Arts Archives

From cartoons to stage design: the genius of Osbert Lancaster

Arts feature

‘Bigger,’ said Sir Osbert Lancaster when asked the difference between his work for the page and for the stage. ‘Definitely bigger.’ For almost 40 years Lancaster was the ‘pocket cartoonist’ for the Daily Express. He had remarked to the features editor that no English newspaper had anything to match the little column-width cartoons of the French papers. ‘Go on,’ said the editor, ‘give us some.’ On 1 January 1939, Lancaster gave them the first of around 10,000 line-drawn cartoons. His subjects were the war, the Blitz, the weather, Stalin, Hitler and Dr Spock, the Swinging Sixties, the Common Market, the test tube baby and the topless swimsuit.

Martin Gayford

Remarkable and imaginative: Fitzwilliam Museum’s The Art of Food reviewed

Exhibitions

Eating makes us anxious. This is a feature of contemporary life: a huge amount of attention is devoted to how much we eat, when we eat it, where it comes from, to toxic foods, organic and inorganic ones, environmentally damaging groceries, those that tot up too much mileage or cause damage to the rainforest. Some of these worries are relatively novel, but preoccupation with the nourishment we consume is not. A remarkable and imaginative exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500–1800, documents just how obsessed our ancestors were with every aspect of their meals. At its heart are a series of recreations by Ivan Day, a specialist on the subject of what can only be described as edible art.

Sam Leith

‘My wife sends me sleep bubbles’: The extraordinary world of Pete Townshend

Features

When most rock stars have trouble sleeping, they fall back on Valium, temazepam, heroin or Jack Daniel’s. But Pete Townshend, guitarist and songwriter for The Who and — we’re pleased to discover — Spectator subscriber, isn’t much like most rock stars. Sober now for three decades, he calls instead on his wife Rachel’s psychic powers. ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘when I’m having difficulty sleeping, Rachel — who has some… certainly, some kind of healing powers — will say to me, “Do you want me to send you a sleep bubble?” Now, I often go’ — he mimes squirming like a reluctant child — ‘“No, of course I don’t need you to send me a bloody sleep bubble!

Deborah Ross

Wildly entertaining Pope-off: The Two Popes reviewed

Cinema

The Two Popes stars Anthony Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce — that’s two reasons to buy a ticket, right there — as Pope Benedict XVI and his successor Pope Francis I, and it is wildly entertaining, so now you have a third reason too. True, it does, as others have noted, shy away from directly tackling the most difficult questions currently facing the church. But is that really the film you want to see? Rather than this affectionate and literate bromance that does, in fact, nudge us towards the bigger picture, but slyly? Also, it is brilliantly comic. Pope Benedict, for instance, doesn’t get jokes but does try to tell one, which no one else gets. ‘It’s a German joke, so it doesn’t have to be funny,’ he then explains. I laughed my head off.

Michael Hann

Rap that feels like a sociology lecture: Loyle Carner at Alexandra Palace reviewed

Music

A few years ago, I asked the young American soul singer Leon Bridges — a latter-day Sam Cooke, with the old-fashioned song arrangements to match — if he ever pondered the incongruity of being a black man, backed by a white band, playing music in the African-American tradition to audiences that (in the UK at least) were almost entirely white. ‘I have a song called “Brown Skin Girl”,’ he replied, ‘and I ask “Where my brown-skinned girls at?” And there’s maybe one or two in the crowd. It’s a little awkward sometimes.’ His words came to mind watching Adia Victoria.

Alexandra Coghlan

Handsome and revivable but I wasn’t moved: Royal Opera’s Death in Venice reviewed

Music

Premièred within two years of each other, Luchino Visconti’s film and Benjamin Britten’s opera Death in Venice both take Thomas Mann’s novella as their starting point. But from shared beginnings the two works diverge dramatically. The cloying visual beauty of the film, its pink-and-grey vision of Venice swaddled in Mahler strings, couldn’t be further from the stern, self-loathing austerity of Britten’s last opera, whose beauty is much harder won. The sea that pounds and dashes the Suffolk coast in Peter Grimes is lulled in Death in Venice into the queasy, syncopated swell of the lagoon, a miasma of heat and sickness rising from its waters.

Kate Chisholm

The pleasures and perils of talking about art on the radio

Radio

‘I like not knowing why I like it,’ declared Fiona Shaw, the actress, about Georgia O’Keeffe’s extraordinary blast of colour, ‘Lake George, Coat and Red’. O’Keeffe was inspired by the lake in upstate New York but there’s no discernible lake on the canvas and no coat, although there is plenty of red. When Shaw is asked to describe the painting for us, her listeners, by Alastair Sooke, the presenter of The Way I See It, she puts her head in her hands. It’s almost like an amateur painting, Shaw concludes, and yet ‘it absolutely isn’t’. It’s an early work from 1919 when O’Keeffe was 32.

