Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Daniel Grant

Why on earth paint portraits in the age of photography?

‘Everybody faces rejection,’ the portrait artist Aaron Shikler said. He should know, having had three official White House portraits of former President Ronald Reagan rejected — one was too large, one was too casual and one ‘they just didn’t like it’. The commission finally was given to a different artist. Don’t feel too sorry for him. His posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy hangs in the White House along with those of First Ladies Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan, and he has also painted likenesses of US senators, Supreme Court Justices, cabinet officers, socialites and people who just had a lot of money. Still, fame and past successes don’t

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibition review: Looking at the View, Tate Britain

Most of us like to look at a view, though not all are fortunate enough to live with one, in which case art can offer an alternative, a window on the world. Landscape is a great solace, and particularly refreshing for the tired urban spirit, but we want more than holiday snaps of foreign places briefly visited. We need the deeper exploration of art to feed hearts and minds, an investigation through the procedures of painting and drawing, a reordering of shapes and a fitting together, a showing again under other than a purely mimetic guise. With luck and application, through bearing witness to that process of recreating, we come

Matilda Bathurst

Trading places | 25 April 2013

The Philippines: An Archipelago of Exchange at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris (until 24 July) brings together an impressive range of objects that demonstrate the fluidity of ideas and forms dispersed through exploration, trade and the blood of battle. The exhibition focuses on the fertile interactions between Filipino tribes and naval traders preceding the 16th-century Spanish colonisation. Housed under the canopy of Jean Nouvel’s extraordinary building, the display treads a fine line between fetishisation and objective examination. On entering, you are surrounded by semi-circles of carved wooden rice gods, expanding outwards like shockwaves; you leave through a dark chamber lined with funerary objects. Through the photographic lens of the

Kate Chisholm

Radio 4’s Front Row is brilliant, witty and eclectic. So why let Tracey Emin spoil it?

Front Row is one of those Radio 4 programmes that it’s too easy to take for granted. It’s on every weekday, all year round, at the same peak listening time (after The Archers), with a team of presenters, John Wilson, Mark Lawson and Kirsty Lang, who have become such a reliable fixture they’re almost like chums. If you’re lucky enough to catch it regularly you’ll know its mix of interviews, reviews and conversations about buildings, books, pictures, poems, galleries, anything that’s remotely creative. Sometimes the reviewers are awfully pretentious, sometimes what’s being talked about is way too weird or winsome, sometimes it’s a reminder of just how silly, time-wasting and

Clarissa Tan

Television: The United States of Television; The Politician’s Husband

There are two American Dreams — the one that happens in real life and is experienced by people such as Barack Obama, and the one that happens on screens, both silver and small, shared by millions across the world. BBC2’s The United States of Television: America in Primetime (Saturday) traces the history of the latter, focusing on the TV series shown during those magical hours when Americans sit down to dinner after a hard day’s work chasing the former. Only the fittest, finest programmes survive in this slot, where Nielsen ratings mercilessly track the tastes of 300 million people as they chow down and chill out. For this four-part series,

Deborah Ross

Cinema: The Look of Love

The Look of Love is the biopic of Paul Raymond and although it wants to be a tragedy — I could feel it straining at the leash to go in that direction — it never quite pulls it off, so to speak. Visually, it’s fantastic, with more retro kitsch than you can shake a stick at, should you wish to shake a stick at retro kitsch, and there are exceptional performances from Anna Friel and Imogen Poots, but it somehow lacks emotional heart, or any kind of poignancy. It’s entertaining, but glib and unaffecting, and so astonishingly uncritical it makes posing for porn mags or getting your kit off in

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Theatre: Children of the Sun; The Arrest of Ai Wei Wei

They’re back. Howard Davies and his translator Andrew Upton had a well-deserved hit in 2007 with Gorky’s Philistines at the Lyttelton. Children of the Sun, which Gorky wrote in jail in 1905, is a prophetic allegory that foretells the destruction of Russia’s weak, idle and pretentious upper classes. We’re in a country mansion where a mad professor, stuck in his laboratory, conducts daft experiments while rhapsodising about the redeeming power of science. He stands for the tsar, I think. Around him clusters a gang of artists and drifters who settle into a quadrangle of doomed eroticism. This one loves this one but that one loves this one who loves someone

