Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

1 Oct 2015

Hitler’s émigrés

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach

Martin Gayford

Now you see it, now you don’t

The artist, according to Walter Sickert, ‘is he who can take a piece of flint and wring out of it drops of attar of roses’. In other words, whatever else it is — and all attempts at definition tend to founder — art consists in making something rare and memorable out of not very much. Those words of Sickert’s popped into my mind as I looked at an exhibition of works by Avigdor Arikha at Marlborough Fine Art. Among these were pictures of a piece of toast, two pairs of socks, a casually folded orange tie, and part of a bathroom including a roll of toilet paper. Arikha (1929–2010) was

Charles Moore

No, Radio 3, not everyone can be an artist

Radio 3 on Saturday had interesting, if over-long programmes about the effect of music on the mind. In one of them, people were discussing musical education. All the panellists agreed with the proposition that ‘everyone is musical’. Later in the day, I attended an exhibition opening at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill, at which Peter Bazalgette, the chairman of the Arts Council, spoke. ‘Everyone is an artist,’ he said. Two things struck me about these propositions. The first is that they are now the orthodoxy in the arts: no teacher in the state system or anyone working in the subsidised arts could publicly deny them and expect to get

Nick Cohen

How to defend the arts using liberal values

This is a version of a speech I made to the No Boundaries conference at the Bristol Watershed Theatre on how censorship affects the arts, museums and libraries. The organisers asked me to talk about political correctness and the arts; a touchy subject which requires enormous sensitivity to the feelings of others, and long, thoughtful discussions of whether we should use the term ‘political correctness’ at all. Unfortunately, they continued, you have only 10 minutes and there will be no time for any of that. You will just have to get on with it. So forgive me if I belt out arguments like a machine gun, but I must get

Connie Bensley

The Time of Shoring Up

After the years at the gym, the diets and the supplements, he comes — nevertheless — to the time of shoring up. Now he is under the aegis of the Holy Trinity of Dentistry, Cardiology and Urology whose gods must be placated and obeyed. He turns towards his bathroom reflection, to assess the state of affairs: chest braced, mouth closed (pending the next dental refurbishment). Mercifully, the glass steams up, and his blurred gaze looks younger every minute.

Anna Picard

Lady killer

‘Kiss me, Sergei! Kiss me hard! Kiss me until the icons fall and split!’ sings Katerina Ismailova, adulterous antiheroine of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. Stalin was not amused by Shostakovich’s bleak black comedy but our culture would be poorer without bored wives like Katerina. Perhaps all that Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina and Laura Jesson needed was a proper kiss — the sort that mutes the white noise of disappointment. But a kiss is never enough in these cautionary tales of bourgeois bed-hopping. One thing leads to another and before you know it you’re knocking back the arsenic, throwing yourself in front of a train or back home listening to the

Ismene Brown

Gutted!

There was blood on the walls and floor at the birth of Kenneth MacMillan’s Romeo and Juliet in 1965. The violence of the subject was matched by the goings-on in the wings, the scrap over the first-night casting, in which the original Juliet, the young Lynn Seymour, found herself relegated down the list having had an abortion to take the role. Due to Machiavellian box-office politics, the première was staged with Fonteyn and Nureyev as the young lovers, and rising star MacMillan, horrified at being steamrollered, quit the Royal Ballet. None of the smell of blood and fury survives in the Royal Ballet’s scrupulously scrubbed-down 50th anniversary staging. Though there

Jasper Rees

Speech impediment | 1 October 2015

Who goes to big-screen Shakespeare? Not theatre-goers much, and with reason. Apart from the odd corker by Kurosawa, arguably Olivier and Orson Welles — and let’s bung in Zeffirelli for those with a sweeter tooth — the Bard is a better scriptwriter when the words are dumped and the plots he nicked from elsewhere are updated. See 10 Things I Hate About You (the Shrew as high-school comedy), Forbidden Planet (Prospero in outer space) and, best of all, West Side Story (in fair Manhattan where we lay our scene). There is, as it happens, a semi-respected English-language version of Macbeth by Roman Polanski, who used the cloak of art to