Lloyd Evans

An astonishing treat: Dear Evan Hansen at the Noël Coward Theatre reviewed

Theatre

Dear Evan Hansen, by Steven Levenson, opens as a standard American teen-angst musical. Evan is a sweaty geek with a crush on Zoe Murphy whose rebellious brother, Connor, is so disturbed that he styles his hair to suggest ‘school-shooter chic’. Evan tries to befriend Connor but gets shoved to the ground. Then, a bombshell. Connor kills himself. By an amazing but credible coincidence Connor’s parents start to believe that Evan was good pals with their deceased son. And Evan exaggerates the depth of the friendship in order to help the family, and especially the mother, cope with their grief. He even fabricates an exchange of emails in which Connor appears to speak warmly about his parents and to express hopes for the future.

James Walton

Is the patriarchy as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be? The Baby Has Landed reviewed

Television

Anybody who watched the opening episode of The Baby Has Landed (BBC2, Wednesday) might have found themselves wondering if the patriarchy is quite as all-powerful as it’s cracked up to be. The programme follows ‘six families over six life-changing weeks’ as they welcome a new member — and on the whole features women who radiate authority and men who do what they’re told. The most experienced parents are Nigel and Helen Pierce, first seen embarking on a lengthy quest for shoes as they tried to get their four children under five out of the house so that Helen could go to hospital and have a fifth. As old hands, they passed the time during labour doing crosswords. (‘Breed of hunting dog? You have your contraction and get back to me.

21 November 2019

Richard Bratby

Meet the unrivalled Sun King of early music, William Christie

Arts feature

It’s morning in the garden of William Christie, and he’s talking about home improvements. ‘I planted three pines up there actually,’ he says, pointing. ‘One blew over in a storm in ’99. But I was able to plant on both sides and create a vista. It’s getting there.’ He gestures across topiary and lawns and away towards the opposite hillside, where an avenue of trees and classical pillars sweeps up towards the skyline. Hang on: he created that too? It’s not unknown for famous conductors to act like Bourbon princes.

Martin Gayford

The extraordinary paintings of Craigie Aitchison

Exhibitions

One of the most extraordinary paintings in the exhibition of work by Craigie Aitchison at Piano Nobile (96–129 Portland Road, W11) is entitled ‘Georgeous Macauley in Blue against a Red Background’ (1968). It depicts the sitter, a Nigerian who was Aitchison’s favourite model of the 1960s and ’70s, wearing a peaked cap and double-breasted jacket. The catalogue quotes a reminiscence by the artist which provides a partial explanation of the headgear. ‘He wanted to be a traffic warden, and I said, “Why do you want to go about in the rain doing that?” And he said, “Because you get a uniform.”’ The art and life of Aitchison (1926–2009) were all like that: perfectly logical and at a unexpected tangent from normality.

Lloyd Evans

Riveting and beautifully staged analysis of totalitarianism: Arcola’s #WeAreArrested reviewed

Theatre

When the RSC does modern drama it usually lays on an ultra-worthy yarn with a huge cast, dozens of fancy costumes and a three-hour running time. Miraculously, its new co-production with the Arcola avoids these faults and delivers a terse, gripping 75-minute documentary drama based on the prison diary of Turkish journalist, Can Dundar. In 2015 Dundar received proof that his country’s intelligence service was attempting to supply arms to Syrian rebels. He knew that if he released the material he might face jail but he published it anyway and was threatened with life imprisonment. Peter Hamilton Dyer, well known for impersonating journalists, plays Dundar as a loveably cerebral type determined to stick to his principles.

Michael Hann

Range and power – and amazingly she sang all her songs: Christina Aguilera at Wembley reviewed

Music

In every respect bar its austere pews, the Union Chapel is one of the best venues in London: beautiful and atmospheric, it encourages concert-goers to listen rather than chat. There’s no bringing in booze from the bar, so you’re not disturbed by people going hither and thither (though the couple next to me had smuggled in a thermos of tea and a pack of Choco Leibniz). It suited the Delines, from Oregon, down to the ground. Though they released their first album only five years ago, the Delines are hardly a young band. They’re middle-aged and their songs are middle-aged: sad and weary laments for lives that have slipped out of focus.

Richard Bratby

Ravishing and poignant: ENO’s Orphée reviewed

Music

Billy Wilder, asked for his opinion of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical version of his movie Sunset Boulevard, famously replied: ‘Those boys hit on a great idea. They didn’t change a thing.’ I don’t think you could say exactly that about Netia Jones’s new staging of Philip Glass’s Orphée, a piece that takes the script of Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film and turns it into — well, into an opera by Philip Glass. Cocteau’s shimmering cinematic imagery (think Man Ray come to life) defies physical realisation, so Jones and her designers Lizzie Clachan (sets) and Lucy Carter (lighting) have found poetic, often blindingly beautiful theatrical equivalents.

