Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Dealer’s choice

One evening a few weeks ago I was on my way to the opening of an exhibition at the Venice Biennale when I stopped for a moment in a quiet campo off the main drag. An elderly priest was standing on the steps of the church of Santa Maria della Fava in the weak sunshine. On impulse I stepped inside and he followed. For a while I looked at Piazzetta’s altarpiece, ‘The Madonna with St Philip Neri’ (c.1725). Then — as if silently to indicate that I should have a look at this too — the priest switched on the light to illuminate Giambattista Tiepolo’s ‘Education of the Virgin’ (c.1732)on

Andrew Roberts

National Army Museum

I used to love the National Army Museum in Royal Hospital Road, Chelsea, which was crammed with the memorabilia of four centuries of the British Army. I even visited it on the morning of my wedding. It taught you about the history of the British Army in a completely non-political way, allowing the objects — which were carefully factually annotated — to speak for themselves. It was housed in a hideous 1971 building, but the artefacts inside were superb. Today’s huge new £24 million refurbished National Army Museum looks imposing inside, but instead of chronologically taking you through the history of the Army it is now broken down thematically into

Kate Chisholm

Comic relief | 1 June 2017

In such times as these, enough to try a man’s soul, a dose of John Finnemore is advisable. His brand of comedy, as fans of Cabin Pressure will know, makes you laugh out loud (unlike, I fear, a lot of the programmes in that 6.30 p.m. slot on Radio 4). His quirky stabs at the absurdity of human nature are guaranteed to cheer even the most awful of days because they’re so simply drawn, etched in clear, sharp lines, and because they celebrate rather than bewail our frailties; life’s tendency to make you fall flat on your face just as you thought you were about to make it big time.

Louise Levene

Scarlet women

A Covent Garden barfly was scanning her programme during the first interval: ‘Oh yes, the one about the gynaecologist.’ She meant Strapless, of course, an attempt to tell the back story to John Singer Sargent’s ‘Portrait of Madame X’, which scandalised the Paris Salon of 1884. ‘Madame X’ was Amélie Gautreau, a Creole beauty who became the trophy wife of a Paris banker (and bat-guano importer). Impressed by Sargent’s striking portrait of her lover, the surgeon and saloniste Samuel-Jean Pozzi, Mme Gautreau agreed to let the fashionable young artist immortalise her own cadaverous allure. Bad idea. Her brazen pose and the fallen strap of her low-cut gown caused lasting damage

James Walton

Heaven knows they’re miserable now | 1 June 2017

On the face of it, the two new big drama series of the week don’t have a great deal in common, with one set in a determinedly present-day Britain, the other in a dystopian American future. What they do share, though, is a general air of classiness, some impressively understated central performances and, above all, an almost heroic commitment to unrelenting misery. In the first episode of Broken (BBC1, Tuesday), a typical scene consisted of single mother Christina — who’d just been sacked from her badly paid job and told she was ineligible for benefits — reluctantly selling off her wedding and engagement rings, before returning home to find her

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Army surplus

Georg Büchner, a justly neglected German playwright, died at the age of 23 leaving a half-finished script about a mad soldier and his cheating girlfriend. This relic has fascinated dramatists ever since because Büchner is regarded as a visionary left-wing artist cruelly stolen before his time. (Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.) Jack Thorne is the latest to rehash the leftovers. It’s 1981 and we’re in a divided Berlin. We meet a mopey British squaddie, Woyzeck, who shares a flat with his girlfriend from Derry who has the voice of a seagull and the personality of a dishcloth. The flat pongs because it’s located over a slaughterhouse.

Alexandra Coghlan

Music matters | 1 June 2017

The ancient Greeks had a word for it —katabasis, descending into the depths, to the underworld itself, in search of answers. To cross the threshold between life and death, innocence and knowledge, the everyday and what lies beyond, is an act woven through art, resurfacing in each generation. For Orpheus, and for Monteverdi, the journey may be a literal one, but for Bartok’s Bluebeard, imagined in the age of Freud and Jung, hell is not found outside, or even in other people, but within the darkest recesses of our own selves. When we speak of Orpheus it is of music, of birds and beasts beguiled, and men and women drawn

Thursday

Laura Freeman Laura Freeman

Making waves | 25 May 2017

The end, whenever it came, was always going to be too soon for Katsushika Hokusai. There was still so much to see. So much he had not painted. On his deathbed, Hokusai, attended by his doctor, said a prayer. ‘If heaven will extend my life by ten more years…’. He paused and made a private calculation. ‘If heaven will afford me five more years of life, then I’ll manage to become a true artist.’ He may have been 90, but he wasn’t done yet. In life, Hokusai (1760–1849) painted dragons, creatures of long life, by the dozen. He has them disappear in puffs of inky smoke, then reappear across the

Martin Gayford

Being and nothingness | 25 May 2017

Size, of course, matters a great deal in art; so does scale — which is a different matter. The art of Alberto Giacometti (1901–66) illustrates the distinction. There are very few major artists who have produced objects so physically minuscule. But the smaller and thinner his people are, the vaster the space they seem to inhabit. That’s where scale comes in. There was a period of about five years, wrote his friend the critic David Sylvester, ‘when every figure Giacometti made (with one exception) ended up an inch high more or less.’ You encounter just such a work about halfway around Tate Modern’s big new Giacometti exhibition. Aptly entitled ‘Very