Michael Tanner

Incomprehensible genius

London’s Goethe-Institut has a two-month season of films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder (whose 70th anniversary it’s celebrating), but only five movies, each one alternating with a film influenced by him from another country. Considering that Fassbinder created about 60 films, it seems rather a slim effort. Still, half of his output is available on DVD, at no vast cost, and, having revisited many of the films in the past few days, I am more struck than ever by how great he was, and how, thanks to innumerable kinds of pressure, he only intermittently did justice to his phenomenal creativity and energy. He exasperates as often as he enthrals and moves.

James Delingpole

Independents’ day

I really hadn’t meant to write a postscript to last week’s column on my dark Supertramp past. But then along came a TV programme which reminded me: I WAS cool once. It happened after Oxford when I became, almost simultaneously, both an acid-house freak and an indie kid. And BBC4’s three-part special — Music For Misfits: The Story of Indie (Friday) — captured quite brilliantly what it was like to live in that golden era of floppy fringes, black Levis, obscure music, psychotropic substances and DM boots. Watching it, I knew just how it must have been for combat veterans watching The World at War in 1973. Same distance in

Lloyd Evans

Foote fault

Samuel Foote (1720–77) was a star of the 18th-century stage who avoided the censors by extemporising his performances. Today we’d call him a stand-up comedian specialising in improv. He served tea to play-goers and claimed that the show was a free accompaniment to the beverages. Dogged by homosexual scandals, he was hounded out of England at least once despite the patronage of George III. A riding accident left him with a compound leg fracture (bone piercing flesh), which required amputation to prevent gangrene. The limb was hacked off in 20 minutes. Foote hobbled back to fame and fortune playing Sir Luke Limp in The Lame Lover. At his burial the

Mark Mason

Fancy that

[audioplayer src=”http://rss.acast.com/viewfrom22/boris-nickyandthetoryleadership/media.mp3″ startat=1677] Listen [/audioplayer]Stand by your remotes, girls: the second series of Poldark is under way. Filming has started — yes, he’s out there somewhere, wearing those trousers, not wearing that shirt, swinging that scythe. You’ve only got to wait for someone to edit it all together and then Sunday nights can be special again. You’ll be able to gaze and sigh and imagine. Us blokes, meanwhile, will be considering an anomaly: why is that women can express lust without sounding seedy, but men can’t? I didn’t watch the first series. About three weeks in, when the Twitter drums had really started beating, I asked a female friend if

Thursday

24 Sep 2015

Jenny McCartney

Coming up for air

The thing that the photojournalist Don McCullin likes best of all now, he tells me, is to stand on Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland in a blizzard. He made his name in conflicts in Vietnam, Cambodia, Biafra, Uganda — hot places full of fury, panic and death — but these days he finds his greatest solace in the English landscape. I can see why he is drawn to that wild part of Britain: its isolated beauty, the feeling of being roughed up by the elements but not destroyed by them. Clean air, too: you must get a cool, fresh lungful up there. He’s 80 years old in October: talking to him

Stephen Bayley

Stars in their eyes | 24 September 2015

‘The dominant narrative of space,’ I was told, in that strange language curators employ, ‘is America.’ Quite so. Kennedy stared at the moon and saw a promotional opportunity. Nasa’s logo was designed by the flamboyant Raymond Loewy. A PR man wrote Neil Armstrong’s unforgettable lines. Every event at Cape Canaveral (later the Kennedy Space Center) was televised, while, in the USSR, Star City was built in furtive secrecy just outside Moscow. Tom Wolfe glorified the US space programme in The Right Stuff, his boisterous 1979 masterpiece of reportage where the cowboy mentality of the fly-boys co-mingled with the technical marvels of California aerospace, myth-making the while. But the Soviet Union’s