William Shawcross

The Queen, and indeed the British public, deserve better than The Crown’s lies

More from Arts

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge recently met with survivors of national disasters. They were attending the launch of a new charity. The Duke made a short, supportive speech. But much more important was the private time he and the Duchess spent with the survivors. As Lord Dannatt, who was hosting the public meeting said: ‘Their empathy with those affected demonstrated the vital link between the royal family and people of this country.’ That vital link is indeed one of the key strengths of the monarchy. Countless (and almost always unsung) hours are spent every year by royal family members with people needing recognition or comfort, as they visit schools, factories, charities, people’s homes.

14 November 2019

Daisy Dunn

What really happened at Troy?

Arts feature

Heinrich Schliemann had always hoped he’d find Homer’s Troy. Although he had no archaeological background to speak of, he did have money, and spades, and in the 1870s this would do. Tipped off as to the probable location of the ancient citadel — beneath Hisarlik on the west coast of modern Turkey — the Prussian businessman got zealously to work, pushing through the soil until he struck what he assumed to be the treasure of King Priam himself. In the Iliad the Trojan king lived lavishly. His palace was ‘surpassingly beautiful’. Its 50 rooms were built of ‘polished stone’. The terracotta wares Schliemann lifted from the ground did not quite evoke such splendour. There were fat-bellied pots with nipples and navels and rustic two-handled cups.

Brigid Keenan

How Nova revolutionised women’s magazines

More from Arts

Batsford has just brought out a huge tome on Nova — ‘one of the most influential magazines in history’ — compiled by two of the magazine’s star art directors, David Hillman and Harri Peccinotti. It covers the ten years that the magazine existed, 1965 to 1975, and focuses on the brilliant and groundbreaking layouts it introduced. But somehow it is not quite the Nova that I loved when I went to work there as assistant editor in 1967. For me, Nova was its editor, Dennis Hackett, who had been brought in to save the failing magazine soon after its launch. I don’t know what genius first thought of putting a tough Yorkshire newspaperman in charge of a women’s magazine but he had already made a name for himself on trendy Queen.

The Spectator

Books and Arts – 14 November 2019

The Spectator

Books and Arts | 14 November 2019

Netflix’s ‘The King’ isn’t ‘Francophobic’

I enjoyed watching the new Netflix epic, The King, which celebrated the brief life of Henry V. And it wasn't just because of Robert Pattinson's 'Allo 'Allo French accent in portraying the Dauphin. What gave me the most pleasure as I watched the French cavalry fall beneath a blizzard of arrows at Agincourt was the knowledge that the film has infuriated the French. One of their television channels has accused Henry V of being a 'war criminal', while Christophe Gilliot, director of the Agincourt battlefield museum, decried the film as perpetuating the myth started by Shakespeare that Henry was a gallant chap when in fact the opposite was true. ‘The image of the French has really been tarnished, the film leaves a taste of Francophobia,’ stormed Gilliot.

Damian Thompson

The cult of Trifonov is doing the pianist no favours

More from Arts

Grade: B– Deutsche Grammophon have decided that Daniil Trifonov’s new Rachmaninov piano concertos with the Philadephia Orchestra and Yannick Nézet-Séguin are a railway journey. The video trailer offers no explanation — but, boy, they certainly threw some cash at their conceit. The pianist is dressed like a Russian anarchist, wandering wild-eyed through a railway carriage. Is he fleeing a ticket inspector? Apparently not, because later he’s playing on the train, presumably in the compartment reserved for grand pianos. Those were the days! Last year we had the second and fourth concertos, entitled Destination Rachmaninov: Departure. Now it’s Arrival — the first and third.

Laura Freeman

Unsettlingly faithful to the spirit of Schiele: Staging Schiele reviewed

More from Arts

‘Come up and see my Schieles.’ Those were the words that ended a friend’s fledgling relationship with an art collector. One evening looking at Egon Schiele’s skinny naked scarecrows was enough. Staging Schiele, a one-act dance piece by choreographer Shobana Jeyasingh, is unsettlingly faithful to the spirit of Schiele’s art. If the skin creeps, if the stalls recoil, then the dancers — one man and three women — have done their job. The opening solo is danced by Dane Hurst stripped to his pants in a powerful display of athletic narcissism. His only partner is a small hand mirror at which he lunges and thrusts. Hurst sprawls and crawls and scratches and writhes and bends his body into double-jointed spider shapes.

