Richard Dorment

Saturday

Richard Dorment

Blots on the cityscape

From our UK edition

As the 414 bus swings left from the Edgware Road at Marble Arch you avert your eyes, hoping you won’t have to look at the thing looming up in front of you for a single second longer than you have to. Even so, you know it’s there — a blot on the sky, a gulp of polluted air. I’m talking about a 33-ft-high bronze sculpture in the form of a decapitated horse, muzzle pointed downwards, in the middle of Marble Arch. The epitome of ghastly good taste, it looks like an expensive knick-knack from Harrods blown up to a size that would have appealed to Saddam Hussein. When the thing arrived, the Evening Standard assured us that it would be on view for only one month.

Saturday

Richard Dorment

A dog by the name of Flower

From our UK edition

with a foreword by David Hockney and an introduction by Lucinda Lambton It is a well-known fact that artists love dachshunds. Bonnard had Poucette, Picasso Frika, Andy Warhol Archie, and Hockney his Stanley and Boodge. Less often noted is the attraction these adorable creatures have always had for royalty.

Saturday

Richard Dorment

Being at home abroad

From our UK edition

In ‘Thé-Dansant; Saturday Evening, La Ciudadela’ the English painter James Reeve shows elderly men and women dancing the danzon, a national passion in Mexico not unlike the two-step, where partners perform a series of intricate, angular passes and twirls requiring complete control of wrists, elbows, and little fingers. In Mexico City, where Reeve lives, well-off aficionados repair to elegant palais de dance such as the California Dancing Club. Those who can’t afford such grandeur settle for the Ciudadela, a small park where from 12 noon until dusk they can dance in the open air to live mariachi bands.