Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Lionel Shriver Lionel Shriver

It’s time for feminists to call it quits

You would think that the British Film Institute’s sponsorship of a month-long festival celebrating some of the most memorable female characters in cinema would draw plaudits from feminists. You would be wrong. Featuring the likes of Nicole Kidman in To Die For, Meryl Streep in Death Becomes Her and Bette Davis in The Little Foxes, the BFI’s programme ‘Playing the Bitch’ is meant to explore the female anti-hero. But in a petition originating with academics at King’s College London, 300 signatories have objected that the festival’s theme ‘uncritically parrots rather than questions the misogynist logics that inform so much Hollywood cinema… The women of Bitches do not subvert gender norms,

Thursday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Knight fever

Emperor Maximilian I liked to say he invented the joust of the exploding shields. When a knight charged and his lance struck the opposing shield — bam! — the shield shattered and the shrapnel went up like fireworks. It’s almost impossible to turn the pages of Freydal. Medieval Games. The Book of Tournaments of Emperor Maximilian I and not imagine Batman-style captions. Clank! Thwack! Kapow! The knights and princes of the painted miniatures are all-awl, all-action iron men. Their horses are hooded to stop them bolting and every harness is stitched with bells. All the horse would have heard was the jangling, not the thunder of hooves or the roar

Martin Gayford

Let there be light | 2 May 2019

Henry Moore was, it seems, one of the most notable fresh-air fiends in art history. Not only did he prefer to carve stone outside — working in his studio felt like being in ‘prison’ — but he felt the sculpture came out better that way too, in natural light. What’s more, he believed that the finished works looked at their best in the open air. This last idea is tested in a new exhibition, Henry Moore at Houghton Hall: Nature and Inspiration — and it turns out that the artist was absolutely right. This — the latest in an enterprising series of shows at this north Norfolk mansion — is

Daniella Greenbaum Davis

Censored in the City: Deborah Lipstadt on modern-day anti-Semitism

Censored in the City is a new podcast taking you through a round-up of news, politics, and culture in New York City, Washington DC, and abroad, focusing on stories and issues beyond the 24/7 news cycle. Each week, Daniella Greenbaum Davies is joined by a guest to discuss the long-term, underlying issues behind the headlines.  In the first episode, Daniella Greenbaum Davis is joined by Deborah Lipstadt: historian and author of, History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier and Antisemitism: Here and Now. They talk about Holocaust denial, the changing face of anti-Semitism, and the unfortunate New York Times cartoon that was published last week. 

Deborah Ross

The invisible man | 2 May 2019

Tolkien is a biopic covering the early life of J.R.R. Tolkien (Nicholas Hoult) and it is not especially memorable. I’m even forgetting it as I’m trying to remember it. Yes, it’s one of those. Come back, come back, I need to remember you at least until the end of this review. But, no, it’s fading, fading, fading. Still, I’ll do what I can before it is fully gone, which may happen any minute now. This is quite the race against time, in fact. So, quickly, quickly. The film opens in 1916, during the first world war, with Tolkien, then 24, on the front line at the Battle of the Somme.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

One of the great whodunnits

It starts on a beautiful summer’s morning in the suburbs of America. A prosperous middle-aged dad is chatting with his neighbours in the garden of his comfortable home, but by nightfall his family has been destroyed. This is one of the most momentous convulsions in all drama. Arthur Miller’s masterful plotting, which he never again surpassed, is a match for the best. By the best I mean Oedipus. Jeremy Herrin’s production emphasises the lush fertility of America in the late 1940s. Trees in full leaf overlook the timber house that is perhaps a little too small for its millionaire owner. Joe Keller is a pioneering industrialist who served a brief

James Walton

The end is in sight

Channel 4’s When I Grow Up had an important lesson for middle-class white males everywhere: you’re never too young to be held up as a git. The series, billed as ‘a radical experiment in social mobility’, gets a group of seven- and eight-year-old children from different backgrounds to work together in a real-life office setting — which in Thursday’s first episode was, rather unexpectedly, Hello! magazine. The editor-in-chief Rosie Nixon began by announcing, in the tones of one making a brave stance against prevailing social attitudes: ‘I do feel passionately about diversity.’ And this, of course, was also the brave stance taken by the programme itself and its on-hand experts,

Kate Chisholm

Up close and personal | 2 May 2019

‘Can you fly down this evening?’ she was asked by her boss in the Delhi office of the BBC. ‘Yes, of course. I have to,’ replied Ayeshea Perera, a Sri Lankan journalist. She was talking from Colombo to David Amanor of the World Service’s The Fifth Floor, which looks at current news stories from the perspective of those intimately involved with them and is always worth catching for its alternative, less formal approach and Amanor’s gentle probing to find the real story. Perera described the chaos on arriving at the airport in the Sri Lankan capital on the evening of Easter Day and the weirdness of going to see the

