Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

The rise of the art fair – and the death of the small gallery

In 1967, two Cologne-based gallerists came up with the Cologne Art Market — a trade fair where German galleries could set up temporary gallery-style spaces for a few days to showcase their stock. The following year, three dealers in Basel copied the idea but opened up their event to international galleries. For years these two art fairs were discrete yearly shows which were in the background to far more visible gallery exhibitions, museum shows and biennials. Today there are hundreds of art fairs, with an explosion of these in the last few years. Last December 18 different art fairs took place in the same week in Miami alone. There are

The general who scribbled and doodled his way around the British empire

Soldier scribes are rare, soldier artists rarer still, and soldiers who can write and draw rarest of all. General Henry Hope Crealock (1831–1891) was one such polymath. He scribbled and doodled as he fought his way around Victoria’s empire. He was a decorated veteran of the Siege of Sebastapol, the Second Opium War, India and the Anglo–French march on Peking in 1860. In the Anglo–Zulu War of 1879 (Rourke’s Drift and all that) Crealock commanded First Division and sent sketches of the campaign to the Illustrated London News. His work provides an invaluable account of the history he helped to forge. After retiring in 1884, Crealock spent his declining years

The best blues singer you’ve never heard of

A rustle of paper as the sleeve is removed. A clunk and click as the needle arm is swung across. The needle hits the vinyl, bringing it to life. At first there’s a lot of crackling in the ether. Then at last the music begins. A sultry saxophone. A few notes on the guitar, slow, low and relaxed. At last the voice enters. It’s not at all what you would expect from that swingband opening. The voice is strong, unmelodic, harsh almost, but so passionate you’re drawn in straight away. We’re told it’s Little Miss Cornshucks. She’s singing a version of ‘Try a little tenderness’ that sounds just as good,

James Delingpole

Thank God for the Game of Thrones imp – and the heaving breasts

Which character are you in Game of Thrones? For me it’s got to be the imp, Tyrion Lannister. As Ed West suggested in his erudite Speccie article a few weeks ago, Tyrion is about the only character with a vaguely sympathetic 21st-century mindset as opposed to a ruthlessly pragmatic medieval one. Persecuted since childhood because he’s a dwarf, he understands — as his fellow members of the ruling class generally do not — what it is to be marginalised, downtrodden and thus empathetic. And the other reason to identify with him is that he’s not going to die. I say this without any knowledge of what happens in George R.R.

Lloyd Evans

The Silver Tassie: a lavish, experimental muddle that slithers into a coma

The Silver Tassie is the major opening at the Lyttelton this spring. Sean O’Casey’s rarely staged play introduces us to a group of Dublin sportsmen, and their womenfolk, as they prepare to volunteer for service on the Western Front. They parade the ‘silver tassie’, a newly won football trophy, mistakenly believing it to presage victory and good fortune. O’Casey’s characterisation is a little perfunctory. The men are boastful studs, quailing dolts, blarneying drunks or violent despots. The women aren’t much better: a weeping mum, a caustic shrew, a battered martyr, a snooty beauty. It may sound colourful but the storyline develops at the pace of tree rings. And there are

Two Mimi-Rodolfos at Opera North who go from nought to frisky very believably

Purists might have winced at Opera North’s advertisement for its latest revival of La Bohème. ‘If you see one musical this year,’ it said, ‘see this opera.’ Such rhetoric might invite unhelpful discussion of the relative merits of each genre, but it also reflects the fact that this show is a refreshing, unfusty treat. Phyllida Lloyd’s updated production wears its 21 years lightly and, especially as revived by Michael Barker-Caven, is light on its feet, and unencumbered by the laborious attention to period details that we often see with Puccini’s warhorse (John Copley’s venerable production at the Royal Opera House, which starred the young Plácido Domingo when it was new

You want a glitzy new cultural centre in Backofbeyondistan? Don’t call Shigeru Ban

Shigeru Ban is the celebrated architect who refuses to become a celebrity. Thus, at 57, his career has run opposite to the dominant trend in the profession. For a generation there has been a star system in architecture, as tacky and ludicrous and overblown as the Hollywood original. Ban, softly spoken but strictly principled, is outside it. New money — gas- and mineral-rich individuals and, indeed, whole nations — seeks prestige through stand-out buildings. The stage army of celebrity architects who once made their reputations through ingenious design have become willing collaborators in a vulgar conspiracy. Instead of selling ingenuity, or humbling themselves with notions of public utility, the starchitects

Steerpike

Michael Dobbs shuffles Cards in the House of Lords

Filming of season three of Netflix’s House of Cards will begin in four weeks’ time in Maryland, creator Michael Dobbs revealed at Norman Tebbit’s book launch last night. Lord Dobbs, who was an advisor to Thatcher, said that he had to ‘tone things down a little bit’ to make the plot ‘credible’, although he’s clearly proud of his work, telling Mr S: ‘Kevin [Spacey] is wicked. It’s like the West Wing for Werewolves’. When he’s not the toast of America’s TV, Dobbs sits on the Lords’ standards committee. Channelling his inner chief-whip, Dobbs says he’s ‘tightening up on behaviour’ in the upper chamber: ‘We are doing things properly, making sure rules

The hidden, overlooked and undervalued: Andrew Lambirth’s spring roundup

Jankel Adler (1895–1949), a Polish Jew who arrived in Glasgow in 1941, was invalided out of the Polish army, and moved to London two years later. A distinguished artist in his own right, he turns out to have been a hidden presence on the English art scene, a secret influence on indigenous artists. He is usually cited as a crucial inspiration for Robert Colquhoun, but as his work grows more familiar, it becomes clear that a whole host of other artists must have been aware of him, from S.W. Hayter to Cecil Collins. Interestingly, the sculptors who were coming to maturity in the 1950s (just after Adler’s death) also seem

