Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

George Hull

Broken hearts

In a bleak St Louis tenement, the Wingfields are buckling beneath the Depression and their mother’s old-fashioned aspirations. A framework of fire escapes and raised walkways provides convenient perches from which Tom (Leo Bill) can narrate and look on with foreboding as his lame sister is dressed and groomed for the long awaited ‘gentleman caller’. In a bleak St Louis tenement, the Wingfields are buckling beneath the Depression and their mother’s old-fashioned aspirations. A framework of fire escapes and raised walkways provides convenient perches from which Tom (Leo Bill) can narrate and look on with foreboding as his lame sister is dressed and groomed for the long awaited ‘gentleman caller’.

Deborah Ross

Incredible journey

Monsters is a sci-fi alien film and is being promoted as a sci-fi alien film but it’s not really a sci-fi alien film as it’s a love story with a beautiful and unexpected ending. Monsters is a sci-fi alien film and is being promoted as a sci-fi alien film but it’s not really a sci-fi alien film as it’s a love story with a beautiful and unexpected ending. It just happens to be set in the future and happens to feature aliens, and is one of those films that was made for next to nothing — $15,000! — and yet has proved both a critical and box-office success. Fifteen thousand

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Child abuse

Christmas approaches. And kitchens and playrooms across the land resound with the joyous tinkle of little Josephs and Marys rehearsing their roles in the Nativity play. My four-year-old son, making his debut in a farmyard cameo, has just one line, ‘I’m a donkey and I’m very tired,’ which he repeats endlessly to the delight of his beaming dad. So I can only imagine the levels of pride surging through the families of Ciara Southwood and Madison Lygo as they prepared for the lead roles of Mimi and Janey in the Royal Court’s new play Kin, which is set in a girls’ prep school. The homes of these lucky ten-year-old actresses

Michael Tanner

Magnificent Mozart

The subtitle of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (the rake punished), that of Rossini’s La Cenerentola is ‘La bontà in trionfo’ (goodness triumphant), while Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea might well be subtitled ‘Vice rewarded’. The subtitle of Mozart’s Don Giovanni is ‘Il dissoluto punito’ (the rake punished), that of Rossini’s La Cenerentola is ‘La bontà in trionfo’ (goodness triumphant), while Monteverdi’s L’Incoronazione di Poppea might well be subtitled ‘Vice rewarded’. They are the three operas that Glyndebourne is taking round the country this year, whether with moralistic intent I don’t know. Large school parties attend these performances, and are extraordinarily well behaved in my experience; if they have

Giannandrea Poesio

Playing it safe

Put the life of a legendary music-maker/campaigner in the hands of a controversial choreographer and you’ll possibly end up with some explosive stuff. Put the life of a legendary music-maker/campaigner in the hands of a controversial choreographer and you’ll possibly end up with some explosive stuff. This is what the Broadway producer Stephen Hendel might have had in mind when he asked Bill T. Jones to direct and choreograph a musical about Fela Kuti. But whether or not he saw his dream realised, I am not sure. Fela! hails from Broadway where it has been a long-running sizzling hit. It has great music, an almost endless stream of colourful numbers

Kate Chisholm

Watching and waiting

Phew! We’ve just had a narrow escape, if reports are true that the Today programme has been ‘in talks with’ Katie Price, aka Jordan. Phew! We’ve just had a narrow escape, if reports are true that the Today programme has been ‘in talks with’ Katie Price, aka Jordan. In talks with? Is international-style diplomacy really necessary for Ms Price to be persuaded to accept such an invitation, guest-editing Radio 4’s flagship current-affairs slot one morning between Christmas and New Year? She has declined (it’s that world-shattering book on how to beat cellulite she needs to finish), and so we’ll have to put up with second-best, Colin Firth, whose qualifications for