Lloyd Evans

The script’s a dud: Antipodes at the Dorfman Theatre reviewed

Theatre

The Antipodes, by the acclaimed dramatist Annie Baker, is set in a Hollywood writers’ room. Seven hired scribblers are brainstorming a new animated feature under the direction of a mysterious, bearded multimillionaire, Sandy, who seems thoroughly bored with the movie-making process. The script is in its early stages and Sandy decrees that the central character must be a monster. That’s all. The writers can fill in the details. He asks them to indulge in a free-association experiment by describing their first sexual encounter or the scariest moment in their lives. Long speeches follow. Very long, some of them. Sandy loses interest in the project, not surprisingly, and starts to absent himself from the room. The writers toil on, chatting and wittering.

Deborah Ross

Detailed and devastating: Marriage Story reviewed

Cinema

Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story is a drama about the breakdown of a marriage and it is, at times, devastatingly painful. ‘Divorce,’ says a lawyer at one point, ‘is like a death without a body.’ It’s certainly not the most fun you’ll ever have at the cinema — although it is witty and there are some brilliantly comic lines — but you will see something riveting, detailed, authentic and excellent. Plus it also marks the return of Scarlett Johansson as an interesting actress — remember Lost in Translation? — rather than the one who hangs out with Iron Man and Thor and just does sexy kicks. I’d even forgotten she could be as interesting as this, frankly. Johansson plays Nicole while Adam Driver plays Charlie.

Kate Chisholm

The Polish electronic music revolution of the 1950s

Radio

It was created in November 1957, a year before the BBC’s fabled Radiophonic Workshop, and was far more influential in shaping the development of electronic music, yet the Polish Radio Experimental Studio (PRES) is now virtually unknown even in Poland. Radio 3’s feature on Sunday night, Poles Apart (produced by Andrew Carter), made the case for its significance, taking us back to those early days of analogue bleeps, bongs, blurps and squelches. Robert Worby and the eerily electronic undercurrent to the programme gave us a completely new perspective on what else was going on in Poland in the 1960s besides the trouble at the Gdansk shipyards and the suppression of political thought.

James Walton

Patronising, clichéd and corny: BBC1’s Gold Digger reviewed

Television

Some last taboos, it seems, can remain last taboos no matter how frequently they’re confronted. Grief, the menopause, masturbation, mental illness are all routinely described that way whenever they get depicted on television — i.e. quite often. But perhaps the sturdiest last taboo of the lot is that older women can have sexual feelings: something that appears to come as a rather patronising surprise to TV folk every time they tackle it — i.e. quite often. The latest example of such bravery is Gold Digger (BBC1, Tuesday), a drama keen for us to understand that a woman of 60 can still be both desirable and a goer — although not so keen as to cast a woman of 60 in the role.

Peter York

The man who built Britain’s first skyscraper

More from Arts

In 2011 Britain’s first skyscraper was finally given Grade I listing. The citation for 55 Broadway — the Gotham City-ish home of Transport for London, which sprouts up from St James’s Park Station — said that the building was important in a number of ways: its architect Charles Holden, the designer of Senate House and a range of breakthrough modernist Tube stations in the 1930s, was increasingly recognised as major. The building’s scale and structure were pioneering for London in 1929. And the sculpture on its otherwise plain façades was by important artists including Jacob Epstein, Eric Gill and the young Henry Moore (his first work on a public building and a rare figurative human-in-motion figure).

Richard Bratby

Why are Haydn’s operas so lousy? La fedelta premiata reviewed

Music

There’s a book about musicals that every opera lover should read. Not Since Carrie by Ken Mandelbaum is a history of musical theatre’s greatest flops: a comprehensive study of the thousand ways in which a collaborative artform can crash and burn. It’s unbelievable stuff. The Broadway cast of 1961’s Kwamina participated in a voodoo ritual to neutralise the show’s critics (English National Opera is rumoured to be planning something similar). Adverts for Jule Styne’s Subways Are for Sleeping were banned from New York public transport after vagrants took them as an invitation to spend the night on board.

Michael Hann

Fascinating and compelling: Bruce Hornsby at Shepherd’s Bush Empire reviewed

Music

In the unlikely event that Bruce Hornsby and Morten Harket, A-ha’s singer, ended up featuring in the Daily Mail for, I don’t know, getting into a fight in a supermarket over the last luxury Scotch egg, they would be described as ‘“The Way It Is” hitmaker’ and ‘the “Take on Me” star’. In neither case, I suspect, would that be how they would choose to be remembered. In Hornsby’s case, I know it’s not, because he told me so earlier this year. And when he played that song — a piece of high-class MOR so persuasive that it’s been sampled by hip-hop stars and used incessantly in TV montages since 1986 — at his London show, he introduced it by saying it was ‘why some of you are here.