Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Martin Gayford

American beauty | 29 September 2016

‘At last,’ wrote Patrick Heron, a British painter, in 1956, ‘we can see for ourselves what it is to stand in a very large room hung with very large canvases by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and others.’ Just over 60 years later, we, too, can stand in a series of grand galleries at the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism and see what Heron saw, and much more. He was at the (greatly anticipated) first showing of those fabled American artists in Britain. Since then, they have frequently been exhibited individually, but there has been just one collective show of the movement. Now Pollock, de

Deborah Ross

White Knight

Free State of Jones is an American Civil War drama ‘inspired’ by the life of Newton Knight, who led an armed rebellion against the Confederacy in Jones County, Mississippi, and one rather wishes that that was all it was about. Directed by Gary Ross (Seabiscuit, The Hunger Games), and starring a whiskery, leathery Matthew McConaughey, it tells that story, then thinks: while you’re here, might we tell another story? And another one? So you are fully educated in all matters? In the end, such is the weight of all these stories that you won’t lose the will to live exactly, but you will find it has been significantly weakened. The

Kate Chisholm

One day in November

The weather was ‘treacherous’ on Saturday, 23 November 2013, the day chosen randomly by Gary Younge as the focus for his latest book, Another Day in the Death of America. As he described it, a ‘Nordic outbreak’ of snow, rain and high winds swept across the desert states and up into the northern plains. It was for many Americans a winter’s day like many others but for ten families a shot rang out sometime during those 24 hours and their lives changed for ever. Not that these ten disparate events made the national news. Death by gunshot is so commonplace in the USA that not even when those who died

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Close encounters of the Eighties kind

Stranger Things is the most delightful, gripping, charming, nostalgic, compulsive, edge-of-seat entertainment I’ve had in ages. Like a lot of the best TV these days, it’s on Netflix, which I highly recommend so long as you can cope with the technical complexities of getting it to appear on your screen in the first place. Yeah, I know, all you bastard millennial types sneering at Granddad for his inability to do stuff that’s like so totally easy and obvious. But if like me you grew up in an age when there were just three channels and an on/off button, it’s a bloody nightmare grappling with this future where there’s an Amazon

Alexandra Coghlan

Losing heart | 29 September 2016

The subtitle for Mozart’s Così fan tutte may be ‘The School For Lovers’, but it’s as a school for directors that the opera is most instructive. From four lovers and two different romantic pairings, the composer spins a parable whose moral is as elusive as its morals. Faced with so much ambiguity (and so little political correctness) directors tend either to sand down the rough edges with laughs, or fling a capacious concept over the whole lot. It says something about the awkward profundity of this most inscrutable and affection-resistant of the Mozart-Da Ponte collaborations that it can take it. It says even more that you so rarely see an

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Hilarious, puzzling, boring

No Man’s Land isn’t quite as great as its classic status suggests. At first sight the script is a bit of a head-scrambler because Pinter’s characters are obscure to the point of incoherence. A demented alcoholic, Hirst, is cared for in his Hampstead mansion by two mysterious thugs, or servants, who may be emeritus rent boys and who are, or perhaps were, romantically linked to one another. Into this mysterious triptych comes Spooner, a simple and fascinating creation, a washed-up Oxford poet of high intelligence and low achievement who lives by cadging favours from kindly Hampstead folk. He wheedles his way into Hirst’s affections in the hope of gaining employment

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Root and branch

Eventually,’ said Michelangelo Pistoletto, ‘it became a movement. In fact, I believe that arte povera was the last true movement. Since then all artists have been individuals.’ We were sitting one baking hot day last month in his cool study in Biella, a small town in the foothills of the Alps where he has established a huge museum and foundation in a series of disused 19th-century textile mills. He was discussing the group of Italian artists of the 1960s of which Pistoletto himself was a founding member. Arte povera is an umbrella phrase that covers a number of diverse artists, several of them marvellous, who emerged in Italy about half

Rose Prince

Food of love

Modern Britain scratches its head over children who are overfed, not underfed, while guilt-ridden mothers stand accused of feeding children badly even if they are not obese. These are not insignificant troubles since childhood obesity is set to cost the NHS many millions in years to come. But as a new exhibition at the Foundling Museum in London will show, infant and child nutrition is not a new science and the challenge of nurturing, not least keeping children alive before the age of five, was taken just as seriously two centuries ago as it is now. Feeding the 400 is the first show at the museum, built on the site

Laura Gascoigne

Skinny dipping

For a 21st-century gallery, a Victorian collection can be an embarrassment. Tate Modern got around the problem by offloading its Victoriana on to Tate Britain, but York Art Gallery decided to make the best of it. As the birthplace of William Etty, York found itself lumbered with a major collection of work by a minor Victorian artist whose reputation nosedived after his death. While Etty’s statue still dominates the gallery forecourt, most of his paintings languish in the stores. For contemporary audiences, though, he has a USP. An avid frequenter of the life room, Etty acquired a mastery of flesh tones and a penchant for painting nudes that many of

Jonathan Meades

This history of the YBAs confirms their ahistoric arrogance and boundless incuriosity

Artrage by Elizabeth Fullerton. Thames & Hudson. 288pp. £24.95 Thames & Hudson is no longer a publisher much associated with writing. You do not expect its books on art and applied art to be wrought with the brio and elegance of Susie Harries or Rosemary Hill, Crook or Summerson. Which is, perhaps, just as well because Elizabeth Fullerton’s text is catastrophically clumsy. According to the author note she graduated from Oxford with a degree in modern languages: one must assume that English was not among them. She can just about parse a sentence but beyond that, nothing – save a perennially tin ear, a relentless tide of clichés (sea change, game