Peter Culshaw

Indiscreet astronaut

Among my more bohemian friends in 1980s London, Brion Gysin was a name spoken with a certain awe. He was the man who William Burroughs, the author of Junky and Naked Lunch, said was ‘the only man I ever respected’. Gysin was a modernist novelist, inventor and artist. He and his mathematician friend Ian Sommerville invented something called the Dream Machine, which was a spinning cylinder said to induce drug-free hallucinations. He came up with the idea of literary cut-ups, arguing that writing was 50 years behind art in its innovations and this was the writing equivalent of collage. The idea, of introducing random elements by literally cutting up and

Martin Gayford

Melting pot

‘Celtic’ is a word heavily charged with meanings. It refers, among other phenomena, to a football club, a group of languages, a temperament, a style of art and a fringe, once the stronghold of the Liberal Democrats. But who are — and were — the Celts? The curators of the new British Museum exhibition are not at all sure, and that’s one of the reasons why the result is so enthralling. There is a familiar answer to this question: the Celts were an ancient people who moved into Europe from the east in prehistoric times and occupied most areas north and east of the Alps, together with northern Italy and

Digby Warde-Aldam

If only they were a bit less cool: Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons at the Guggenheim Bilbao

Jean-Michel Basquiat: Now’s the Time Guggenheim Bilbao, until 1 November Jeff Koons: Retrospective Guggenheim Bilbao, until 27 September Manhattan in the late 1970s early 1980s was, by all accounts, a pretty scary place. It was caked in graffiti, lawless, and in certain areas, almost emptied by the so-called ‘white flight’ to the suburbs. It was, in other words, a perfect stomping ground for artists and musicians. This is the romantic notion, anyway. It’s what someone will tell you when trying to justify Jean-Michel Basquiat’s posthumous superstar status and its accompanying price tag. His work is supposed to evoke not just the hip-hop heavy whirl of pre-Aids New York, but if

Claudia Massie

Two country-house treasures in the Borders

Picture Gallery Paxton House, Berwick-upon-Tweed Curved Stream Traquair House, Innerleithen, until 31 October In the Regency picture gallery at Paxton House hangs a full-length portrait of a young man in striking yellow breeches. The horse at his side is rubbing its bridle on its knee, the way horses do, while the man looks out at the viewer with the composed confidence of a fellow who would go on to be professor of moral philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. This is John Wilson, or ‘Christopher North’, writer, critic, advocate and, according to one contemporary, nothing less than ‘a true upright, knocking-down, poetical, prosaic, moral, professional, hard-drinking, fierce eating, good-looking, honorable

Kate Chisholm

Tales of the unexpected | 24 September 2015

Two significant anniversaries, each very different but both reflecting the BBC’s mission and the reasons for its continued success. From Our Own Correspondent has been on air for 60 years, reporting on events across the world not just as news but to fill in the back story to the headlines. Instead of bombs and bullets, we might find ourselves listening to a Russian-born piano teacher in Gaza who at last finds a grand piano and begins entertaining her neighbours with Chopin. A single episode might take us from shallots in Mali to the strange ways in which Norwegians celebrate midsummer via China’s new passion for shopping, playing roulette in Russia,

James Walton

Talk of the devil | 24 September 2015

For years, Ian Fleming was famously self-deprecating about the James Bond books. (‘I have a rule of not looking back,’ he once said. ‘Otherwise I’d wonder, “How could I write such piffle?”’) Towards the end of his life, though, he finally produced an essay in their defence — proudly pointing out, among other things, that however fantastical the plots may become, they’re always carefully rooted in a world recognisable as our own. Of course, this is not something that can necessarily be said of all the Bond films — but it certainly applies to ITV’s new three-part thriller Midwinter of the Spirit (Wednesday), based on the novel by Phil Rickman.