Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Kelvin MacKenzie

James Graham’s Ink is riveting and, if they cut it by 30 minutes, even Sun readers might be tempted to pop along

It was most odd. Four decades after I’d walked into the Sun to start my first shift as a news sub editor, I was sitting in a small theatre in the heart of La La Labour-land (the Almeida in Corbyn’s Islington) watching a play where I knew all the characters, as I both worked with them and worshipped them. There was Rupert Murdoch. There was Sun editor Larry Lamb, his deputy Bernard Shrimsley, Page Three photographer Beverley Goodway, and even production supremo Ray Mills who, due to his northern background, was known as Biffo — Big Ignorant Fucker From Oldham. How much would that acronym be worth at an employment

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

There will be blood | 29 June 2017

Wyndham Lewis was a painter, poet, publisher and picker of fights. No target was too grand or too trivial: sentimental Victorians and the modern man of government; shark art dealers and the ‘atrocious’ Royal Academy; compilers of honours lists and editors of literary reviews; thin flapper girls and the fat ‘Belgian bumpkins’ of Peter Paul Rubens; men who read detective stories and women who liked bowl-of-apple paintings by second-rate Cézannes. People who lived in Putney. The poet Edith Sitwell, who sat for an unfinished portrait by Lewis, was one of his ‘most hoary, tried and reliable enemies…I do not think I should be exaggerating if I described myself as Miss

Martin Gayford

American quartet

Politics and art can make for an awkward mix. Much more than with religious subjects it seems to matter whether the viewer shares the artist’s beliefs. But whatever you think of Richard M. Nixon, it would be hard not to enjoy Philip Guston’s satirical drawings of him and his cronies at Hauser & Wirth, Savile Row. These were the most exuberant, scatological, obsessive and imaginative such works since 1937 when Picasso produced an extraordinary strip-cartoon vilification and lampoon entitled ‘The Dream and Lie of Franco’. Indeed, the two series have a good deal in common. Picasso portrayed the Generalissimo as a sort of obscene, moustachioed set of bagpipes. Similarly, Guston

Richard Bratby

Roll over Beethoven

If you want to see an opera director kicking a genius when they’re down — and I mean really sticking the knife in and giving it a good old twist around — Fidelio is usually a safe bet. It’s one of Beethoven’s few undisputed masterpieces in which he’s not in absolute command of his medium; instead, the sheer moral and emotional conviction of the music carries it through. Confronted with such blazing sincerity, the instinct (possibly defensive) of many modern directors seems to be to subvert, to undercut, to belittle. I haven’t seen a production of Fidelio this century that’s been content simply to help the work speak (and Fidelio

Deborah Ross

Car trouble

Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver is an action, heist, car-chase film that is said to reinvent the action, heist, car-chase film. But as you can’t have an action, heist, car-chase film without action, heists and car chases, you may wish to ask yourself: how much do I like action, heist, car-chase films in the first instance? And that’s the bottom line, I suppose. This action, heist, car-chase film is also about the soundtrack, as the story is told through the… ears? of Baby (Ansel Elgort), a getaway driver who doesn’t just enjoy music, but needs it. He rarely takes his earbuds out. He can’t perform unless he’s listening to Blur, Beck,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hyped to death

Hand it to the Americans. They know how to hype a young talent to death. The latest to be asphyxiated by the literary establishment is Branden Jacobs-Jenkins. He’s written six off-Broadway plays (one adapted from a script by Boucicault), and won a ton of awards and prize money. Most of the English ‘critics’, if one can call them that, have meekly regurgitated the American propaganda. Gloria, which was nominated for the Pulitzer, now arrives at Hampstead. The setting is a snobbish New York magazine, which is absolutely and emphatically not the New Yorker, according to Jacobs-Jenkins. (Before turning to drama, he worked at the New Yorker for three years.) We’re

Norman Lebrecht

Council of despair

Amid the general political turmoil, a flutter of hope has greeted the arrival of Sir Nicholas Serota as chairman of Arts Council England, an organisation of fading relevance. Sir Nick, grand impresario of the Tate galleries, started life as an Arts Council gofer in 1969, taught to hang pictures by the flamboyant David Sylvester, friend of Lucian Freud, Bacon and Giacometti. Sylvester was one of many outsized brains that fuelled the quango in its heyday. Think Stuart Hampshire, Alan Bullock, Marghanita Laski, Richard Hoggart. No one like that left now. Might Serota signal a revival? The omens are not auspicious. In the past 20 years, the Arts Council has shed

Thursday

Tobias Grey

Brief encounter | 22 June 2017

How do you follow a film like Shoah? The nine-hour Holocaust documentary, released in 1985 after 11 years of work and 350 hours of interviews — with survivors and perpetrators, saviours and collaborators, historians and bystanders — is considered one of the greatest films ever made. For decades, director Claude Lanzmann kept returning to the subject, raking over the same material, finding it impossible, maybe indecent, to move on. Of the five documentaries he has made since Shoah, four were substantial footnotes to the original, extended — and often extraordinary — out-takes from the acres of unused footage. But Lanzmann did have an answer to the question of what to

