Arts Reviews

The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art Dulwich Picture Gallery, until 22 August There have been a number of painting dynasties in the history of art — families such as the Bruegels, the Bellinis and the Tiepolos — but fewer in recent years, British art having favoured the older brother syndrome (Paul Nash and John, Stanley Spencer and Gilbert). The Wyeth family is a glorious exception, an American family obsessed with realist painting, and an encouraging phenomenon to study. Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) is the best known of the painter Wyeths, and indeed the most talented. He is a remarkable artist, and it is his name that will probably attract

Marianne Gray talks to the down-to-earth Oscar nominee Brenda Blethyn about her latest film Brenda Blethyn doesn’t really understand why people continually ask her why she plays dowdy, often downtrodden characters, like Cynthia, the despairing mother in Secrets & Lies, or James McAvoy’s heartbroken mother in Atonement, or Mrs Bennet in Pride and Prejudice, who horse-trades her daughters. Or, indeed, like her latest role, the anxious Elizabeth, an ignorant, conservative, prejudiced woman, in London River. ‘I just don’t see it like that,’ says Blethyn, who has made a brilliant career out of playing understated, restrained women. ‘Everyone must be portrayed. Everyone must have a voice, even the flawed ones. I

Andrew Lambirth talks to John Richardson, biographer and friend of the artist John Richardson has spent a lifetime in the company of great art and artists, and is justly celebrated for his ability to evoke, explain and evaluate their work in beautiful prose. Best known as the biographer of Picasso, he has written about many other artists, including Manet and Braque, and has curated a number of seminal exhibitions since the Picasso retrospective he staged in New York in 1962. For the past 50 years he has lived in New York, though born in England in 1924. He was in London recently for the installation of his major new curatorial

Lloyd Evans talks to Michael Attenborough, whose star at the Almeida is the theatre itself The back office of the Almeida Theatre in Islington could do with a major refit. Dowdy, open-plan and scattered with Free-cycled furniture, it looks like the chill-out room of a student bar or the therapy suite of some underfunded weight-watch clinic. The tin chairs are arranged around elderly coffee-tables. The walls have been painted with the ramshackle expediency of a squat — a blue stretch here, some scarlet columns there, a few purpley flourishes. Beneath the roof eaves a beer gut of damp and crumbly brickwork bulges outwards precariously. I’d give it three months, maybe