Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Lara Prendergast

When Mondrian was off the grid

I find it easy to forget that Piet Mondrian is a Dutch artist. The linear, gridlocked works he is famed for seem to beat with the energy of the New York metropolis. But it was not always so. His path to abstraction was a precarious one that bumped into a number of styles drifting round during the early 20th century. And, in the beginning, his work was Dutch — pastoral, domestic, earthy. To see this progression, head to Margate (Margate!) where you will find an exhibition of Mondrian’s work at Turner Contemporary, which commemorates the 70th anniversary of his death. The title sounds generic — Mondrian and Colour (artist —

Why is the opera world so damn uptight?

God, opera singers are touchy. You dare to analyse how they look, you dare to criticise the enormous subsidies they get, you have the temerity to call someone an opera singer who hasn’t been vetted by an opera commissar and they go all Al-Qaeda on you. Yesterday the Today programme had an interview with Russell Watson, a decent, popular singer whose shtick includes shouty renditions of opera arias. The presenter introduced him as an opera singer and the poncey opera world went ballistic. ‘He’s not an opera singer!’ they bleated, ‘He’s just a singer!’ Note that twatty ‘just’? No art form that was confidant about what it does would ever feel

Memory

While in the mirror I’m an aging face More or less the same day after day,   In the mind’s darker space There are these handles to enticing doors  Of occasional abrupt transition,   Doors of entry, doors   Of intercommunications   Obeying the same laws.  So many rooms! Such impatience!  Backwards and forwards I make my way With a fine sense of continuity And the illusion of one memory,  But always now with the admission   Of an actuarial fear   That soon the day must be near   When I will stand and pause With a shaking hand on one of the beautiful doors (The doors that open and the doors that slam  Quite suddenly

Terry Gilliam turns to eye-watering excess for his staging of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini

Operas about artists are not rare. However — perhaps for obvious reasons — those artists tend to be musicians, singers, or at least performers, able to persuade and cajole both us in the audience and the other characters on stage through their eloquence. Berlioz, in his first opera, presents the renaissance sculptor Benvenuto Cellini, in an episode loosely adapted from his autobiography. But the final casting and unveiling of his new statue of Perseus, against all the odds, provides a climax that music (let alone stagecraft) seems fundamentally ill equipped to portray. The road to that climax is also paved with numerous distractions for both us and Cellini, the most

James Delingpole

We need something less evil than Britain’s Got Talent. How about public executions?

You know what the world needs most right now? What it needs is five good-looking-ish, talented-ish blokes dressed in a mélange of artfully deconstructed dove-grey suits singing one of the songs out of Les Misérables, like a boy band but one that does numbers from musicals rather than original compositions, oh, and preferably with the kind of crap name that you can imagine being brainstormed by one of the teams on The Apprentice… Well, if that’s what you’ve been thinking these past few weeks, lucky you! You’ll surely have loved the final of Britain’s Got Talent, which gave exactly the result you were pining for: not the slightly rubbish impressionist;

New wonders among old shelves at the London Library

The Royal Court Theatre, the Young Vic Theatre and the London Library (above) are buildings of varied character and rich history. What they have in common is that each has been unpicked and reassembled by the architects Haworth Tompkins, recently announced as winners of the RIBA London Architect of the Year. This firm, founded in 1991, often gets chosen to make practical improvements to existing institutions and manages to make them work with a panache that allows the original building to retain its character. In an architectural world where severe contrast between old and new confronts the alternative of invisible and seamless extension, they have always managed to get somewhere

Belle has everything going for it – except for a decent soundtrack or script or plot or acting

Belle is based on the true story of Dido Elizabeth Belle, the illegitimate, mixed-race daughter of a sea captain and his African slave mistress, who was brought up as a free gentlewoman by her great uncle, Lord Mansfield, at Kenwood House, Hampstead, in the 18th century. How fascinating, you might think. You just can’t mess up with a story like this, you might also think. It has everything going for it; a costume drama fulfilling all our beloved Jane Austen tropes (class, gender, etc.) with the added charge of race. How could it go wrong? Alas, all too easily. This is disappointingly lifeless, and shallow, and the soundtrack! So many

Shorthand

Might you not have found him a little exhausting, though? If, for example, you were his mother, not given to innovative thinking yourself, and had this youth (in 1920 the word teenager was not current), forever coming up with a new interpretation of Genesis or sketching plans for a contraption that must be at least electrical, if not dangerous. And now this: a small ad in the Auckland Star – SHORTHAND in three hours. New system, easily learned. Send 5/- for course. C. Adcock, Te Rau-a-moa. That was in June; but on reflection three hours may have struck him as less than five shillings’ worth. So in December: SHORTHAND in

It’s not the job of the arts industry to get more ethnic minorities through its doors

You’ve got to feel sorry for the arts world. Decades of self-imposed diversity drives and community outreach schemes and still – still! – they’re told they’re not being inclusive enough. ‘Even from the cheapest seats in the [Royal Opera] house,’ Harriet Harman said yesterday, ‘I couldn’t see in the audience anyone who wasn’t like myself: white, metropolitan and middle class.’ Tory culture minister Sajid Javid had the same message last week, noting how few people from black and ethnic backgrounds are given grants from the Arts Council. Before this Jeremy Paxman was banging on about how poetry needed to engage with ordinary people. It reminds me of another age. ‘The

TV snobs hate the telly because it’s watched by those born on the wrong side of the tracks

Growing up in the 1970s I watched as much TV as humanly possible. When we had important visitors to the house my mum would merely turn down the volume, and by the time we went to bed you could have fried an egg on the screen. Now that I am a middle-aged, middle-class professional the only thing that has changed is I watch even more of it. I have a TV in my bedroom, in the kitchen, lounge, and access to it on my phone, iPad and laptop. But all my adult life, since I began mixing with educated, privileged people, I have been plagued by TV snobs. You know

Was Kenneth Clark wrong not to ‘understand’ the value of abstract art?

