Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Mysterious ways | 3 December 2011

Among exhibition organisers, hyperbole is clearly the order of the day. The crowds are going wild over Leonardo at the National Gallery, expecting an exhibition packed with paintings (though only nine are by the master), and now the Fitzwilliam is hauling them in with a show called Vermeer’s Women that contains just four paintings by Vermeer. On the day I visited, the gallery was thronged, though the queues of which the management warned were thankfully not in evidence. I am frankly horrified by the volume of visitors to art galleries these days. I should perhaps be thankful that art is so popular, but the sheer numbers make the experience of

George Hull

Power games

Plays used to end in marriage. Then they anatomised the highs and lows of life as a couple. Now — at least in Neil LaBute’s latest London première — the relationships are all either over or heading that way fast. Reasons to Be Pretty (Almeida, until 14 January) gives a spot-on depiction of those no-man’s-land months following a break-up, when relations between exes are loaded with an electric ambiguity, and contradictory feelings alternate with bewildering rapidity. After an apocalyptic row in the first scene, estranged Greg and Steph keep bumping into each other about town. Tom Burke lets us see that Greg’s innocent exterior masks both genuine warmth and an

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Sage advice

To the Manor Reborn (BBC1, Thursday) is undoubtedly one of the most brilliant programmes in the history of television. But then I’m biased for the Rat is in it, and what a splendid, handsome and talented young fellow he has turned out to be. If you looked very carefully about halfway through episode one, you’ll have caught him standing facing interior designer Russell Sage, holding a sheet of wallpaper or something. And then later, you’ll have caught him again being told by Sage to remember something he’d forgotten. Superb! The boy is a natural, he’ll go far, and as his proud stepfather I shall accept nothing less than the highest

Kate Chisholm

Dark time

Keep awake, urges the Gospel messenger in the readings for the beginning of the Christian festival of Advent. That’s not easy in late November when by lunchtime the sun is already fast dropping to the horizon. The propensity to nap, to switch off, can be overwhelming. In Finland it must be so much worse. For two months, from mid-November to mid-January, the sun never rises at all. Everything has to be accomplished in total twilight. The Light in Darkness, a 20-minute short on Radio 3 (Thursday evening), took us inside the ‘dark time’, with an eerie impression of the northern winter that was so sharply evoked you could almost hear

Giannandrea Poesio

Saved by the Bel

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s and Jérôme Bel’s 3Abschied is the latest addition to a long and historically well-established series of choreographic works set to music by Gustav Mahler. There are still those, however, who cringe at the idea of dancing to the notes of this revered composer — as Keersmaeker points out in her initial monologue where she recounts her encounter with the conductor supremo Daniel Barenboim. Barenboim’s words linger menacingly through most of the performance. When Keersmaeker first dances to the ‘Abschied’, from Das Lied von der Erde (in a Schoenberg transcription), played live on stage by the superb Ictus ensemble, one can hear the words ‘I told you

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Anatomy of an uprising

They can’t even be bothered to think of a decent title. Good thing too. The Riots, at the Trike, is a rush job, a gripping and pacey attempt to analyse the disturbances that engulfed Britain last August. Cops, criminals and community leaders have been interviewed by Gillian Slovo, who fashioned their statements into a dramatic investigation. The riots might never have happened if more prudent tactics had been used at the start. The family of Mark Duggan, shot dead by police on 4 August, staged a demonstration outside Tottenham police station two days later. Police refused to speak to them, claiming that the independent investigation into Duggan’s death obliged them

Deborah Ross

A la recherche du temps perdu

Hugo 3D is Martin Scorsese’s first child-friendly family film and the first thing to say about Martin Scorsese’s first child-friendly family film is that it is a visual wonder: rich, lush, beautiful, gorgeous. But the second thing to say is nothing else is as exciting as the look of it and if there is a third thing it is this: Hugo himself is rather boringly bland and I didn’t much care for him. Honestly, you can wait ages for one thing to say and then three come along at once. Isn’t that always the way? The source material is the graphic novel The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

Jonathan Croall

Forthright to a fault

Her mother was Ellen Terry, the most admired actress of the day. Her brother was Edward Gordon Craig, the celebrated stage designer. Little wonder then that Edith Craig was overshadowed for most of her life by two such towering figures. Yet her theatrical achievements were substantial. She was a talented costume designer and maker, the founder of the radical theatre group the Pioneer Players, and an indefatigable producer and director of countless plays and pageants. She was also an important figure in the suffrage movement, staging many feminist plays, and lived in a famous artistic lesbian ménage-à-trois. After her mother’s death she turned her cottage, Smallhythe Place in Kent, into

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Buried treasure | 26 November 2011

In recent years there has been a surge of interest in the treasures hidden in our public art collections, many of them rarely if ever on view. The Tate Gallery is perhaps the principal offender here, showing only a tiny percentage of its glorious and wide-ranging holdings of British art, but attention is now being directed towards our provincial galleries and museums. Since 2003 the Public Catalogue Foundation has been recording and publishing the oil paintings held in galleries and civic buildings, county by county, and issuing invaluable volumes of colour illustrations to show us what usually remains invisible. By its calculations, a shameful 80 per cent of these paintings

Susan Moore

Money talk

At least one market posted strong results in November. That was the market for contemporary art. In just four days in New York — 7 to 10 November — a phenomenal $775 million was spent on postwar and contemporary art at auction alone (who knows what deals were transacted privately). Sotheby’s evening sale exceeded its expectations by more than $45 million. Here, a real market rarity, a magnificent painting by the American Abstract Expressionist Clyfford Still, fetched a mighty $61.7 million. Some 45 works sold for over $1 million; seven sold for more than $10 million. Good news, one might say — but only up to a point. It is