Robin Ticciati interview: ‘Glyndebourne is a festival where the established and the fresh exist together’

Glyndebourne, the great Sussex opera house, celebrates its 80th anniversary this summer. Hurrah! There is a new music director, too, 31-year-old Robin Ticciati. Hurrah! And he opens the season next week with a new production of Der Rosenkavalier directed by Richard Jones. Hurrah! Summer has begun. There are few finer plots of land to be on a summer evening in England than Glyndebourne, one of those rare places where the frame matches the picture. In a way Glyndebourne defines England, and summer, and the way the English take their pleasures. Certainly there is no place like it anywhere else. People at other festivals may love music just as much, and

Henri Le Sidaner: the artist who fell between two schools

Like other species, artists club together in movements not just for purposes of identification but for longevity. Individuals who don’t belong to schools take longer establishing reputations during their lifetimes, and tend to lose them sooner after their deaths. Henri Le Sidaner (1862–1939) was one such individual: a contemporary of the Post-Impressionists who painted in dots but was not a Pointillist; revelled in complementary colours but was not a Fauve; and drew a veil of dreams over reality but was not a Symbolist, or only briefly. He was, as his friend the critic Gabriel Mourey described him, ‘a sort of mystic who has no faith’. When asked what school he

Lloyd Evans

Everyone should see this pious anti-war monologue – seriously

Off to the Gate for a special treat: a pious anti-war monologue from the prize-winning American George Brant. Curtain up. And within seconds all my preachy prejudices have fallen apart. The speaker is a female pilot in a jump suit sealed within a see-through cage. Slaying men is her vocation. Interesting! The story moves with amazing deftness and clarity. She flies missions over Iraq. Loves it. The speed, the jeopardy, the power, the solitude. ‘The blue’ is her term for her intoxicating and deadly haven in the skies. Home on leave, she hits the bars. A one-night stand. She likes the guy. Back in Iraq, she’s pregnant. Skypes him. He

‘Sometimes audiences applauded Frank; sometimes they threw stuff at him’

Frank is a music biopic, but only of sorts, as it is not at all like your average music biopic. It’s not that processional march we have come to expect; that chronological story of tough beginnings, the moment of discovery, tour montages, calendar dates flying, and finally making it big. In fact, this is about a musician for whom making it big would be the death of him, and very nearly is. Also, it stars Michael Fassbender wearing bad knitwear and a giant paper-mâché head. So it is not Walk the Line or Dreamgirls or The Karen Carpenter Story, is what I’m saying, and it is profoundly more interesting and

Nothing beats Book at Bedtime

There I was trapped in the bathroom at 10.55 p.m., unable to leave for fear of missing anything. The time it would have taken me to get to the bedroom, touch the screen of the digital radio, encouraging it to dawdle its way into life, was just too long, too risky. Vital information in the story might have been lost. The tension, created by that single voice holding me on a thread, would have been dissipated. It came as a surprise. Book at Bedtime (Radio 4, Monday to Friday evenings) is often such a disappointment these days that the radio gets switched off at 10.51 (after six minutes you know

Fifties domestic harmony

Our love affair with the 1950s has been going on for years and shows no sign of abating. Pangolin London, the city arm of the Gloucestershire foundry, has cleverly used the visceral appeal of Fifties design — if ever a period merited the term gay in its original sense, this one does — to show how sculpture can be incorporated into a domestic setting (until 17 May). All too often works of sculpture, whatever their size, are put on pedestals or instinctively relegated outdoors or to public spaces. Sculpture in the Home, inspired by a series of promotional touring shows staged by the Arts Council between 1946 and 1958, closely

Lara Prendergast

Let’s call the Turner Prize what it really is – an uninspiring ode to a multimedia world

The Turner Prize shortlist has been announced, and includes a video artist who uses YouTube clips, an artist who pairs spoken word with slide shows and photography, and a historical documentary about African art. Among the four nominees for the most ‘prestigious and provocative’ contemporary art prize, not one of them is a traditional painter or sculptor. In short, the Turner Prize seems to have morphed into a film and photography prize. The Tate seem to be aware of this. The nomination announcement said the four artists’ methods ‘suggest the impact of the internet, cinema, TV and mobile technologies on a new generation of artists’. Of course, there’s no reason

‘When HBO want a gritty, hard-bitten, authentic American, they think: Old Etonian’

You don’t expect to find a slice of Eton College in deepest Dalston, but tonight a distinctly posh Waiting for Godot opens at the Arcola Theatre. The Beckett play is being directed by Eton’s former head of theatre, Simon Dormandy, and his Vladimir and Estragon are Tom Palmer and Tom Stourton, two of his past pupils. Together Palmer and Stourton (son of BBC’s Ed) are sketch comedy duo Totally Tom – perfect casting for Dormandy’s ‘reimagined’ production of the play, with its frequent references to music hall, the artform Beckett so loved. Dormandy, an actor as well as a director, has worked with Cheek by Jowl and the Royal Shakespeare

The problems at Tate Britain go beyond the director

Last week, Tate Britain was one of six museums across the UK to be nominated for the Art Fund’s Museum of the Year award, an annual prize in which the winner receives the not inconsiderable sum of £100,000. A couple of weeks earlier, Waldemar Januszczak, the Sunday Times’s ‘cor blimey’ art critic (don’t get me wrong, he has a winning shoot-from-the-hip style) was calling for the head of Penelope Curtis, Tate Britain’s director since 2010. Despite approving of the chronological rehang of the permanent collection which she oversaw last year – in fact, he proclaimed it a ‘miracle’ – Januszczak still insisted Curtis must go. He gave his reasons: she puts