Kenneth Clark’s view of culture may by now be ‘outmoded’, but I was surprised to read that it was also ‘narrow’. An exhibition at Tate Britain about Clark’s influence, Looking for Civilisation, and the BBC’s threatening to remake the Civilisation TV series, have given rise to some depressing comment. Much mention is made of Clark’s ‘stiff’ presenting style; he mostly stood in front of the camera, rather than walking to and from it as one must now. I assume we are being encouraged to take this as the sign of regrettably rigid thinking. But Clark knew where he stood. And that is at the root of the problem. ‘I believe that order is

Nicola Benedetti interview: Bruch, boyfriends and Scottish independence

On  18 September, the Scots will decide whether they want to become independent. But it is only a coincidence that Scotland’s most celebrated violinist is launching an album that brings together Scottish folk music, the tunes of Robert Burns and Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy. Nonetheless, I want to know where Nicola Benedetti stands on the most fundamental question the Scots have asked of themselves since the Act of Union in 1707. I’m  sitting opposite her in the west London flat she shares with her German cellist boyfriend Leonard Elschenbroich. The late morning light from the window is catching her rich brown hair and turning it blonde. Is she, I ask,

It took 11 years to bring Bill Viola to St Paul’s Cathedral – but it was worth it

Deans are a strange breed. Growing up in the Church of England, I met a wide range, their cultural tastes embracing everything from Chagall to In Bed with Madonna. In 2003, I didn’t know what appealed to the then Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral, John Moses, but in April of that year it suddenly became crucial. I was proposing that St Paul’s commission the artist Bill Viola — dubbed by some the Rembrandt of the video age — to create a work for the cathedral. Since Moses had never heard of Viola and I didn’t work in the visual-arts world, it seemed a far-fetched proposition. Yet I was in no

Kenneth Clark wasn’t happy simply popularising art, he liked to collect it and shape it too

Earlier this year, I sat down and watched Kenneth Clark’s groundbreaking TV series Civilisation. I vaguely remember when it was first screened in 1969, but was too young to appreciate it properly. This time around it made splendid Sunday afternoon viewing: Clark’s distinctive blend of authority and humour, his ability to convey information and enthusiasm without the slightest trace of condescension, coupled with effective camerawork and good editing, make a rich and stimulating brew of word, image and music. The series, which was commissioned by David Attenborough and brilliantly directed by Michael Gill, established a model for all subsequent arts documentaries. Not only did I learn a lot from its

Lara Prendergast

Uncovering a Royal treasure trove

It’s rare for the public to be given access to the Royal Archives. They are housed in the forbidding Round Tower at Windsor Castle, and direct contact with them is normally reserved for erudite academics adept at buttering up the Keeper. With about two million documents relating to 700 years of the British monarchy, it is quite the trove. To celebrate the centenary of the creation of the archive, a few pieces have been put on display. Treasures from the Royal Archives (until 25 January 2015) is a bijou blend of the cheerful and the solemn. A young Princess Elizabeth captures her parents’ coronation in 1937, writing that she thought

Lloyd Evans

When the big-boobed whisky monster met the upper-class snoot

Lionel is a king of the New York art scene. An internationally renowned connoisseur, he travels the world creating and destroying fortunes. He anoints a masterpiece, here. He defenestrates a forgery, there. He visits the Californian city of Bakersfield (code in America for Nowheresville) to determine the authenticity of a Jackson Pollock bought for three bucks in a garage sale by an unemployed drunk named Maude. This is a great set-up. Power meets destitution. Sophistication frowns at simplicity. Wealth hits the dirt-heap. It’s enormous fun, too. As the impeccably tailored Lionel walks into Maude’s cluttered hovel, he’s attacked by two ravening Alsatians. She offers him a whisky ‘to take the

Dance games from Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker at Sadler’s Wells

Forget the pedantic classifications of genres, styles and schools. When it comes to dance performances, it all boils down to two kinds: those that make one think and those that entertain. Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker is a veteran of the first category. Since 1983, the year she founded her company Rosas, she has used the choreographic idiom to explore and question other areas of culture and performance-making. Music and its multiple uses have always been her main sources of inspiration, and her thought-provoking, if not puzzling or purely irritating, challenges to music remain at the core of her creative process. Over the years, she has also fine-tuned her signature movement

Dialogues des Carmélites brings out the best in Poulenc – and the Royal Opera House

Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites is an audacious work, much more so than many others that advertise their audacity. It deals with Love and Death, the central topics of opera, but the love is that of God; and death, rather than being a romantic consummation or a stirring tragedy, is something to be terrified of. The central character, Blanche de la Force, is terrified of life too, and her determination to enter a convent is seen initially as an attempt to escape, so that in the powerful second scene of the opera, after being given a hard time by her father and brother, she is subjected to searching questions by the