Michael Tanner

Opera: The Turn of the Screw – review; remembering Sir Colin Davis

The conducting career of Sir Colin Davis, who died a fortnight ago, more than that of most interpretative artists, had the aspect of a personal pilgrimage. Though I had no personal acquaintance with him, and don’t know much more about his life than can be gleaned from Wikipedia, I did attend his operatic performances from 1956 until 2011. In fact I realised recently, to my surprise, that he conducted far more of the operas I have been to than any other person. I first heard him and heard of him in 1956, when I attended a concert performance of Le Nozze di Figaro which he gave in Cambridge’s Guildhall with

N. S.

After War

‘The Firs’, ‘Hillcrest’, ‘Innisfree’ I An aerial view. A brochure maps it out And full possession guaranteed Within the year: time for the prefab plots to sprout Before the moves and backyards turn to seed. II Look, engines pushing upwards, shovels plough Until the hill is taken, then a kerb Whitewashed, colonial style, now caps the brow Once held by rosebay willow herb. III From smoke-black stations, city veterans Ascend and, armed with suitcases, meet packed Possessions dropped by green removal vans To walls in plaster, pale and cracked. IV But after decoration, ground is gained: Slit trenches, dug in by skeletal frames, Hold nothing but the memories retained By

John Greening

Provincials

for Stuart Henson So Petrarch lived here? First saw Laura here, invented the sonnet and began a craze that turned to ‘tyranny’ (your word). These days they’re hardly de rigueur, but there’s the fear that if you can’t balance seven hundred years on fourteen lines and five rhymes, then the Muse will leave for Tony Harrison. There she goes. But you and I have learned by now to steer a steady course up Petrarch’s mountain track or — better metaphor — across the Rhône beside that Pont that keeps on reaching for a rhyme on its far bank. We know the knack of picking a wind, too: not one that’s blown

Wednesday

Steerpike Steerpike

Maria Miller tells the luvvies to take their easels off her lawn

Something had to give for Culture Secretary Maria Miller. She’s not had an easy time since the Leveson report and the subsequent battle over state regulation of the press. Harangued by all and sundry, she’s looking to make friends. In a speech at the British Museum this morning, Miller took the novel step of talking to the luvvies of the arts world as if they were grown-ups living in the real world. Her subject was budget cuts: ‘For honesty’s sake we must be clear about the grounds on which this argument must be had and the points that will get traction, not in the press, but with my colleagues –

Friday

Camilla Swift Camilla Swift

Spectator Play: what’s worth watching, listening to or going to this weekend

In a week where the news has been filled with stories about a certain ‘strong woman’, Kate Chisholm has found another strong woman to write about. In this week’s radio column, she argues that the radio presenter Sue MacGregor managed to be the only female presenter on the Today programme without the need to deepen her voice or worry about power dressing or pussy-bow blouses. Like Thatcher however, MacGregor ‘has always done things her way’, and her radio programme The Reunion is a prime example of this. In this week’s episode, MacGregor unites five survivors of the King’s Cross fire; here’s a clip: This week’s television review comes from James

Thursday

Frederic Wake-Walker

The future of opera

‘It’s an occult-mystery film opera.’ This is how Michel van der Aa describes his new opera, which opened last Friday at the Barbican (and is reviewed here). I had similar difficulties in describing the nature of many of the shows that I produced at Mica Moca, a performance and exhibition venue in Berlin. Over the course of five months, we produced more than 350 different shows of every genre you could think of and some I’d never heard of (check out Japanese free noise) and yet, by the end, I felt that what we’d actually produced was one huge opera. We’re living in very interesting and exciting times for the

Andrew Lambirth

Exhibitions: R.B. Kitaj: Obsessions The Art of Identity

Nowadays, R.B. Kitaj (1932–2007) tends to be ignored by the critics in this country — like a bad smell in the corner of the room. It was not always thus: for years he was an admired, if somewhat controversial, presence, but then came his great retrospective at the Tate Gallery in 1994. A large proportion of the British critical fraternity united to condemn and vilify him, to ‘take him down a peg or two’, as if he were an unruly schoolboy too big for his boots, too clever for his own good. This chorus of complaint (some of which amounted to abuse) was deeply felt by Kitaj, and when his

