Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

William Cook

Where Van Gogh learned to paint

In December 1878 Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the Borinage, a bleak coal- mining district near Mons. He was 25 years old. He’d failed to become an art dealer. He’d failed to become a schoolteacher. Drawing was just a hobby — an artistic career was the last thing on his mind. He’d come here as a preacher, full of evangelical fervour, yet he proved a failure at that too. The problem was, he was far too pious. He gave away everything he owned. These miners didn’t know what to make of him. They called him ‘the Christ of the coal mines’. After six months, he was fired. With nowhere else

Paul Morley

The future of the album lies in the gallery

The album is not what it was. It still exists, in record collections, as part of the torrential streaming of everything, and in the sentimental memories of those who lament the loss of what once seemed a permanent fixture and the most exciting, unimpeachably authentic way of capturing and keeping music. Many musicians refuse to relinquish the idea — length, number of songs, conceptual framework, illusory two sides, solidity, sound — of the album. It remains worth hearing what a musician like PJ Harvey might have to say about the album, because it is where she has worked for 20 years, and so she has built up enough momentum to

Will Eaves

Bolivia

for Lucy Dallas Because they wanted to go home and some bit part, a rat in deep cover, raised the alarm (he had done harm himself, but legally, and hid his shame) or, falling in slow motion, the cashier, shot through the heart for moving a finger, reached with his last breath for the dead guard’s Peacemaker and returned fire – because of this taped riot I’m here watching the sun dance to our own live show, few words between us and the telling air, the sum of what was not but is now clear, how Redford in his larcenous prime loved Katharine Ross the schoolteacher and there was time

James Walton

Better Call Saul review: the box set equivalent of a (very) well-made play

I lost count long ago of the number of dinner parties and pub conversations where I’ve had to utter the humiliating words, ‘Actually I haven’t seen Breaking Bad.’ The social isolation became even more shaming when my 81-year-old mother rang to ask me if I’d heard of the show and to explain how much she loved it. (‘But isn’t it very violent, Mum?’ I said. ‘Yes,’ she replied.) All of which means that I can approach Better Call Saul (Netflix) with what I like to think of as stern critical neutrality — rather than, say, ignorance. The main character is, or will become, Breaking Bad’s Saul Goodman, who, from a

Kate Chisholm

The amazing story of the blind photographer

Perhaps the news that Radio 5 live will be the only BBC station (under the new broadcasting rights agreements) to broadcast ‘live’ golf will ensure that its audience stays above the six million listeners now dreamt of by its controller Jonathan Wall as the magic number he needs for the network to stay buoyant. (Figures announced last week showed that 5 live has lost 10 per cent of its audience after a radical shake-up of its presenting team, losing especially Shelagh Fogarty and Victoria Derbyshire, which had the knock-on effect of turning it even more blokey.) At first the idea sounds absurd —golf on radio. It’s such a slow-paced game,

Deborah Ross

Love Is Strange review: subtle and nuanced in ways which, I’m assuming, Fifty Shades is not

You will be wondering why I haven’t seen Fifty Shades of Grey as this is very much Fifty Shades of Grey week and although I’m as curious and excited as anybody — how has Sam Taylor-Johnson filmed a book which, let’s face it, is quite a bit shit? — there were no UK media screenings prior to going to press. This means I will now have to pay and see it at the cinema, which is something, I know, you little people do all the time, but still, who does one go with? As it happens, my mother (86) expressed an interest, but I had to tell her: no way.

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

A tatty new theatre offers up a comic gem that’s sure to be snapped up by the BBC

New venue. New enticement. In the undercroft of a vast but disregarded Bloomsbury church nestles the Museum of Comedy. The below-stairs space wears the heavy oaken lineaments of Victorian piety but the flagstones have been smothered with prim suburban carpeting, wall-to-wall. There’s a bar in one corner. Yes, a bar in a church. With prices high enough to make you take the pledge. The ecclesiastical shelves are crammed with books, magazines, scripts and photographs that summon up the ghosts of our comedy heroes. A big carved pew, centrally plonked, invites the worshipper to sit and read, let us say, the autobiography of Clive Dunn or the diaries of Kenneth Williams.

