Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

28 May 2011

Unrequited obsession

Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV. Two films this week, one assiduously without heart, and one which may suffer from a surfeit, so you pays your money and takes your pick or you don’t pays your money and you stays in and has a jacket potato and watches TV. Makes no odds to me. I’ll review in the order in which I saw them, as that seems only fair so, first, Heartbeats, which

Simon Hoggart

In your dreams

Two self-directed films this week, and that is usually a bad sign. Every television auteur, even the best, needs someone at his shoulder saying, ‘Nah, mate, won’t work.’ The lack of an independent voice can be disastrous and lead to Billy Bunter levels of self-indulgence. All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace (BBC2, Monday) was the latest Adam Curtis film, named after a poem by Richard Brautigan. This imagines — ironically, I suppose — a situation in which humans return to a state of nature, with all our needs cared for by computers. It was a typical Curtis film, resembling one of those dreams you sort of remember because

Saturday

21 May 2011

Henrietta Bredin

Wit of a hunter-gatherer

Over the years Chris Beetles must have made the pencil-wielding fingers of Quentin Blake and Ronald Searle itch with a desire to draw him. He presents a vigorously compact figure, possesses a pair of appropriately beetling brows sheltering an extremely shrewd gaze and sports an unabashedly splendid set of bugger’s grips. Standing in the doorway of his gallery on Ryder Street in the heart of art-dealing London, both he and his collection are a world away from the smooth-talking, sharp-suited power-broking of Christie’s and Sotheby’s, the plush hush of Colnaghi. The walls of the gallery bristle with pictures, hung to fill every possible available space from floor to ceiling. Rowlandson

Andrew Lambirth

All things bright and beautiful

Beauty is generally considered old-fashioned by the young and not-so-young bloods of contemporary culture, so an exhibition appealing unashamedly to the aesthetically refined will not seduce the practitioners of sensationalism, bad taste and ever more self-indulgent and feeble art. But it will appeal to a public fed up with the empty, egomaniacal posturings of today’s fashionable art world nonentities, whose every burp and slurp is faithfully reported by a cynical press. At last, you may justifiably say, here is an exhibition to delight the eyes. Assuredly, it’s another of the V&A’s great blockbusters, and as such really too large to take in at one session, but at least it’s full

Michael Henderson

Never say goodbye

Michael Henderson considers the perennial appeal of Bob Dylan Bob Dylan turns 70 next week, and from Duluth to Derby they will blow out the candles. The Minnesotan troubadour, who rolled into New York the year Kennedy became president, will pay no attention. As he wrote in one of his better songs, ‘Me, I’m still on the road, heading for another joint.’ Like Ken Dodd, a different kind of minstrel, he will stop performing only when they put him in a box. It would not be unkind to say he has been crooning like a 70-year-old for some while. His voice, which was never an instrument of beauty, lost whatever

Andrew Lambirth

Read all about it

As newspapers are consulted increasingly on screen, and newsprint is all set to become a thing of the past, artists are turning their attention to this endangered medium. The Irish Expressionist painter Michael Kane (born 1935) has produced a provocative series of 100 paintings in ink, acrylic paint and collage, done on newsprint magazine pages taken mostly from the Irish Times (see above). The results are witty and moving, powerful comments on the age-old imperatives of humanity, acted out against the media stories and features of yesterday. Kane responds to the pictures and headlines he’s painting over, either as shapes or narratives, juxtaposing and repositioning to good effect. Man and

Lloyd Evans

Family at war | 21 May 2011

Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. Edward Albee doesn’t like the word ‘revival’. His plays aren’t dead, he says, just lurking. His 1966 drama A Delicate Balance has been coaxed back into the limelight by James Macdonald in a sumptuous new version starring Penelope Wilton and Imelda Staunton. We’re in a New England mansion whose unshowy opulence is brilliantly suggested by designer Laura Hopkins. The chairs are elegant, costly and fading. The shelves are

Michael Tanner

Spark of the divine

With its new production of Janácek’s last and in some ways most intractable opera, From the House of the Dead, Opera North shows once more that it is the most intelligently adventurous company in the UK, using its money where it is most needed: not on elaborate and perverse staging, but on high-class soloists and a small but excellent chorus, and an orchestra that can rival any in the country. With its new production of Janácek’s last and in some ways most intractable opera, From the House of the Dead, Opera North shows once more that it is the most intelligently adventurous company in the UK, using its money where

Deborah Ross

Guilt trip

Win Win is a comedy-drama that is warm-hearted and compassionate and enjoyable without, alas, being especially remarkable or original, which is a bit of a blow but I think you’ll get over it, with bed rest and time. Win Win is a comedy-drama that is warm-hearted and compassionate and enjoyable without, alas, being especially remarkable or original, which is a bit of a blow but I think you’ll get over it, with bed rest and time. Written and directed by Tom McCarthy, who made The Station Agent and The Visitor — two powerful character studies I could watch and rewatch into infinity — this is broader, lighter, schmaltzier and more

Giannandrea Poesio

Incomparable Verdi

Call me biased, but I believe that my illustrious compatriot Giuseppe Verdi composed ballet music like no one else. It is a pity he never felt like penning a full ballet score, and limited himself to composing balletic interludes for his glorious operas. As demonstrated by the work of eminent scholars, he possessed the unique ability to mentally choreograph a ballet. His approach to ballet music thus started with a detailed visualisation of the action, which fed into the unique innovative fluidity of his balletic compositions. Take, for instance, the complex Peregrina ballet, composed for the Paris Opéra staging of Don Carlos. The demands of creating a work that would

