Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The camera always lies

Everyone knows about architecture being frozen music. The source of that conceit may be debated, but its validity is timeless and certain. For all its weightiness, architecture plays with ethereal proportion, harmony, resonance and delight: the stuff of music. But architecture is more fundamentally about the management of light and space. Or, at least, that’s how architects see it. So photography makes better sense of architecture than any other medium does: there is something congruent between the fixed optical geometry of a camera and the way we perceive buildings. And because images are more readily accessible than travel to remote sites, everyone’s experience of world architecture is, at least initially,

Lara Prendergast Lara Prendergast

Tate Britain’s Turner show reveals an old master – though the Spectator didn’t think so at the time

Juvenilia is the work produced during an artist’s youth. It would seem logical to think, therefore, that an artist’s output during their old age would be classified as ‘senilia’. Yet no such word exists. But how else to classify the three blockbuster exhibitions this year that deal with Matisse, Turner and Rembrandt’s late work? These titans produced some of their finest art during old age. The exuberance of Matisse’s cut-outs are all the more astonishing given that they were produced not in the first bloom of life but rather in the dying embers of it. Rembrandt’s late works — on display at the National Gallery from October and discussed by

Andrew Lambirth

Is John Hoyland the new Turner?

What happens to an artist’s reputation when he dies? Traditionally, there was a period of cooling off when the reputation, established during a lifetime, lost momentum and frequently collapsed, quite often presaging a long fallow period before reassessment could take place. The Pre-Raphaelites suffered this to a very pronounced degree. Famously, Andrew Lloyd Webber tells the story of buying his first Victorian pictures for pocket money in junk shops, and just missing Lord Leighton’s ‘Flaming June’ because he didn’t have the £50 asking price. Closer to our own time, when Graham Sutherland died in 1980 his reputation plummeted terribly, having for years been overinflated by a loyal European market that

Niru Ratnam

‘Likes’, lacquered cherry pies and Anselm Kiefer: the weird world of post-internet art

In the mid-1990s the art world got excited about internet art (or ‘net.art’, as those involved styled it). This new way of making art would harness the world wide web, take the form of exciting online projects, bypass traditional galleries and be accessible to all with a dial-up connection. ‘Net.artists’ were self-styled radicals particularly fond of that most modernist of tropes, the manifesto, which they distributed via electronic mailing lists or electronic bulletin boards. These artists adopted funky, web-style names such as ‘Irational.org’ and ‘VNS Matrix’ and showed their work online at similarly funkily named websites like Rhizome, Suck and Echo. But there was, alas, a gap in the Matrix,

Martin Gayford

Why everyone loves Rembrandt

Talking of Rembrandt’s ‘The Jewish Bride’ to a friend, Vincent van Gogh went — characteristically — over the top. ‘I should be happy to give ten years of my life,’ he exclaimed, ‘if I could go on sitting here in front of this picture for a fortnight, with only a crust of dry bread for food.’ Without undergoing such rigours, visitors to Rembrandt: the Late Works at the National Gallery next month will be able to see the picture that drove Vincent to such a paroxysm of enthusiasm, along with many other masterpieces from the artist’s last years. It may be that in recent decades other 17th-century masters — Caravaggio

John Whitworth

The soul, a poem, John Whitworth

The soul is like a little mouse. He hides inside the body’s house With anxious eyes and twitchy nose As in and out he comes and goes, A friendly, inoffensive ghost Who lives on tea and buttered toast. He is so delicate and small Perhaps he is not there at all; Long-headed chaps who ought to know Assure us it cannot be so. But sometimes, as I lie in bed, I think I hear inside my head His soft ethereal song whose words Are in some language of the birds, An air-borne poetry and prose Whose liquid grammar no one knows. So we go on, my soul and I, Until,

James Walton

Marriage and foreplay Sharia-style

Needless to say, it’s not uncommon to hear single British women in their thirties and forties saying that all the good men are married. But in The Men with Many Wives (Channel 4, Wednesday) this came with a twist: it turned out to be precisely the reason why you should marry them too. Polygamy may be illegal in Britain, but it’s permitted under the Sharia law that many Muslims here apparently live by — and, as several of the programme’s participants told us, there’s no better guide to whether a man is husband material than the fact that he’s a husband already. Take Nabilah, who came to Britain from Malaysia

