘Two Peasants Binding Firewood’, c.1604-16, (see p31) was once thought to be by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, but as it’s one of several copies from the same workshop it has since been reattributed to his son. Pieter Bruegel the Elder didn’t churn them out; with a waiting list of collectors queuing to acquire his paintings, he didn’t need to.

Grade: B+ We are all very touched, up here, that the esoteric French artist formerly known as Christine and the Queens has changed her name to Redcar, in honour of our once vibrant beachside steel town. Perhaps she was impressed by the newish ‘vertical pier’, or enjoyed a nutritious meal in the Light of Asia. Or, better still, maybe she is planning to adopt a whole bunch of East Cleveland nom de plumes and will next call herself Liverton Mines, or Boosebeck. She may, of course, just mean a red car. Héloîse Letissier (her born name) is very good at simple, naggingly catchy, woebegone synth pop. The simpler the better – as with 2018’s wonderful ‘Five Dollars’ which once heard will never leave your head. She is much less good at ethereal electronic art-pop.

Like so many of history’s great catastrophes, the story begins with an eccentric Victorian Englishman. Francis Galton was a maker of maps and compiler of tables; ‘Whenever you can, count,’ was his mantra. Galton was the first man to plot a weather map and the grandfather of forensic fingerprinting. His quixotic mania for quantification would lead him to try and draw up a ‘beauty atlas’ of the United Kingdom based on his own observations. In a footnote to one of his books, he expressed the need for a new term for the ‘science’ that obsessed him most: ‘We greatly want a brief word to express the science of improving stock.’ That is, improving, by breeding (and by other means), the genetic quality of the human race. He coined a new term: ‘eugenics’.

‘The Age of Anxiety’, W. H. Auden’s book-length poem, has always been described as strange, and difficult. It is an eclogue, but set far from the countryside, in a bar in New York, in the middle of the second world war. It looks like a modern script on the page but metrically it sounds more like Old English. The text flits between conversation and inner thought and is steeped in Jungian philosophy, mysticism and mirrors. Puritanism has bred the assumption that ‘good people’ do not need free speech When I first read it in my twenties, I gave up on trying to understand it and simply allowed the words to wash over me. It’s an approach I recommend taking while listening to Robin Brooks’s haunting new dramatisation of the poem on Radio 3.

Reader, I let you down. But I did so for the right reason: for love. On a night when all of London’s music critics were at the Royal Festival Hall for Christine and the Queens, I deserted my duty. But, honestly, I don’t regret it. The reports back from the RFH suggested some baffling melange of performance art, am dram, experimental pop and gender identity, wrapped up in a concept piece about red cars. Not me. I’ll stick with Rod, a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido. Rod is a man so comfortable with his gender identity that he’s a byword for male libido My love for Rod Stewart is pure and noble.

It’s not until you see this exhibition of drawings by Henry Fuseli that you realise that most artists have really not done anything like justice to women’s hair. Fuseli was obsessed with it, particularly that of his wife Sophia, a former artists’ model 20-plus years his junior. Hers was wildly extravagant even by the standards of the time – late 18th, early 19th century. For most art buffs, Fuseli, one of the most idiosyncratic artists of his age, is best known for ‘The Nightmare’, his lurid Gothic painting of a curvaceous sleeping woman with a demon squatting on her belly, shown in the Royal Academy exhibition of 1782; the drawings in this Courtauld exhibition show another side.