Kate Chisholm

Object lesson

What are we supposed to make of those odd pictures of Osama bin Laden sitting crouched in a dingy, undecorated concrete room watching something blurred on a small TV screen? Is this really the face of jihadist evil? These were the questions behind this week’s provoking 15-minute drama in the From Fact to Fiction slot on Saturday (Radio 4). What are we supposed to make of those odd pictures of Osama bin Laden sitting crouched in a dingy, undecorated concrete room watching something blurred on a small TV screen? Is this really the face of jihadist evil? These were the questions behind this week’s provoking 15-minute drama in the From

James Delingpole

Big Brother Beeb

For the past few weeks, unnoticed by all but the most sharp-eyed critics, BBC1 has been running a Celebrate Communitarianism season. The first programmes were: Envy of the World!!!, in which children at Great Ormond Street hospital spent a week being forcibly denied vital drug treatment. Then, in a touching scene right at the end, just as they were all on the brink of death, a big pink bunny with NHS printed all over his fur came hopping in with all the medicines and dialysis machines they needed, accompanied by Sir Jimmy Savile saying, ‘Now then, now then. As it ’appens, I have fixed it for YOU to understand why

Monday

16 May 2011

Alex Massie

Peanut Tweeter

Pretty much my new favourite thing: Peanut Tweeter. Random tweets from around the world inserted into not-wholly-random Peanuts galleries. Weirdly cool and fun. Hurrah for the internet. Thus: And: Many more here. [Thanks to RF]

Saturday

14 May 2011

Lucy Vickery

Vocal heroes

Foundling Voices at the Foundling Museum in London’s Bloomsbury (until 30 October) is the fruit of an oral history project that recorded the memories of 74 men and women (the youngest is now 68, the oldest 98) born to unmarried mothers who were placed as babies in the care of the Foundling Hospital Schools in the first half of the 20th century. Foundling Voices at the Foundling Museum in London’s Bloomsbury (until 30 October) is the fruit of an oral history project that recorded the memories of 74 men and women (the youngest is now 68, the oldest 98) born to unmarried mothers who were placed as babies in the

Daniel Grant

American view – Sword of controversy

‘I’ve refused to become a prisoner of “Piss Christ”,’ said the photographer Andres Serrano, referring to his 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass filled with urine. ‘I’ve refused to become a prisoner of “Piss Christ”,’ said the photographer Andres Serrano, referring to his 1987 photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass filled with urine. But the fact remains that he has become a very wealthy prisoner of that work. The picture, created while he was the recipient of a $15,000 grant from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which itself had received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in

Roderick Conway-Morris

Power of invention

Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits alone should have secured him a place in history as a major Renaissance painter. Lorenzo Lotto’s portraits alone should have secured him a place in history as a major Renaissance painter. Yet, ironically, while his works continued to be admired, his name was all but forgotten. This paradoxical state of affairs came about because Lotto suffered from a steady series of posthumous misattributions, his works being assigned to the most bafflingly diverse range of other artists from Giorgione, Pordenone, Titian, Tintoretto, Dosso Dossi and Veronese to Perugino, Leonardo, Andrea del Sarto, Holbein, even Van Dyck, and an obscure 17th-century German Baroque artist Johann Carl Loth, known in

Laura Gascoigne

Parisian perspectives

In 1879, two young brothers moved into a new fifth-floor apartment at no. 31 Boulevard Haussmann, overlooking the Opéra. Flush with inheritances from their father’s army bunk business, Gustave Caillebotte, 31, and his brother Martial, 26, were exactly the sort of children of the Second Empire for whom these new Parisian mansion blocks had been built. In 1879, two young brothers moved into a new fifth-floor apartment at no. 31 Boulevard Haussmann, overlooking the Opéra. Flush with inheritances from their father’s army bunk business, Gustave Caillebotte, 31, and his brother Martial, 26, were exactly the sort of children of the Second Empire for whom these new Parisian mansion blocks had

James Hamilton

Call to action

From across Margate Bay, the prickly silhouette of the new Turner Contemporary art gallery points towards the sea like prows of departing cruise liners. Here at last is the inspired intervention in economy and townscape to encourage resurgence in the south-east of England as has been catalysed by Tate St Ives in the south-west. Margate has a history of imaginative investment in high capital cost ventures to draw people to Thanet. The Royal Sea Bathing Hospital was opened in the 1790s to provide a cure for tuberculosis. John Rennie’s stone pier was completed in 1815 to allow steam packets to land visitors from London. An iron jetty reaching 50 yards

Andrew Lambirth

Portraits of a marriage

Andrew Lambirth on the special relationship between the artists Zoran Music and Ida Barbarigo that is explored in an exhibition that shows their work together for the first time in more than half a century At the Estorick Collection, a modest north London townhouse, there is until 12 June a most engaging exhibition devoted to two artists, husband and wife, whose work is not particularly well known in this country, though both are recognised and celebrated internationally. Ida Barbarigo (born Venice 1925) first met Zoran Music (1909–2005) at an exhibition of his paintings in Trieste in the spring of 1944. Their burgeoning friendship was interrupted when Music was arrested by

Deborah Ross

Cut to the chase

As Attack the Block is being touted as ‘the new Shaun of the Dead’ I expected a light-hearted romp rather than something quite bloody and nasty, although this does, at least, come in at a highly manageable 88 minutes. As Attack the Block is being touted as ‘the new Shaun of the Dead’ I expected a light-hearted romp rather than something quite bloody and nasty, although this does, at least, come in at a highly manageable 88 minutes. (Next week’s fourth Pirates of the Caribbean film is 140 minutes, can you believe, but don’t worry, I’m already in training for the boredom. I paired socks all morning, will be watching