Michael Tanner

Death wish

Anyone who thinks they have experienced absolute boredom, or even doubts that such a state can exist, should go to Glyndebourne’s first offering of the season, Cavalli’s Hipermestra. The first two acts, played without any break, last for 130 minutes, the third for a mere hour. The audience broke into its normal rapturous applause at the end, no doubt to reassure itself that it still existed. This opera of the inordinately productive Cavalli has been revived only once since its first outing in 1658, and I can only hope that its present resurrection is temporary and its second death final. Arriving at Glyndebourne, we saw a couple of Arabian newlyweds

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Sado-erotic review

The Olivier describes Salomé by Yaël Farber as a ‘new’ play. Not quite. It premièred in Washington a couple of years ago. And I bet Farber was thrilled at the chance to direct this revival at the National’s biggest and best equipped stage. She approaches the Olivier’s effects department like a pyromaniac in a firework factory. She wants everything to go off at once. And it does. Goatherds yodel. Bells bong. Flutes warble. Birds parp. A revolving conveyor belt twirls spare actors around the stage in dizzy circles. Chord surges swell and fade on the soundtrack. Kneeling shepherdesses sift mounds of soap powder into mahogany salad bowls. Overhead, the prog-rock

Deborah Ross

When will I ever learn?

Oh, Pirates of the Caribbean, I have given you every chance down the years. Every chance. I am always hopeful. This may be the one that has a proper story I can follow, I have told myself. This may be the one in which Johnny Depp even bothers to act, I have told myself. This may be the one that doesn’t make me wish I’d stayed home where I could be doing something more interesting and fulfilling, like sorting laundry or cleaning out the fridge. When will I ever learn? When? Pirates, you’re on film five now, and I don’t understand. Well, I do and I don’t. You’re one of

Kate Chisholm

Crime and punishment | 25 May 2017

‘Hell is better than what I personally witnessed,’ says Ben Ferencz, who was one of the American troops sent in to the Nazi death camps to collect vital evidence. ‘Dead bodies mingled with those alive. Piles of bones waiting to be buried. The smell of burning flesh. Those who were still alive pleading with their eyes.’ All of which we have heard many times before, perhaps too many times. But then Ferencz added, ‘SS men trying to flee, running away, and the inmates, those who could still walk, trying to chase them, grabbing at them.’ It was an unusual, vivid detail that captured the attention. Ferencz was talking to Emma

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The great rock’n’roll swindles

Birds have been giving me a lot of grief of late. There’s Tappy — the blue tit who has built his nest just underneath my bedroom window and makes rat-like scuffling noises that bother me at night and wake me early in the morning. And Hoppy, a mistle thrush fledgling who can’t quite fly yet, which means we have to keep the cat indoors, which means I have to deal with its horrible shit in the litter tray every day before breakfast. And the rookery in the big ash, whose inhabitants are very vocal, especially when one of their babies falls out of the nest and gets devoured by the

Tuesday

Tobias Grey

Impeccable filmmaking from Michael Haneke: Happy End reviewed

The title is ironic. The end is not happy for Michael Haneke’s bourgeois French family, whose hamper of festering secrets the Austrian director unpacks with glee. His twelfth feature, which is vying for an unprecedented third Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, features an acting masterclass from French veteran Jean-Louis Trintignant as Georges Laurent, a dotty patriarch who has lost the will to live. For added piquancy Haneke has set his latest tale in the northern French city of Calais where po-faced immigrants stroll silently about the streets – their lack of menace no doubt intended as a counterpoint to the dastardly doings of the Laurent family. The significant youngest member

Monday

Tobias Grey

Amusing, waspish take-down of Jean-Luc Godard: Redoubtable reviewed

Jean-Luc Godard’s famous dictum was: ‘all you need for a movie is a girl and a gun’. In Redoubtable, French director Michel Hazanavicius’s jaunty biopic of Godard, set during the student insurrection of 1968, which premièred yesterday at Cannes Film Festival, there is plenty of the first and none of the latter. The girl is Anne Wiazemsky, Godard’s teenage bride and one-time muse, who wrote an elegant memoir of their time together, Un an après, which is the basis for Hazanavicius’s film. Wiazemsky’s role is taken by French-English actress Stacy Martin who reveals almost as much flesh here as she did in Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac. Though, it must be said,

Peter Hoskin

Coffee, mist and brilliance: Sky Atlantic’s new series of Twin Peaks reviewed

So much coffee. Just like in the original, the characters in the new series of Twin Peaks get through so much coffee. Major characters huddle around it in diners. Background characters raise mugs to their lips. Entire scenes revolve around the stuff. There’s just so much coffee. And, I’m proud to say, I played my part too. I knocked off an entire cafetière so that I’d be awake for the two-part opening to the series, which aired at 2am this morning on Sky Atlantic. And I finished another cafetière to write this post. This is not an occasion I was going to miss. Not only is the return of Twin

Thursday

Martin Gayford

League of nations

‘Are you enjoying the Biennale?’ is a question one is often asked while patrolling the winding paths of the Giardini and the endless rooms of the Arsenale. It is not easy to answer. The whole affair is so huge, so diverse and yet — in many ways — so monotonous. Like the EU, an organisation with which it has something in common, La Biennale di Venezia believes in the principle of subsidiarity. Therefore individual nations are allowed to do what they like within their own pavilions. However, there are also strong homogenising forces at work — so much of what is on view in the national pavilions and elsewhere tends