Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Andrew Lambirth

Thoroughly modern Manet

There can’t really be many people who look at art with any regularity who continue to confuse Manet with Monet. But there are those who still think that Manet was an Impressionist, because so many of his friends and contemporaries were members of the group. In fact, Manet kept his distance and steadfastly refused to exhibit with them. His was an urban, studio-based art, not given to plein-air effects of atmosphere and local colour. He looked instead to the dazzling bravura of Franz Hals’s portraits, and the sombre and often majestic originality of Velázquez and Goya. Edouard Manet (1832–83) was a painter on the cusp of tradition and Modernism, and

Kerry-Lee Powell

Ship’s Biscuit

After Mother scarpered It was ship’s biscuit With shrapnel sparkles. It was hot spurts and gristle And cold snaps with a wet towel For stealing a puff from Dad’s fag Or sneaking a peek at his titty mags. But we buggers deserved no better. It was us that made her run off, With our bickers and our bungles. It was our bloody cheek. It was his bleeding knuckles.

George Hull

Time Travel

Merrily We Roll Along (Menier Chocolate Factory, until 9 March) lets you escape the winter cold to a showbiz party in a Bel Air beach house. Still, despite its summery setting, Stephen Sondheim’s musical has a stock-taking feel that suits it to a run at the changing of the years. ‘How did you get to be here?’ the opening chorus asks Hollywood mega-success Franklin Shepard (played with charisma by Mark Umbers), who has alienated his friends and lost the will to live. George Furth’s book answers with a stepwise journey back in time from 1976, putting meticulous reverse engineering to touching effect. A wistful tune Franklin picks out on the

Kate Chisholm

‘My country first’

It’s not unusual for Kirsty Young’s castaways on Desert Island Discs to choose music that reminds them of people who are important to them. But Aung San Suu Kyi must surely have been the first politician-guest to ask her friends and family what she should take with her to that solitary isle, instead of carefully stage-managing her selection to present a particular view of herself. Who, for instance, would have expected to hear Tom Jones belting out ‘The Green Green Grass of Home’ on Sunday morning? But there he was, as cheesily sentimental as ever, chosen for Suu Kyi by her Burmese PA. She even confessed that she hadn’t listened

Olivia Glazebrook

Ordinary people | 31 January 2013

There was little reason to be curious about David or Jackie Siegel at the beginning of Queen of Versailles (Monday, BBC4): he is the King of Timeshare and she is his Beauty Queen; they are building a palace in Florida, and modelling it on Versailles; it will be the biggest private home in America, when it is finished, and the Siegels will squeeze into it with their colossal fortune, their fleet of staff, their eight children and their bouquet of powder-puff dogs. ‘My husband deserves this house,’ says Jackie. ‘It’ll be like a lifetime achievement.’ There didn’t seem a whole lot more to find out. But then, after 30 minutes

Deborah Ross

A Cirque to irk

Just as Les Mis was soaringly monotonous, Cirque du Soleil: Worlds Away (3D) is soaringly pointless. No point to it whatsoever. I looked. I looked everywhere for a point, even under my cinema seat. (That’s how desperate I was.) But I came up empty-handed. It’s 90 minutes of sheer, total, utter pointlessness, as written and directed by Andrew Adamson (who directed the first two Shreks and the first two Chronicles of Narnia) and produced by James Cameron, who has made some good films, and Titanic. God knows what they were thinking of when they embarked on this. And boredom doesn’t even come near it. I experienced the sort of boredom

Michael Tanner

Addicted to myth

The revival of Harrison Birtwistle’s opera The Minotaur is the most significant artistic event at the Royal Opera since its première, almost five years ago. Unlike Thomas Adès’s more immediately accessible The Tempest, The Minotaur has not gone on to have an international career, though it unquestionably deserves one. With its ideal cast and direction, this production should tour the world’s major opera houses, demonstrating that at irregular but not too large intervals a new masterwork can still be forthcoming in this form, whose decline and decease has often been announced. Birtwistle’s work has something in common with Michael Tippett’s, in that both are attracted or addicted to myth, and

Stephen Bayley

Mauvais goût

It was dinner at a prize-winning hotel in Burgundy. I looked, stupefied, at an awkward arrangement of trapezoidal plates, unaccommodating to food and unergonomic to both eater and plongeur. There was a water glass of triangular section and silly cutlery that would bring even Philippe Starck’s most empurpled morphological fantasies into the arena of commonsense. I thought wistfully about the simple charm of the old Duralex glass. The timelessly perfect round-shouldered Burgundy bottle’s unaffected handsomeness only served to make its table-top companions look all the more ridiculous. Modern France is in a terrible state as far as design is concerned. Renault’s peerless record of ingenuity is gone: it has not

Robert Gorelangton

Unacceptable faces

A play called Rutherford & Son gripped audiences in London 101 years ago. Set on Tyneside, it was the David Hare-style leftie hit of its season. It depicted the unacceptable face of capitalism, a face that belonged to John Rutherford, who rules the family glassworks by fear, hated by his workers and his children alike. It’s still a fresh, brutal-up-north story of a monstrous control freak devoted to work and money and nothing else. The show has a terrific twist at the end and it was an instant hit in London, went to New York and was widely translated. But it became a big news story when the unknown author,

Connie Bensley

Electricity

It was a bolt from the blue, she said. You mean it was love at first sight? I asked. But no, she meant that they ran past the same tree in a storm and were flung to the ground side by side — an introduction of almost Biblical significance. Of course he helped her up and took her to the clubhouse and that was how it started, But now, she complained, the electricity’s off and we’re left lying down in the dark.

Tuesday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Gerald Scarfe, anti-Semitic? No.