Michael Tanner

Mastersingers of Nuremberg, ENO, review: ‘a triumph’

ENO’s new production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers of Nuremberg is a triumph about which only the most niggling of reservations can be set. Every aspect — orchestral, vocal, production — works in harmony to effect one of the richest, most intensely absorbing, energising and delightful afternoons and evenings I have ever spent in the theatre. It is above all a team effort, and since individuality and teamwork are very much what Mastersingers is about, that made it still more satisfying. However, two people must be singled out: Richard Jones for the finest of all the productions of his I’ve seen. This one comes from Cardiff, where it was unveiled almost

Ismene Brown

The Associates at Sadler’s Wells reviewed: another acutely inventive work from Crystal Pite

The prodigious streetdancer Tommy Franzén pops up everywhere from family-friendly hip-hop shows by ZooNation, Boy Blue and Bounce to serious contemporary ballet by Russell Maliphant and Kim Brandstrup, but he’s a bit of a Macavity. He ought to be recognised as a star, but he effaces himself award-winningly in others’ work. That chameleon quality is a problem with his venture into the solo limelight, a Charlie Chaplin tribute, SMILE, on the Sadler’s Wells triple bill of associate choreographers last week. Franzén’s mercurial moves are always thrilling to watch, and his creative extension of Chaplinesque capering into some acrobatic popping and b-boying does OK in making the Little Tramp a street

Roy Kelly

Results

The school holidays in the final furlong and the next new phase and term in clear sight. This is when the thousands receive their plain envelopes informing them whether they have made the grade, precisely. And we look on, remembering or not remembering a future built on hopes and inadequacy, not knowing what is right about our work and knowledge, and what is wrong, aware too of us in them and how things fade. We kiss them out the door and wait until they ring with hard facts that bring five years to a close. Then look in the bedroom where all the revision was done, revising too, seeing all

Monday

Steerpike Steerpike

David Baddiel criticises Bafta for ‘working class’ Bob Hoskins snub

It was the night of Eton versus Harrow at the Baftas as Eddie Redmayne faced off competition from Benedict Cumberbatch to take home the Best Actor gong. Now, Bafta are under fire for leaving out the late Bob Hoskins in their tribute montage to actors who have passed away. David Baddiel, the comedian, took to Twitter to claim that the omission of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit actor was a sign of the demise of the working class actor. The omission of Bob Hoskins in the BAFTA remembrance montage seems symbolic of the erasure in modern times of the working-class actor. — David Baddiel (@Baddiel) February 9, 2015 One working class actor did at least

Saturday

Lucy Vickery

Spectator competition: ‘I really like Ed Miliband. Am I normal?’ Agony uncle Dan Brown responds (plus: a Samuel Pepys’-eye view of 21st-century London)

The Japanese novelist-turned-agony uncle Haruki Murakami is currently dishing out advice to fans on topics that range from cats and hate speech to parenting and infidelity. The call to cast a well-known writer, living or dead, in a similar role was an opportunity to check out the counselling skills of other literary greats — and not-so-greats. The standard was high. Mark Shelton’s Ted Hughes begins his reply to the question ‘how can I be more confident with girls?’ thus: ‘Stoat does not ask. Forefoot poised, he holds the crosshairs on his victim. The wicked waiting eyes glitter like wet berries. He is a cocked crossbow.’ I also liked Nicholas Holbrook’s

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The art of Coke

In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation was premièred, Henry Ford manufactured his millionth Model-T (‘a million of anything is a lot’, he said), Kafka’s Metamorphosis was published and so, too, was one of Einstein’s critical contributions to his own general theory of relativity. Mixed into this modernist cocktail of extreme achievement and harrowing perceptions was something more banal, but just as enduring: the Coca-Cola ‘contour’ bottle. A century old this year, it is, in a disputed field, an undisputed ‘design classic’. And, like any classic in any genre, it can be read in many ways. Long before Apple and the Messianic Steve Jobs, Coca-Cola developed a business model