Robin Simon

Meeting point

I prepared for this exhibition in Düsseldorf by taking the short train journey down the Rhine to Cologne, which would hate to be thought of as a twin city. Its gigantic cathedral is as I first saw it some 40 years ago, still black with soot (but where would you start to clean it?), and the streets still remind me of Swansea, but without the sense of space. The same low-rise blocks of anonymous postwar buildings are on every side, with the same seemingly temporary shops and takeaways, only with Würstel as well as burgers. Where Swansea has the fine Glynn Vivian Art Gallery, Cologne has the Wallraf-Richartz, now in

Roderick Conway-Morris

Trading places

Venice and Alexandria were, as far as the Venetians were concerned, twin cities. According to legend, St Mark had visited Venice before going to Alexandria, where he preached, performed miracles and was martyred. When two Venetian merchants stole the saint’s remains from Alexandria in 828, they were merely fulfilling the prophecy of the Angel that had appeared to Mark in the lagoon and, addressing him with the ringing words ‘Pax tibi Marce, Evangelista meus’, had predicted that a great city would arise upon these waters, which was to be his last resting place. The origins of the mythical links between Venice and Alexandria were as much mercantile as mystical. For

Laura Gascoigne

Adventurous rogue

Historically, British artists have not been good at money management. George Morland (1762–1804) was chronically insolvent; Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846) served four jail terms for debt and eventually killed himself after being reduced to pawning his spectacles; even Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769–1830) died leaving debts of £30,000. But the painter who turned serial defaulting into an art was George Chinnery (1774–1852). Absconding was the making of him as an artist suggests a new exhibition, The Flamboyant Mr Chinnery, at Asia House. A Londoner and fellow student of Turner at the Academy Schools, Chinnery launched his portrait-painting career in Dublin four years before the Act of Union emptied the Irish Parliament of

David Blackburn

Into battle

The charge of the Scots Greys at Waterloo: you’ll know it from the Risk board game. Hundreds of soldiers on lustrous white horses, manes billowing as they gallop straight at the viewer. A magnificent sight, but the stuff of nonsense: the horses probably weren’t all greys and they definitely weren’t turned out as if for Ascot. This is one fact to emerge from War Horse: Fact or Fiction?, the exhibition now showing at the National Army Museum in Chelsea (until August). Other myths are dispelled. Contrary to popular opinion, the history of British cavalry is not one of heroic failure. Even the bloodiest charges succeeded in their military aims. To

Simon Hoggart

Out of kilter

Can a critic simply be wrong, in the way that a mathematician who said that 3×3=10 would be wrong? I’m beginning to wonder, since I am the only person I’ve read who thought Ricky Gervais’s Life’s Too Short was not vile but terrific and The Killing II (BBC4, Saturday) all right, though far from the work of genius others believe. I never quite caught the first series of The Killing on BBC4, though I have tried. I do have the box set, and one day I might even watch it. Mind you, suspicions were aroused when the main talking point seemed to be the heroine’s knitwear. ‘Say what you like

Kate Chisholm

Limited menu

The changes to the Radio 4 schedule have been in operation for a couple of weeks. Have they made any difference? The extra 15 minutes added to the lunchtime news programme, The World At One, has had the knock-on effect of squeezing the afternoon. Do we need another 15 minutes of current affairs analysis? After all, we already have three hours first thing in the morning, 45 minutes last thing at night after the ten o’clock news, with another hour in the middle at five. The problem with extending news programmes at a time of budget cuts is that the only way you can fill the extra minutes is to

Michael Tanner

Concealed passion

ENO’s new production of Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin has created something of a stir by departing from the house almost-tradition of postmodernist, stunningly intrusive and invariably grotesquely irrelevant presentations that began in earnest sometime last year. The set designs for this opera, by Tom Pye, and the costumes, by Chloe Obolensky, update it to the late 19th century, but that is just a nervous tic. More surprisingly, Deborah Warner’s direction of the characters and actors is so unobtrusive that one wonders if she told anyone to do anything in particular. The most sensational departure from what we normally see is that Lensky wears glasses (not sunglasses) for the duel, gently stressing

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Historical knockabout

It’s a palace drama with all the trimmings. Trevor Nunn’s new production, The Lion in Winter, plunges us into the court of Henry II and his spurned wife, Eleanor of Aquitaine, as they struggle to decide which of their three sons should inherit the throne. Eleanor, held prisoner in a deluxe royal fortress, has been granted leave to join the family at Christmas. ‘Thanks for letting me out,’ she says, on their first meeting. ‘It’s only for the holidays,’ jokes Henry. Clearly a king who locks his wife in the broom cupboard won’t pay much heed to her views on the succession. So there’s an emotional and dramatic illogicality here

Deborah Ross

Choppy waters

As there were no invites this week from Hollywood movie stars — I thought Nicole Kidman might ask me over for a girls’ night in, to do face packs and nails and stuff, but not a squeak — I have to get back to the business of reviewing, and so here we are with The Deep Blue Sea. This is Terence Davies’s take on the Terence Rattigan play of the same name, and it’s awfully, awfully good — superb acting; superb sweeping crane shots; a superb evocation of postwar London in the Fifties — but it somehow fails properly to come to life. A new Davies film is, of course,

Charles Spencer

A night at the opera

Thanks to the generosity of friends, Mrs Spencer and I went to the opera the other week, an exceptionally rare event. Having grown up with the rougher edges of pop and rock music, the trained voices of opera singers always strike me as being artificial and overblown. And there is something about the snooty splendour of Covent Garden that brings out a chippy adolescent resentment in me, though on most matters these days I am soundly right-wing and usually enjoy a spot of luxury. The evening didn’t begin well. Our taxi got stuck in a traffic jam and we had barely travelled 100 yards before the meter hit ten quid