Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Richard Cork

In the labyrinth

Nothing might seem more idyllic than Fragonard’s large, manicured paintings of playful seduction. Executed in the early 1770s for Madame du Barry’s Pavilion at Louveciennes, they celebrate the erotic rituals enacted by aristocratic lovers in the grounds of an opulent estate. The young woman and her equally well-groomed suitor dart, gesticulate and embrace among overflowing flower-beds dominated by classical urns and statues. But by the time Yinka Shonibare has finished with them, in an elaborate and unnerving installation at the new Musée du quai Branly, all their carefree poise is replaced by a macabre alternative. The context provided by this museum, recently created to house some of Paris’s great ethnographic

Michael Tanner

Polar exploration

Opera North’s new production of Janacek’s Katya Kabanova is the most moving I have seen, though it is not the best produced, best sung or most consistently cast. There are two things that make it indispensable to a lover of this wonderful work: the first is the brilliant, perceptive and thought-provoking essays in the programme by Stuart Leeks and, especially, David Nice. The second is the overpoweringly penetrating conducting of Richard Farnes, who shows with every opera he conducts that he is as versatile and deep a conductor as any alive today. What Farnes realises about Katya is that it is the opera in which the two poles of Janacek’s

Charles Spencer

Distant days

As the super soaraway Spectator becomes ever more style-conscious and glossy, I like to think of ‘Olden but golden’ as a monthly oasis for the scruffs, drunks and wasters among the readership. It is, of course, possible to be all these things while presenting a glamorous façade to the world. The smart society hostess may well be a secret Janis Joplin fan who in the privacy of her own bedroom drinks Southern Comfort from the bottle and howls drunkenly along to ‘Ball and Chain’. That slick-suited, impossibly rich hedge-fund manager, heading for the City in his chauffeur-driven car, may secretly long to be Keith Richards, not just because Keef is

Simon Hoggart

Miracle worker

Now and again someone recommends a programme, and you’re very glad they did because it’s the kind of show that television ought to make often and only rarely does. I Believe in Miracles (BBC2, Tuesday), a This World documentary, was like that — just the right length at 40 minutes, and as packed with good things as a Christmas cake. The producers followed Ken, confined to his wheelchair by strokes, and his daughter Susan, who had given up work to care for him, but who suffered herself from debilitating migraines. They joined a coach party from Garstang, Lancashire, to Lourdes, where Dad hoped to walk again. The journey was horrible,

Tuesday

The Spectator

The New Yorker on Banksy

This week’s New Yorker has a fascinating profile of the graffiti artist Banky. He’s one of those people you either love or hate. This quote gives you a flavour of where he’s coming from: “I don’t think art is much of a spectator sport these days,” he began. “I don’t know how the art world gets away with it, it’s not like you hear songs on the radio that are just a mess of noise and then the d.j. says, ‘If you read the thesis that comes with this, it would make more sense.’ ” Do read the whole thing.

Monday

Stuart Reid

The meaning of life

Andrew Ferguson is one of America’s most accomplished conservative writers, but he is barely known here. That’s a pity because his sceptical pen would appeal to many English readers. The other day, on behalf of the Weekly Standard, he attended a panel discussion on the politics of Darwinism at the American Enterprise Institute. The theme before the panel was: “Darwinism and Conservatism: Friends or Foes?” Ferguson’s report is a model of wit and clarity. The cracking pace is set by the first sentence:  “They only had two and a half hours to settle some knotty questions–Does reality have an ultimate, metaphysical foundation? Is there content to the universe?–so they had

The Spectator

The Gordfather

“Barzini’s dead. So is Phillip Tattaglia — Moe Greene — Strachi — Cuneo — Today I settle all Family business.” Remember that scene in The Godfather, where Michael Corleone tells his soon-to-be-executed brother-in-law that the Corleones have settled all their vendettas in a bloody spree of vengeance? That’s what Westminster feels like this morning. The Gordfather has seen them off: all of them. Milburn, Blunkett, Johnson, Clarke, Miliband, and now, unexpectedly, Reid. He has settled all Brownite Family business. He is the unchallenged Don. But – of course – we know from Godfather Part II that blood quickly begets blood, that feuding abhors a vacuum.  In today’s Guardian, Jackie Ashley

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Facing the music

The Spectator’s pop critic looks back on 20 years It suddenly occurs to me, with a jolt, that I have been writing about pop music for The Spectator for 20 years. This makes me the fifth (or possibly sixth, since I am bound to have forgotten someone) longest continuously serving columnist on the magazine, which isn’t bad going, as one or two columnists I know have been carried out of here feet first, promising to file their next one by Tuesday lunchtime with their last worldly breath. It’s all the more bizarre as it stems from something said a quarter of a century ago by a friend of mine called

Andrew Lambirth

Timeless verities

Marylebone is the pleasant departure-point if you’re taking the train to Aylesbury from London, and what better way to spend a spring day than an outing to the gentle Buckinghamshire countryside to see a celebration of its merits by fine artists. Upstairs at the Bucking-hamshire County Museum, near St Mary’s Church, is an excellent small exhibition of pictures and sculptures by artists who lived and worked locally in the 1920s and 30s. The principal exhibitors are John and Paul Nash, Clare Leighton, Eric Gill and David Jones. Their work offers a richly textured display of art and craftsmanship, a deeply heartening affirmation of the still considerable glories of our countryside.