Simon Hoggart

Street life

It is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street and there seems to be as much celebration and feasting as there was for the Queen’s own golden jubilee, in 2002. It is the 50th anniversary of Coronation Street and there seems to be as much celebration and feasting as there was for the Queen’s own golden jubilee, in 2002. I have to declare a personal interest here. The inventor of Corrie is Tony Warren, who told my father that his book, The Uses of Literacy, had been one of his inspirations. It had shown working-class life to be as rich and complex as the lives lived by the middle and upper

Saturday

Alasdair Palmer

Rewarding rubbish

If you went on holiday to Italy this year, you may have come back with a plate, a mug or a jug — an item or two of the painted pottery still handmade (at least sometimes) by craftsmen and women, mostly in Umbria, but also in the Marche, and which you can see in the shops in Siena and Florence and in other places in Tuscany. If you went on holiday to Italy this year, you may have come back with a plate, a mug or a jug — an item or two of the painted pottery still handmade (at least sometimes) by craftsmen and women, mostly in Umbria, but

Susan Moore

Chinese burn

A kind of madness has taken grip of the art market. It seems that the world’s super-rich have decided that money has no value — or at least that it has a value different from that understood by the rest of us. Just this month, one of Alma Tadema’s fanciful biblical epics was sold for an incredible $36 million (previous auction record $2.8 million), a Modigliani changed hands at $69 million (previous record $31 million), while a now famous porcelain vase made for the Emperor Qianlong, which turned up in a bungalow in Pinner, realised more than £53 million — a world auction record for any Chinese work of art.

Laura Gascoigne

At the heart of Europe

The historic centre of Bruges has 16 museums, enough to cater for every touristic taste. There’s a Diamond Museum, a Lace Centre, a Choco-Story (the narrative element distinguishes it from the 50 chocolate shops) and a Friet Museum — or ‘Belgian Fries Museum’, for English-speakers under the misapprehension that fries are French. But the main focus of the city’s five-yearly festival, now in full swing, is on a local product the French cannot lay claim to: the Flemish painting tradition founded by Jan van Eyck, who died in Bruges in 1441. The historic centre of Bruges has 16 museums, enough to cater for every touristic taste. There’s a Diamond Museum,

Roderick Conway-Morris

Smoke and mirrors

The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine Father of Spin emphasised, it was a great deal more important to seem to have, rather than actually to have, these qualities. The Prince, according to Machiavelli, ‘should appear, to see him, to hear him, all compassion, all good faith, all integrity, all piety’ — which might be translated into Basic Blairish as ‘should appear a pretty straight kind of guy’ — but, as the Florentine

Andrew Lambirth

The folly of ambition

Andrew Lambirth talks to the artist Keith Coventry about drawing inspiration from Sickert, Churchill and Ladybird Books Keith Coventry has no time to visit the two lap-dancing clubs that lurk a few doors down from his studio, a small room with barred windows in a light-industrial block in the East End. Here, he puts in long hours, often forgetting to eat in his total immersion in the act of putting paint on canvas. He grudgingly admits to being a workaholic. This is where he painted ‘Spectrum Jesus’, which two months ago won him the £25,000 John Moores Painting Prize, one of the most prestigious accolades in the art world. Winning

Austen Saunders

A thinker of arresting and compelling grandeur

John Ruskin is the greatest writer whom, today, an educated person can admit not having read without embarrassment. One professes ignorance of Shakespeare or Dickens with apology or defiance, but most of us still seem unaware that Ruskin is as essential as Chaucer or Milton to understanding ourselves within a world (for all its ills), of beauty and happiness. Hopefully The Worlds of John Ruskin will bring new readers to one of modernity’s most remarkable thinkers. Ruskin first made his name with Modern Painters, a five volume work published between 1843 and 1860 which established Ruskin as the dominant art critic of the mid-19th century and is remembered chiefly for