Thursday

Kate Chisholm

The sense of an ending | 25 April 2019

It was never given the choicest slot in the schedule, airing first thing on Sunday morning with a repeat at the end of the day. But in its 24 years Something Understood, guided and often presented by the esteemed foreign correspondent Mark Tully, has gathered an impressive audience. Its blend of poetry, prose and music from a huge variety of thinkers, theologians, scientists, poets and composers, carefully (but not artificially) edited around a theme, is for many listeners the best of Radio 4, challenging yet always accessible, highly selective but broad in content. I didn’t always manage to hear it but was glad to know it was there. Yet on

Jonathan Jones

What you see is what you get | 25 April 2019

There’s no avoiding the Britishness of British art. It hits me every time I walk outside and see dappled trees against a silver-grey cloud that looks like it was painted by Thomas Gainsborough, or look in the mirror and feel the same gooseflesh anxiety as I do when I see a portrait by Lucian Freud. It’s got something to do with the light — that pale, ever-changing clarity that is so kind to clouds and, when Freud has got his model naked under the skylight, so unkind to human flesh. The phrase the Englishness of English art was coined by Nikolaus Pevsner in the title of a classic art-history book

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Keeping it real | 25 April 2019

It starts at a secretarial college. The stage is occupied by a dignified elderly lady who recalls her pleasure at learning shorthand in the 1920s. She lived in Germany and she took a job at a firm headed by a man named Goldberg. He was Jewish. These unremarkable disclosures are spoken by Brunhilde Pomsel, a woman of high intellect and modest ambitions, who was born in 1911 and died two years ago, aged 106. Her life story was turned into a documentary film, which Christopher Hampton has adapted for the stage. Pomsel’s words are spoken by Dame Maggie Smith. What makes her fascinating is that she worked for Josef Goebbels

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Off the Boyle

‘I spend a lot of time helping teenagers who’ve been sexually abused…’ — beat — ‘…find their way out of my house.’ You’d scarcely imagine, listening to Frankie Boyle now, that this was the kind of joke he was telling on TV as recently as this decade. I wouldn’t believe it myself if I didn’t have written evidence of it, in the form of a 2011 TV review of his now-forgotten shocker of a Channel 4 show, Tramadol Nights. Boyle was great back then because he went to places few other comics dared to tread. He joked about everything from cancer (‘What is it about people with cancer thinking they’re

Deborah Ross

Guns, Puccini and sex in the china cupboard

Bel Canto is an adaptation of the Ann Patchett novel first published in 2001, which I remembered as being brilliant and unputdownable, even if I recalled only a few of the details — hostages, an opera singer; that was about it. So I found it on the bookshelf and read it again, which was daft. The book is brilliant (and unputdownable) and now I can’t come to the film without comparing them, which is unfair and not helpful. But I’m going to say it anyway: this isn’t as good as the book. Not nearly. Patchett’s novel was inspired by the Peruvian hostage crisis of 1996, when members of the Tupac

Jonathan Meades

What next for Notre Dame?

Notre Dame is only important from a Shakespeare’s-birthplace point of view. Architecturally it is a nullity beside the cathedrals of Beauvais and Laon, Albi and Marseille, Rouen and Clermont-Ferrand (a sinister marvel of black tufa). The ashes of the cathedral are now the site of a proxy struggle between some of the greatest fortunes on the planet. The struggle has begun with the architectural competition announced by the widely loathed Macron and the so far less loathed PM Édouard Philippe. How will the competition be conducted? Who will select the committee that will select the committee that selects the architect or engineer whose name will get attached to the building

Wednesday

Martin Gayford

Line dance

Sean Scully once told me about his early days as a plasterer’s mate. At the age of 17 he was helping a craftsman who would often accidentally drop a good deal of plaster on his youthful assistant’s head, especially after a midday break in the pub. Scully spent his own lunchtimes differently. He would roar on his scooter to the Tate Gallery, and spend the time staring at a single picture: ‘The Chair’ by Vincent van Gogh. That picture is one of two reference points in Sea Star, his beautiful exhibition at the National Gallery. Scully pays homage to it in two groups of three paintings, entitled ‘Arles Abend Vincent’

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 17 April 2019

This week, the Wolfson History Prize announced its shortlist. It is always worth drawing attention to, precisely because it is not attention-seeking. Neither ‘woke’ nor stuffy, the prize is simply interested in serious history. This year’s list of six ranges in terms of subject from birds in the ancient world and building Anglo-Saxon England, through maritime London in the age of Cook and Nelson, to Queen Victoria and India (a love affair in which the two never met), Oscar Wilde, and the quest for justice after Nazi persecutions. It being Holy Week, I am wondering what would happen if all the four Gospels were on the Wolfson shortlist. Obviously they

Revd Steve Morris

The wonder of Whitby

The 199 steps up to the ruins of Whitby Abbey are a pilgrimage; they always have been. And any good pilgrimage takes effort. Count Dracula (also acquainted with the north Yorkshire town) cheated — he climbed the steps in the guise of a black hound. These days, with its new £1.6 million museum and visitor centre, our vampire friend would find a ground-floor café and gift shop. Knowing English Heritage, there is probably a bowl of water for dogs, which would have kept the Count happy. Whitby is a surprise, with a history that puts it at the heart of Britain’s spiritual and literary life. It’s also a vibrant fishing