So, that Gerald Scarfe cartoon, then. I don’t like it much, but then I like cartoons which make me laugh, (and especially so if they have animals in them). McLachlan, Honeysett, Rowson et al – and on a daily basis of course, Matt. I’m always at a bit of a loss with those big cartoons in the broadsheets which are attempting to tell me something very meaningful and make me stroke my chin. This one made me averse because it seemed to encapsulate the shrieking hysteria of the metro-left; translated into words, it says: ‘Netanyahu is building walls out of the blood of murdered Palestinian innocents!’, which is exactly the

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Obsessed with Pinter

It’s the size of a Hackney bedsit but the ambience is cosily expensive. Sonia Friedman’s tiny office above the Duke of York’s Theatre in St Martin’s Lane has warm, pinkish lighting and elegant armchairs with thick, deep cushions. The dark wallpaper is obscured by framed posters of hit West End shows. Sprawled across the sofa there’s a touch of pure kitsch: a six-year-old poodle, snuffling and dozing, whose fluffy white forelegs are sheathed in the armlets of a scarlet tank top. His name is Teddy and he looks like the victim of a stag-night prank contentedly sleeping off his hangover. Opposite me sits Sonia Friedman — pretty, blonde, in her

Daniel Grant

Bring in the lawyers

When collectors want to purchase an expensive work of art, they contact their lawyers to write up a contract with the dealer, spelling out pages of contingencies and indemnity clauses. ‘We have a steady stream of business writing agreements for collectors and galleries,’ said Jo Backer Laird, a Manhattan arts lawyer and a former general counsel at Christie’s. ‘We didn’t see much of this just ten years ago.’ When someone believes he didn’t make enough money selling a work of art  — Lord Edward Spencer-Churchill for the sale of his Basquiat painting last year through the London dealer Gerard Faggionato; Ronald Perelman for the 2011 sale of a Jeff Koons

Andrew Lambirth

Seraphic misfit

This year marks the 15th anniversary of the Estorick Collection and it is fitting that Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964), one of the most consistently popular of the museum’s artists, should inaugurate the celebrations. Although Morandi’s trademark still-life paintings of bottles and jars have been regularly shown in Britain (the last major show was at the Tate in 2001), the appetite for his work is unassuaged, perhaps because its delights are not revealed all at once. His work encourages repeated looking and gives something back each time, differently articulated. ‘The monk of the bottles’, as he was called, lived with his mother and three sisters in an apartment in Bologna, hardly travelling

Steerpike Steerpike

Alan Rusbridger’s new playmate

Steerpike is back in this week’s magazine. As ever, here is your preview: ‘While losses mount at the Guardian, the editor, Alan Rusbridger, has fallen in love. He keeps ordering the sub-editors to find space for articles about his new Fazioli piano. Cheeky responses have appeared on the website. ‘We always wondered how you filled your days and how you spent your fortune,’ wrote one indignant hack. ‘Now we know.’ Faziolis cost at least £50,000 and a friend at the Wigmore Hall tells me professionals won’t go near them. ‘They’re for loaded amateurs who think a pricy instrument will make up for clumsy fingerwork.’ Rusbridger recalls an early tryst with

Andrew Petrie

The shock of the old

New Yorker music critic Alex Ross published The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century five years ago, earning himself the Guardian First Book Award and a finalist citation for the Pulitzer Prize. Now London’s Southbank Centre is turning the book into a year of concerts, talks, film screenings, exhibitions and even a three-part BBC4 documentary series in celebration of 20th-century classical music. The festival marks the centenary of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, though Ross plays down the significance of the work’s riotous première in his book: it seems Paris audiences would faire la révolte for just about anything in those days. Less volatile Londoners can look forward to

Kate Chisholm

Word challenge

The first competition had 30,000 entries; the second more than 74,000. How many will be attracted to this year’s 500 Words challenge, launched by Chris Evans on his Radio 2 morning show on Monday? It’s open to any young person — under the age of 13 — to come up with a winning short story. To create a fiction that works as a vivid, compelling narrative in just 500 words, and no more, is no easy task. Shorter means crisper, sharper, edgier and more focused; no dead wood. That’s hard enough for a seasoned grown-up. The young writer must quickly learn how to stick to the point, to conjure up

James Delingpole James Delingpole

The hard sell

`The older I get, the less tolerant I become of being treated by television like a child with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. No offence meant to Dr Jago Cooper but, if I’m going to consider spending a valuable hour of my fast-diminishing lifespan watching a documentary about Lost Kingdoms of South America, the very last thing that’s going to persuade me is being importuned in the manner of those men with microphones at street markets trying to persuade me to buy an amazing labour-saving device I never knew I needed, the Radish-o-Chop. Probably, if I stopped to listen to the man, I’d find that the Radish-o-Chop was indeed an invaluable

Deborah Ross

Telling tales

I cannot tell you about all the things Steven Spielberg can and cannot do. I cannot tell you, for example, if he can make decent goblets from Quality Street wrappers or funny teeth from orange peel, as I can, but what I am able to say is this: he knows how to tell a story; where to start it, where to finish it, what to do with all those fiddly bits in the middle. And although Lincoln is a film that pays fantastically close attention to politics — not a negative per se, but unless you are on top of your American history you may occasionally find yourself scratching your

Michael Tanner

Orchestral tour de force

There is only one test that a performance of Verdi’s Otello has to pass: do you come out of the theatre drained, desperate at the suffering that human beings who love one another can nonetheless inflict, so that they torture or even kill the object of their love? Shakespeare’s play is about other things besides, indeed that may not be the major test of a production of it. But Verdi and his librettist Boito took a straightforward view of what is Shakespeare’s longest and one of his most complex plays, so that what they give us is what Leavis called ‘the sentimentalist’s Othello’, in which, taking the Moor at his