Mark Glazebrook

At one with nature

Yorkshire Sculpture Park is the first and best of the breed in the British Isles. Since 1977 it has activated 500 acres of undulating land between Barnsley and Wakefield in a unique way. A man-made upper and lower lake, with a weir and cascade at the narrow junction between the two, runs through the middle of the Bretton Hall estate â” a widening of the River Dearne at the bottom of a valley. An 18th-century manor house survives. Farming continues in a professional way but as part of another focus, which is, of course, aesthetic. Andy Goldsworthy was YSP’s Artist in Residence in 1987. Since then he has worked and

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Banality of evil

Holocaust art must be approached with care. There’s a worry that by finding fault you’re somehow failing to take the world’s all-time Number one human rights violation seriously. Kindertransport follows the tale of Eva, a Jewish schoolgirl sent from Nazi Germany to Britain at the close of the 1930s. She’s adopted by a rough-diamond Manchester mum (lovely work from Eileen O’Brien) but when her real mother returns after the war Eva claims she’s been abandoned and stages a complete emotional withdrawal. It’s rather heartbreaking and a touch over-familiar. The best moment comes early on when a sneaky German customs officer rifles through Eva’s bags, steals her money and fobs her

Giannandrea Poesio

Simple and sumptuous

I wish the term ‘ballet-theatre’ had not already been snatched and (mis)used by dance historians, for there is no better way to define Will Tuckett’s art: his creations are to ballet what dance-theatre is to modern and postmodern dance. Not unlike some of the most acclaimed performance makers who specialised in the latter genre, Tuckett has taken a recognisable choreographic idiom and combined it successfully with other expressive/theatrical means. His choice, however, was and still is particularly daring; ballet, after all, is not as malleable as modern and postmodern dance techniques and styles. Yet, acclaimed creations such as The Soldier’s Tale, arguably the best theatre translation of Stravinsky’s work there

Michael Tanner

Preachy prig

Britten’s penultimate opera, Owen Wingrave, has always been the Cinderella in that area of his work, and the production of it at the Linbury Studio in the Royal Opera House is unlikely to change that. Britten wrote it for presentation on BBC television, and took very seriously the possibilities and limitations which that medium possesses — one of the very few composers who has done. Naturally, he was eager to have it produced on stage, too, presumably so that the music could be heard live instead of in what was then the fairly poor sound that TV offered. But it doesn’t really work on the stage, not even in so

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Our island story

Victoria’s Empire (BBC1, Sunday) is the BBC’s new Palinesque travelogue series in which comedienne Victoria Wood goes from exotic location to exotic location chatting to the locals, making wry observations and being mildly funny. But there’s at least one thing that’s very, very annoying about it. The annoying thing — and I don’t know whether this is a problem Wood herself has or whether it’s something which has been imposed on her by the BBC’s political-correctness-enforcement department; a bit of both, I suspect — is the way it keeps apologising for being white, middle class, middle-brow, post-Imperial and British. For example, in a scene where Wood goes to visit the

Friday

Saturday

Robin Holloway

Buried treasure

The newly available recording of the 1955 Bayreuth ‘Ring’ Unlike my fearless and indefatigable colleague, I visit the opera with reluctance, expecting the worst and usually finding it. The almost universal betrayal in recent decades of this most complex of genres by hideous design and perverted production is never so sheerly ghastly as with the works of Wagner: among these the Ring offers the widest scope for traduction. I love and revere this colossal yet human monument so deeply (whatever passing moments of reservation or resentment) that witnessing its trials by mockery, malignity, ineptitude, inadequacy, tears a fibre from the brain like a six-lane motorway over a sacred landscape or

Andrew Lambirth

Cover story

Since Sir Edward Poulton’s pioneering study The Colours of Animals was published in 1890, the importance of disguise in the natural world — and, by extension, in the human one — has been widely recognised and exploited. As technology changed the patterns and prospects of warfare, with aerial reconnaissance and long-range shelling becoming a nasty reality, so the need for discretion and subterfuge was more readily apparent. No longer were scarlet uniforms a good idea on soldiers; no longer should an army stand up and be counted. Concealment and dissimulation were the order of the day. Honour, chivalry and honesty may have suffered irrecoverable body blows, but who cared? Dishonesty

Laura Gascoigne

Pastoral visions

I’d never really looked at landscapes with cows until a student experience brought them sharply into focus. I was standing in front of one at a tutor’s party when I noticed the boy next to me staring at it. As I wondered what had so captured his imagination, he suddenly gasped, ‘God, I’m hungry!’ There are a lot of cows, and sheep, in Compton Verney’s new exhibition of landscapes from the Royal Academy’s collection, but they’re not there to whet the appetites of starving students. Rather, runs the thesis behind the show, their presence lends credibility to a pastoral vision of England designed to appeal to the new class of

Michael Tanner

Hot stuff

Handel’s Giulio Cesare in a staged concert performance at the Barbican, given under the experienced baton of René Jacobs, was something to look forward to keenly, especially for that tiny minority of us who think the work a great one but the enormously popular Glyndebourne production a vulgar travesty. In the event, it was rather a flat evening. Perhaps if one way of celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Barbican Centre were to be the introduction of effective air-conditioning into the stifling atmosphere of the Hall, such huge events (this was another almost four-and-a-half-hour marathon) wouldn’t seem so interminable. Perhaps, too, the extreme frequency with which Handel operas are being

Kate Chisholm

Short cuts

‘Censorship,’ shrieked Hanif Kureishi after discovering that his short story, ‘Weddings and Beheadings’, was not going to be read on Radio Four as part of the National Short Story Competition (organised with various organisations including Prospect magazine, Booktrust and the Scottish Book Trust to promote the skill involved in writing short stories). The five shortlisted stories were all meant to be aired last week on Radio Four, but Kureishi’s was withdrawn at the last moment on the orders of the Controller, Mark Damazer. Damazer stated firmly that the BBC was ‘not censoring’ the story, just ‘postponing transmission’. His reason: ‘because of stories that have been circulating about Alan Johnston, the