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Charles III is made for numbskulls by numbskulls

Suppose Charles were to reign as a meddlesome, self-pitying, indecisive plonker. It’s a thought. It’s now a play, too, by Mike Bartlett. In his opening scene he bumps off Lilibet, bungs her in a box and assembles the family at Buck House to discuss ‘what next?’ Bartlett imagines them as stuck-up divs. William’s a self-righteous sourpuss. Kate’s a smug minx. Camilla’s a hectoring gadfly. Harry’s a weepy drunk. Charles is a colossally narcissistic nuisance. They’re too dim to understand the constitution so Camilla has to explain that a new reign commences with the death of the previous monarch and not at the coronation. (This is for the benefit of the

Digby Warde-Aldam

Artists’ houses

I’m not sure what took me to Salvador Dalí’s house in Port Lligat, but it sure as hell wasn’t admiration. As a public figure, I hold him alone responsible for the look-at-me culture that gives contemporary art a bad name. And as a painter… don’t get me started. Sceptics slag off conceptual art as a load of navel-gazing nonsense, made by people with no interest in anything other than themselves. But to be fair to Dalí, he did at least have something to say. That is: ‘I’m mad, me!’ No, if I’m honest the only reason I’d slogged up the hill from the nearest town was nosiness. Artists’ houses that

Deborah Ross

Outnumbered: The Movie (But Crap)

What We Did On Our Holiday is written and directed by Guy Jenkin and Andy Hamilton, the pair who created the hit BBC sitcom Outnumbered, and this is like an extended episode of Outnumbered minus anything that made it good in the first instance. This is Outnumbered: The Movie (But Crap). Hard to explain, considering Jenkin and Hamilton have more than proved their worth over the years (they also created the brilliant newsroom satire Drop the Dead Donkey) but we all have our off days, I suppose. And our supremely off days. We must put this down to a supremely off day, particularly as it even has one of those

Hugo Shirley

Robo-Tell hits Welsh National Opera

Is there a fundamental, insuperable problem with staging Rossini’s Guillaume Tell on a budget, without the resources to conjure up the sense of scale that was part of grand opéra’s appeal and raison d’être? Take away the special effects, whip away the phantasmagorical curtain, and, as with any Hollywood blockbuster, you are left with a modest little plot whirring away at its centre. In Tell, this involves the love between Arnold and Mathilde across a national divide. It’s the struggle of the Swiss — in a time before neutrality and cuckoo clocks — against their Austrian oppressors that, along with the Alps, forms the backdrop. Rossini’s score can occasionally seem

Sarah Wardle

Values

The final way we’re held to account is the standing order we never chose. To whatever our lives might amount, our contracts state death will foreclose. Eventually our assets will diminish sans heart and eyes, brain and breath. There falls a repayment of the spirit, the sum we bequeath, pounds of flesh. When we are lying on our deathbeds asking ourselves what we have to show for our time, will voices in our heads say life’s last debt is pay as you go? In this age of global recession the contemporary view of the soul is one of temporary possession owned by each only as a loan.

Saturday

Douglas Murray

Anna Nicole is a masterpiece

It isn’t often that you can say you’ve seen an opera not only of but about our times. But Anna Nicole – which I saw Thursday night at the Royal Opera House in London – is such a work. The music is by Mark Anthony Turnage, the libretto by Richard Thomas. It sets off by causing the audience to laugh out loud repeatedly, but grows darker until the whole thing turns on the audience and indeed on our times. The story of the small-town girl turned billionaire widow is probably familiar to most people. Anna Nicole Smith married early, had a kid, divorced, got out of town, joined a strip-bar, had

Thursday

Martin Gayford

‘I like vanished things’: Anselm Kiefer on art, alchemy and his childhood

At the entrance to Anselm Kiefer’s forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy visitors will encounter a typically paradoxical Kiefer object: a giant pile of lead books, sprouting wings. When I asked Kiefer to explain this strange object, he immediately — and characteristically — began talking about alchemy. Lead, of course, was the material from which alchemists hoped to make gold. ‘But at the beginning,’ Kiefer explained, ‘it wasn’t just a materialistic idea, it was a spiritual one: to transform matter into a higher spiritual state.’ So, I suggested, in a way all art is alchemy: transforming one substance — paint and canvas, for example — into something else entirely. ‘Yes,