Martin Gayford

Marlene Dumas at Tate Modern reviewed: ‘remarkable’

‘Whoever wishes to devote himself to painting,’ Henri Matisse once advised, ‘should begin by cutting out his own tongue.’ Marlene Dumas — whose work is the subject of a big new retrospective at Tate Modern — has not gone quite that far (and neither, of course, did Matisse). On the other hand, she does not hand out many clues as to what her work is all about. On the contrary, when Dumas says anything about her painting, it is inclined to be a self-deprecating paradox. ‘I paint because I am a woman,’ she states on her website. ‘(It’s a logical necessity.) If painting is female and insanity is a female

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Arabian Motorcycle Adventures review: enthralling and constantly surprising

There were great numbers of young men who had never been in a war and were consequently far from unwilling to join in this one.(Thucydides, 5th century BC) I love that quote, inscribed on the walls of the Imperial War Museum, because it tells you so much both about the reason wars happen and about the nature of men. Most of us go through a phase where we think it would be terribly exciting to ‘see the elephant’. And for a lucky few, it’s everything they hoped it would be and more. One of those lucky few is an extraordinarily jammy sod called Matthew VanDyke. By rights this young American

Deborah Ross

Selma review: rich, nuanced, heartbreaking

Selma, the civil rights film that stars David Oyelowo as Martin Luther King, undoubtedly contains the best and most powerful performance of the year as not nominated for an Oscar. Oyelowo has said this is because Hollywood prefers black actors when they play ‘subservient roles’ and aren’t ‘the centre of their own narrative, driving it forward’, which, alas — and before I could help myself — immediately made me think of Driving Miss Daisy (nine nominations, and winner of Best Picture over Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing). So, a useful reminder that, in congratulating ourselves on how far we have come, we should not forget how far we still

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Tom Stoppard’s The Hard Problem review: too clever by half

Big event. A new play from Sir Tom. And he tackles one of philosophy’s oldest and crunchiest issues, which varsity thinkers call ‘the hard problem’. How is it that a wrinkled three-pound blancmange sitting at the top of the spinal cord can generate abstract thoughts of almost limitless complexity? In real life Sir Tom is said to have such a flair for philosophical chitchat that he can fire off searching observations about Descartes, mind-body dualism, the nature of immateriality, being and non-being, the ‘cogito’ and so on, until those around him have slithered into a coma. Which is not rude of them. It’s perfectly acceptable to pass out during an

Igor Toronyi-Lalic

Why we should say farewell to the ENO

It’s easy to forget what a mess of an art form opera once was. For its first 100 years it had no name, it had no fixed address, it didn’t really know who it was or what it was doing. You’d find it at schools, at weddings, at political functions. It was an artistic whore for hire. Embroiled in an epic tug-of-war as to which of the three art forms — word, music or dance — should be primary, it was also lithe and experimental. In fact, it was more like performance art than anything you’ll witness in a modern opera house. Why this historical detour? To remind us not

Candy Neubert

Approaching America

Our pilot on the Delaware offers to show you his laptop. These are the buoys, he says; I know exactly where I am to within a metre. This is the same way we track our missiles and drones. You stare for a moment and say oh. Then remembering your manners add thank you for showing me.

Tuesday

Martin Gayford

Ignore the naysayers: these Fitzwilliam bronzes are by Michelangelo (probably)

A bronze sculpture by Michelangelo is one of the lost Holy Grails of art history. We know he made them, but the most important – an over life-size figure of Pope Julius II – was destroyed by the enraged citizens of Bologna (who had a grudge against the pontiff) a few years after it was made. A bronze David by Michelangelo vanished during the French Revolution. So that, it has always been concluded, was that. Now the Fitzwilliam Museum has unveiled not one but two bronzes attributed to the great man: athletic naked men mounted on slightly weird feline beasts. It seems too good to be true, but I am