Deborah Ross

Non-magnetic north

Oh, Hampstead, what did you do to deserve Hampstead? Bet you wish the film-makers had pressed on down Fitzjohn’s Avenue and made Swiss Cottage, say. On the other hand, maybe you did have it coming, especially as I once overheard one mother say to another in the Coffee Cup: ‘James? He had so much homework we had to send him to boarding school.’ That always makes me feel better, given I’ll never be able to afford to live there. This plainly wants to do for Hampstead what Notting Hill did for Notting Hill and Manhattan did for Manhattan and Munich… nope, we’ll stop there. But it’s the sort of ‘love

Michael Tanner

Twin peaks | 22 June 2017

In an essay called ‘Wagner’s fluids’, Susan Sontag concludes, ‘The depth and grandeur of feeling of which Wagner is capable is combined in his greatest work with an extraordinary delicacy in the depiction of emotion. It is this delicacy that may finally convince us that we are indeed in the presence of that rarest of achievements in art, the reinvention of sublimity.’ For a performance of any of Wagner’s mature works, either we feel we are in the presence of sublimity or the whole thing is a frustrating waste of time, as almost all performances are. At Longborough, which this year has revived its 2015 production of Tristan und Isolde,

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Trouble in paradise | 22 June 2017

‘Riviera is the new Night Manager,’ I read somewhere. No, it’s not. Riviera (Sky Atlantic, Thursday) is the new Eldorado — except, unlike the doomed early 1990s soap opera in which Tony Holland attempted to recreate the success of EastEnders on the Costa del Sol, it has at least been glamorously relocated to Nice, Monaco, New York etc. The settings are the best thing about it. Those Mediterranean palaces with sun-bleached brick-red plaster and bougainvillea and shimmery blue pools and the sun-loungers arranged just so by invisible but discreetly attentive staff: we’ve most of us had the experience at some time or another, either because we’ve lucked out and been

Martin Gayford

Tall story

‘Everything is slow in Romania,’ said our driver Pavel resignedly, and, as it turned out, he was not exaggerating. He was taking us on a trip of about 150 miles, from Sibiu to Targu Jiu, to see the sculptures of Constantin Brancusi. Taking the faster route, we set off a little after 9 a.m. and arrived at about 2 p.m., stiffer, wearier and more comprehending of the reasons why, although Brancusi’s ‘Endless Column’ is among the most celebrated works of modernism, almost nobody — in the London art world, at least — has seen it. My inquiries suggested that an intrepid Tate curator had made it, but that was more

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hymn to self-slaughter

Anatomy of a Suicide looks at three generations of women in various phases of mental collapse. They line up on a stage that resembles a grey dungeon while sad events unfold around them. The first woman gets pregnant. The second takes heroin. The third argues with a lesbian about a fish. Their lives span several decades but their stories are presented simultaneously, and this tripartite method conceals the plain fact that the events dramatised are too flimsy to merit theatrical portrayal. A soap opera would baulk at such scenes: a druggie teenager bores a cameraman with a list of gloomy soundbites; a female wedding guest is partially seduced by a

Kate Chisholm

Listen with mother | 22 June 2017

This week’s column is dedicated to my mother who loved her radio and encouraged us to be listeners. Without her, I would not be qualified to do this. My earliest memories are of sitting under the table while my mother sewed and the theme tune of Listen with Mother echoed through the house. The radio, an old valve model which took a while to get going and whose half-moon dial promised to send us signals from Lahti and Motala as well as Reykj’vik and Kief, was switched on not all the time, that would have inured us to its pleasures, but on and off for a regular sequence of programmes,

Thursday

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

Kissin in action

Is Evgeny Kissin, born in Moscow in 1971, the most famous concert pianist in the world? Probably not, if you stretch the definition of ‘concert pianist’ to encompass the circus antics of Lang Lang, the 34-year-old Chinese virtuoso who — in the words of a lesser-known but outstandingly gifted colleague — ‘can play well but chooses not to’. But you could certainly argue that Kissin has been the world’s most enigmatic great pianist since the death of Sviatoslav Richter in 1997 – though, unlike the promiscuously gay Richter, his overwhelming concern with privacy does not conceal any exotic secrets. He has recently married for the first time, but chooses not

Martin Gayford

The better angels of our nature

Late one afternoon, early in the year, I was walking through the Vatican Stanze with a small group of critics and art historians. While we were admiring the Raphael frescoes that fill these private apartments of the Renaissance popes, Matthias Wivel, curator of the Michelangelo & Sebastiano exhibition at the National Gallery, made the most eloquent case for the painter I have ever heard. Suddenly, I felt a new enthusiasm for Raphael. Essentially what he said is that Raphael is the supreme master of depicting human beings in interaction. Each of the frescoes around us, Wivel pointed out, was made up of a huge number of figures, all engaged with

A.N. Wilson

1944 and all that

The star of this film is the music, composed by Lorne Balfe. I really liked it, which was just as well, because it plays for about half the 98 minutes, while a superannuated Churchill, played by Brian Cox, moons about on beaches, deeply penitent for his catastrophic authorisation of the Gallipoli disaster in which a quarter of a million Allied troops lost their lives on the beaches of Turkey. It is the summer of 1944, and an apparently almost pacifist Churchill is timidly begging Eisenhower and Montgomery not to go ahead with the Normandy landings. He dreads the loss of life, you see. Not being a Churchill scholar, indeed being,