Andrew Lambirth

The man who brought Cubism to New York

The American Jewish artist Max Weber (1881–1961) was born in Belostok in Russia (now Bialystok in Poland), and although he visited this country twice (he came to London in 1906 and 1908), it was the experience of continental Europe — and particularly Paris — that was crucial for his development. The title of this exhibition is thus rather misleading: Weber never lived in England, and his ‘presence’ here is based upon a collection of his work made by his friend Alvin Langdon Coburn. Coburn (1882–1966), a boldly experimental photographer attached to the Vorticist group, was another American, but one who opted to settle in England in 1912. Weber and Coburn

Lindsay Johns

In praise of Den-zel

His Christian name is only two syllables, with the stress (following the African-American pronunciation) on the second. Two syllables that are a byword for urbane cool. A mellifluous shibboleth – the quintessence of all that is decent and upstanding. You see, I’ve grown up on Denzel’s films. From boyhood to manhood, from teenage recalcitrance to adult responsibility, he has accompanied me on my life’s journey like a Virgil to my wayfaring Dante. As father figure, older brother, man of probity and moral rectitude, Don Juan and all round Mister Nice Guy, he has been my consummate companion. Many men of a certain age will have derived much of their moral compass from Denzel’s protagonists.

Kate Chisholm

The sofa that became a work of art

Last week on Front Row (Radio 4) the singer Joyce DiDonato recalled the advice she gave the new graduates of the Juilliard School, just about to embark on their professional careers in music. It’s a hard life. They’re asked to be perfect, which of course is unattainable. She wanted to encourage them to keep going, to persist in pursuing their art, despite the inevitable phases of discouragement and disappointment. Because, she says, art has the power to build bridges across cultures, religions, political divides. ‘It teaches empathy.’ She was referring particularly to musical art, but what she was saying applies also to radio. The intimacy and immediacy of listening create

Peter Scupham

Mynheer Wouwermans

From the long ride, fresh trees licked by enough blue light to cross-patch antique trousers, we come at last past casks head-dressed with tulips to this puzzling concourse where white signs agree to open a house decked by strangers with an attentive love. ‘Mynheer, do you remember? Yes, twenty-five years.’ Our polls are whiter than old snow but your children are fresh as paint, rocking softly to a lullaby sung by a Dutch doll in a carved bed. Shall we make solemn playtime, hiding our wiser faces in crimson velvets, rusty tassels? Over there, in the English pub — the Wagon and Horses — a soft tom-tom thicks the air

Peter Hoskin

20,000 Days On Earth: is Nick Cave the missing link? Or the next stage in evolution?

Inspired by Justin Bieber’s Never Say Never (2011), Katy Perry’s Part of Me (2012) and One Direction’s This Is Us (2013), Nick Cave has released a documentary about himself. No doubt he wanted to prove that this old dog has new tricks. The whole movie is shot in candy-crushed 3D to appeal to the emteevee-ohmigod generation. He talks about how great it was to work with Rihanna and Ludacris: ‘The thing about thoseguys is…’ Nah, sorry, I’m just kidding with you. None of that is true, apart from the bit about Nick Cave releasing a documentary about himself. It’s called 20,000 Days on Earth. And, much like the man himself,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

If you have teenage boys who loathe the very idea of theatre, send them to The Play That Goes Wrong

It’s taken a while but here it is. The Play That Goes Wrong is like Noises Off, but simpler. Michael Frayn’s cumbersome backstage farce asked us to follow the actors’ personal stories as well as their on-stage foul-ups, and the surfeit of detail proved a bit of a brain-scrambler. This is a badly rehearsed thriller played by useless amateurs on a disintegrating set. Good clean knockabout. Some of the background information is puzzling. The troupe calls itself the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society even though polytechnics no longer exist. And their decision to put on a creaky 1920s murder mystery seems a little perverse. Aside from the booby-trapped props and collapsing