Interconnect

Treasure trove | 27 November 2010

One afternoon in the winter of 1992 I was on a bus traversing London’s Millbank when an extraordinary sight caught my eye. A bright red Triumph Spitfire had been driven up the imposing front steps of the Tate Gallery and abandoned there. Not for the first time in my life I wished I had a camera with me. Only later did I learn that some disaffected artist or taxpayer had committed this spectacular act as a protest against the Turner Prize. One afternoon in the winter of 1992 I was on a bus traversing London’s Millbank when an extraordinary sight caught my eye. A bright red Triumph Spitfire had been

Alan Powers

Vertically challenged

St Paul’s Cathedral is quite rightly something of a national obsession. No other building has protected ‘view corridors’ as a result of legislation in 1935, when new building regulations allowed the surrounding buildings — notoriously a telephone exchange to the south — to overtop the cathedral’s cornice line. These corridors, extending like an unseen net as far afield as Richmond Hill, make architects unaccountably cross, as if they were an unfair curb on the alliance of art and Mammon. Thank God they are there, and that the tallest buildings, springing up once again like genetically modified beanstalks, are at least corralled east of Bank. St Paul’s Cathedral is quite rightly

Giannandrea Poesio

Visual pleasure

According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. According to the programme note, the message in Thierry Smits’s To the Ones I Love ‘does not direct itself to the mind but to the senses’. Well, his work is certainly a pleasant sensory experience. Neat patterns of colour, possibly recalling the chakras or energy centres that, in Eastern philosophy, govern our senses and feelings, mark the sections of this one-hour dance. The undeniable prowess of the nine handsome black male dancers with their superbly co-ordinated movements, derived from a mix of idioms, adds

Michael Tanner

Conflicting passions

Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, his biggest success, dating from 1902, leads a fringe existence, but it persists thanks primarily to the name role, dramatically meaty and not imposing too great a strain on the performer. Francesco Cilea’s Adriana Lecouvreur, his biggest success, dating from 1902, leads a fringe existence, but it persists thanks primarily to the name role, dramatically meaty and not imposing too great a strain on the performer. It has been mainly associated with singers at a fairly late stage — or thinking they were — of their career, Magda Olivero and Renata Tebaldi being the most notable. What is undeniable is that it is a vehicle, primarily

Deborah Ross

Catching up with Clooney

There are quite a few reasons to like The American. It is an action film with almost no action, making it a non-action action film which, I now know, is my favourite kind of action film. It stars George Clooney, and while I have tried to imagine Mr Clooney doing something uncharismatically — rinsing out his pants in the sink, say, or hosing down the car on a Sunday morning — I cannot. I’d buy a ticket for both. And it’s directed by Anton Corbijn, the Dutch photographer turned film-maker who made Control, the excellent film about Joy Division, and who knows how to compose a shot gorgeously. There are

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

No laughing matter

The Nobel prize is nothing. The real badge of literary greatness is the addition of the ‘esque’ suffix to one’s name and, if you’re truly outstanding, the word ‘nightmare’, too. Franz Kafka manages this distinguished double, although some readers find the connotations of horror arise not so much from his totalitarian dystopias as from his prose. But it’s best to approach Kafka with an open mind. The Nobel prize is nothing. The real badge of literary greatness is the addition of the ‘esque’ suffix to one’s name and, if you’re truly outstanding, the word ‘nightmare’, too. Franz Kafka manages this distinguished double, although some readers find the connotations of horror

Henrietta Bredin

Anthony Whitworth-Jones: Garsington on the move

When is a country-house opera not a country-house opera? When it no longer has a country house attached. This is what is about to happen to Garsington Opera, which is moving, lock, stock, barrel and picnic basket, from the exquisitely planned and intimate gardens of the Bloomsbury-redolent Garsington Manor near Oxford to the wide-open rolling hills of the Wormsley Estate in nearby Buckinghamshire. The move is a change and a challenge that the company’s general director, Anthony Whitworth-Jones, seems thoroughly to relish. ‘It’s enormously exciting,’ he says. ‘Once we knew we were going to have to move from Garsington the hunt was on for a suitable place, and we had