Claudia Massie

Champion of the people

Welsh miners, Basque child refugees (above), Tyneside shipbuilders, Paul Robeson: In the Shadow of Tyranny at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery (until 16 May) offers a compelling portrait of Britain in the mid-20th century, as seen by an émigrée communist Austrian Jew, who also happened to be a Soviet espionage operative. Edith Tudor-Hart, who had fled her homeland in 1933 after marrying an English doctor, worked with spymaster Arnold Deutsch from 1926 onwards. As a photographer, her political sympathies were evident throughout her career, from early work documenting protest marches of ‘Red Vienna’ and its subsequent Nazification to representations of British inequality and deprivation. These images of outrage and squalor

Kate Chisholm

Radio: Today; The Reunion

You could say that Sue MacGregor has done as much for women on radio as Margaret Thatcher did for women at Westminster. You might, though, want to add that MacGregor survived for 18 years as the only woman presenter on Today, Radio 4’s chief news and current affairs programme, without finding it necessary to deepen her voice to make it more masculine or worrying about what she should wear. She soon established herself as being as essential to the programme’s character and stature as her colleagues, the late Brian Redhead, Peter Hobday and John Humphrys. MacGregor has always done things her way — by adding a softer, gentler, yet not

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Television: Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary

In Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary (Channel 4, Saturday) — Martin Durkin’s superb tribute to our greatest prime minister — there was some footage of Harold Macmillan giving his ‘selling the family silver’ speech that made me quite sick. What nauseated me first was the sycophantic laughter from his black-tie Tory Reform Group audience oozing entitlement at some smoky St James’s club; and, second, the noisome cultural assumptions behind Mac’s ineffably grand remark. According to Mac’s Weltanschauung, it was not only right that people of his class should always keep hold of their silver, their Canalettos and Rembrandts, but that everyone else, a notch or two below, should also applaud

Deborah Ross

Cinema: Love Is All You Need

Love Is All You Need is a romantic comedy that isn’t romantic or comic or much of anything. It stars Pierce Brosnan as Philip, a widowed, all-work-no-play Englishman working in Denmark whose son is about to get married in Italy. Meanwhile, across town, the mother of the bride, Ida (Trine Dyrholm), a hairdresser who wears a wig because she’s lost all her own hair to chemotherapy, has just discovered her husband is playing away from home with pretty young Thilde from accounts. Films are always full of middle-aged men playing away from home with pretty young Thildes from accounts, but have you ever wandered into a company’s accounts department? If

Michael Tanner

Opera: Der fliegende Holländer and Sunken Garden

Scottish Opera’s new production of The Flying Dutchman, performed in German but advertised in English, is almost a triumph, and very well worth going to see. I reflected, as I travelled by train back from Glasgow to Cambridge, changing only at Edinburgh, York, Peterborough and Ely, that this raw and in some ways crude opera, Wagner’s first to remain in the canon, benefits from the restrictions imposed by a budget as tight as Scottish Opera’s, though I can imagine the participants not entirely agreeing with me. The production, by Harry Fehr with designs by Tom Scutt, is simple and clear. The opera is relocated to Scotland, where Wagner originally set

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Upstairs, downstairs

Never a dull moment at the Jermyn Street Theatre. It’s a titchy venue, the size of a gents’ loo, nestling beneath a cavernous flight of stairs in the nameless hinterland between druggy Soho and tarty Mayfair. The current proprietors, aiming for an air of scholastic amateurism, are on the hunt for ‘unknown and forgotten classics’. The theatre boasts a Resident Academic and an eccentric register of patrons including ‘Victoria Biggs, Euan Borland and the Duchess of Cambridge (pub)’. Currently it’s sifting the 1920s for treasure. Others have prospected here before. Ben Travers’s bourgeois farces no longer entertain us because middle-class morality has changed too much in the past 90 years.