Deborah Ross

No fear

I can’t say I care for zombies particularly or even understand them — OK, they’re the living dead, but what do they have against the living living? Why do they always want to bite their faces off? — and I can’t say I cared for The Girl With All the Gifts either. This is an adaptation of the dystopian horror novel of the same name by Mike Carey, who also wrote the screenplay. I have not read the book, I confess, as I don’t do much that’s dystopian if it doesn’t involve Margaret Atwood, but I know it was critically well received as well as hailed as ‘an original and

Kate Chisholm

The Third way

We now think of Radio 3 as the music station, but when it was created in 1946 as the Third Programme music was only meant to take up one third of its output. Dramas, features, talks were just as crucial to its identity, and poetry especially was to be heard ‘three times a week and usually at a peak listening hour, not near midnight’ to quote a contemporary news bulletin from the Manchester Guardian. Last night the station began celebrating its 70th anniversary with a concert broadcast live from the Southbank Centre in London, where for the next fortnight there’s to be an ‘immersive’ Radio 3 experience designed to remind

James Walton

Cautionary tale

The closing credits of National Treasure (Channel 4, Tuesday) contain the usual disclaimer that any resemblance between its characters and real people is merely coincidental. Well, coincidental maybe, but also entirely inevitable — because this is a drama based on Operation Yewtree. With its choice of subject matter, a cast including Robbie Coltrane and Julie Walters and a script by Jack Thorne (author of the all-conquering Harry Potter and the Cursed Child), the series is clearly intended as an Important Piece of Television. Yet, partly for that reason, it’s so far proving a rather careful one. Nobody who watched the first episode could accuse it of sensationalism. They might, however,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

In a league of her own

The Emperor seems like a worthy lesson in Ethiopian history. Haile Selassie’s final days are recounted by a retinue of devoted flunkies. He had valets, chauffeurs, zoo-keepers and door-openers to perform every conceivable chore. Each morning a butler proffered a silver dish loaded with meat from which the emperor fed his exotic pets. A clock-watcher, ‘the Cuckoo’, performed a coded bow during meetings to inform His Majesty that new suppliants awaited him. A royal bursar helped him hand envelopes of cash to petitioners who discovered, always too late, that the donation was barely a fraction of the sum expected. A cushion-handler ensured that his titchy legs were never seen to

Richard Bratby

Pole apart

Alas, poor André Tchaikowsky. A survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, with an assumed name that probably did his musical career as much harm as good (he was born Robert Andrzej Krauthammer), he died of cancer in 1982 shortly after his only opera, The Merchant of Venice, was rejected by ENO. He’s remembered today principally for bequeathing his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use as a prop, in which capacity he starred alongside David Tennant in Hamlet in 2008. That skull had a tongue in it and could sing once. Welsh National Opera’s programme book doesn’t credit the skull that’s removed from Portia’s casket in Keith Warner’s UK première

Stephen Bayley

Nicholas Serota

In this week of toadying obsequies after the (rather late) retirement of Sir Nicholas Serota from his imperial throne at Tate, an alternative narrative (briefly) enters the minds of the mischievous. Alone, aloof, fastidious, austere, he is sitting, suited darkly, in his office surveying, with a basilisk stare, the spreadsheets and data-sets his cowering elfin helpmeets have presented him. They step backwards towards the door bowing, afraid to meet his eyes, as he shoots freezing glances towards them. His lips soon purse in cool satisfaction. He is maybe even stroking a furry white cat. Or perhaps a PVC balloon pussy by Jeff Koons. The numbers on his spreadsheets are all

Tiffany Jenkins

Making history | 22 September 2016

‘A fool’s errand’. That is how Lonnie Bunch, founding director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, wryly characterises the decade’s work it took him to get the museum built. It opens in Washington DC this weekend. A talented fundraiser, he and his team matched the $270 million from the federal government (Oprah Winfrey donated $21 million, Michael Jordan $5 million), and travelled the country sourcing artefacts. Most difficult of all has been convincing critics that such an institution — devoted as it is to the history of black America — is necessary and not divisive, that it will tell a story, not of one culture

Stephen Bayley

Belly of an architect

Depending on your point de vue, Haussmann’s imperial scheme for Paris created townscape of thrilling regularity or boring uniformity. Whatever; against a backdrop of serene haute-bourgeois perfection, intrusions have always been controversial. Eiffel’s tower of 1889 was attacked by the intellos of the day. Maupassant, Gounod and Dumas fils thought it a hideous construction of riveted tin. Le Corbusier’s unrealised 1925 Plan Voisin, replacing monuments with motorways, was designed as a shock to the system. And the 1973 Tour Montparnasse, central Paris’s only tall building, is, by general agreement, brainless. The Centre Pompidou of 1977 was a test for taste while the 1989 Bastille Opera is grossly ham-fisted, the last

Thursday

Martin Gayford

In the shadow of Picasso

‘My painting is an act of decolonisation,’ declared Wifredo Lam. These are the first words you read on entering the retrospective of his work at Tate Modern. But I must say that both Lam and Tate got this statement 100 per cent back to front. On the contrary, Lam’s work strikes me as entirely a product of colonialism. It’s none the worse for that, but it’s not any better either. Lam (1902–1982) was originally from Cuba. His father, Enrique Lam-Yam, had emigrated from China and his mother, Ana Serafina, was of mixed African and Spanish descent. He was, in other words, a rather typical inhabitant of the new world. And