Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Deborah Ross

Over the top

From its very opening scene this film is exquisitely, lavishly gorgeous and on and on it goes, being exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous — oh, the frocks, the shoes, the petit fours, the piled-high candies! — until you start thinking, enough with the exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous already. How much exquisitely and lavishly gorgeous can a movie-goer be expected to take? Let’s see some heads getting chopped off! But on and on it goes — oh, the fountains, the chandeliers, the oak-lined vistas, the sumptuous, gilded rooms …honestly, at certain points you feel as if you’re being beaten to death by a late 18th-century copy of Hello! magazine. And on and

Simon Hoggart

Altered images

At the Cheltenham Festival last week, Professor John Sutherland was on a panel discussing Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea — which on this occasion won the mock-Booker prize for 1966, defeating The Jewel in the Crown, The Comedians and The Magus. Prof. Sutherland made the point that a prequel like WSS can exist because the author may assume in her readers a working knowledge of any book as central to the canon as Jane Eyre. Yet it also casts its modern influence back into the earlier novel. Whereas in Jane Eyre the first Mrs Rochester is fat, ugly and crazed, in WSS she has to be gorgeous and entrancing, for

Ariane Bankes

The witching hour

Twilight, the witching hour — that tantalising moment on the cusp of day and night when everything seems strange, poignant and full of possibilities. It is a gift to the photographer, whose raw material is light: its shifting subtleties, its evanescence, its poetic potential. The V&A has collected in this exhibition the work of eight contemporary photographers from around the world who have made twilight their subject. Like all the best ideas it seems strikingly obvious, yet it has apparently not been done before. Just off the bustle of the V&A’s entrance foyer, the exhibition offers a twilight zone, an area of stillness suffused with dim blue light. Each artist’s

Henrietta Bredin

‘There are no barriers’

There are many who might consider it an absolute crime that someone who would look so entirely delectable in a dirndl is instead about to hit the stage of the London Palladium draped from head to toe in a habit and wimple. Lesley Garrett, however, is so thrilled that she can barely contain herself. Other small girls growing up — as millions of us did — with the film of The Sound of Music spooling like an ever-present backing track to our lives might have felt a particular affinity with the rebellious Maria, the confused teenage Liesl or even the obnoxiously winsome Gretl. Not Lesley. Was she surprised to be

Saturday

Rosamund Pike

Journey of the soul

It is a Monday morning, after a week’s run of Summer and Smoke, and following the example of Tennessee Williams I have just brewed myself a coffee pot of liquid dynamite, and sitting down immediately after breakfast I am hoping its pressure on my heart will stimulate this article. Tennessee Williams was a proud punisher of his heart and, if I wished to follow his example to the letter, I would just now be preparing myself a little intramuscular injection of a secret formula concocted by my doctor. While I would still hate the business of pushing a needle into my skin, the immediate rush of creative energy, combined with

Andrew Lambirth

Masterpieces in miniature

Regular readers of this column will be aware that I champion small exhibitions which combine judicious selection with sufficient breadth to give an adequate representation of the artist under discussion. With Adam Elsheimer (1578–1610) there is no choice: the fullest retrospective must needs be a small exhibition. An artist who worked slowly, suffered from depression and died young, his total output was 34 paintings. Thirty of these have been gathered together at Dulwich, supported by a lavish publication from Paul Holberton Publishing (£35 hardback and £22.50 soft cover), which is the first decent book on Elsheimer in English for some 30 years. But Elsheimer, who painted on the ultra-reflective surface

Mark Glazebrook

Carr’s coup

Dawson Carr is the approachable but authoritative curator of Later Italian and Spanish Painting at the National Gallery. Talking to him you soon sense a total engagement with his work. He was born in Miami and worked at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles for 16 years. Armed with a tape recorder I met him mid-morning in a quiet corner of the Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing restaurant. I knew that he had studied stage design and written a book on Mantegna. He also curated the National Gallery’s recent show of late Caravaggios, an event which attracted a quarter of a million visitors. It is surely a crowning moment in his career

Marcus Berkmann

Enjoy it while it lasts

My friend Mitch rings up. ‘Guess what my album of the year is?’ He is trying to fool me into suggesting Donald Fagen’s Morph the Cat, for Mitch and I are both Steely Danoraks of long standing. But I know he was a little disappointed by the album, and he knows I wasn’t. I can’t give him the satisfaction. ‘Don’t know,’ I say. ‘What is your album of the year?’ ‘The Lily Allen album.’ I am dumbfounded. Mitch is staring down the barrel of 50. Lily Allen could be his daughter or, at the very least, the louche older girlfriend of one of his sons. Which, of course, is the

Michael Tanner

Trivial brilliance

Each time I see Shostakovich’s once controversial opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk I am impressed by what brilliant performances it seems to incite, fascinated by it dramatically and musically, but left unsatisfied by its unevenness and what I think is finally its incoherence. As far as productions go, it is hard to imagine that any could be more compelling than Richard Jones’s at the Royal Opera, and what is amazing is that it has improved considerably since its triumphant first run in 2004. There are probably very few operas which so suit Jones’s temperament, offering him every opportunity to juxtapose the hideous and the tender, the grotesque and the painful,

Peter Phillips

Colour coding

The recently concluded Kandinsky exhibition at Tate Modern was widely appreciated for showing how music influenced the artist’s move towards abstraction. Two concerts featuring seminal compositions by Schoenberg were held alongside talks which explained how abstract forms hit painting and music at about the same time. What was not so fully explored was the blissfully eccentric international movement devoted to synaesthesia, the scientific name for the condition in which the senses are confused with one another, which preceded Kandinsky’s work and gave it a context. The vogue for Colour-Music was thoroughly a child of its time. Like the invention of idealised languages (Volapük in 1879, Esperanto in 1887 and Ido

Saturday

Tom Rosenthal

Light on a master

It’s strange that while Britain has gone fairly mad over Mozart’s 250th anniversary, with vulgarities ranging from Mozart for Babies on Classic FM to Mozart mugs on coffee mugs, etc., we haven’t heard much about possibly his only cultural peer, Rembrandt. The Germans have now put us thoroughly to shame on the artist’s his 400th anniversary. At the Berlin Kulturforum, where the relatively new Gemäldegalerie is just across the road from the home of the Berlin Philharmonic, there are three superb commemorative exhibitions which together will lead up to a high-powered symposium on the latest debates of the Rembrandt Research Project. The main show, over two floors, has more than

Andrew Lambirth

Lines of beauty

Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/8–1543) needs no introduction: his vision of kingship in the person of Henry VIII has become part of our national identity, despite Holbein himself being a German whose first taste of success was in Basel. It’s a strange fact that, although endowed with a robust tradition of drawing and linear ornament in England, our great painters tended to be incomers from the Continent, at least until the time of Hogarth. Holbein was the first of these, wafted to Britain on trade winds and the all-pervading breeze of the Renaissance. In search of patronage, he found Sir Thomas More, friend of his first patron the great humanist

Ruth Guilding

Unforgettable fire

Places, like property prices, go up and down. Margate, in the most northerly corner of Kent, is just beginning the uncertain journey upwards again. The county’s largest resort, it has acres of ribbed brown sand and a harbour enclosed by a pier, ending in a lighthouse. Margate thrived when Turner painted there, and London workers arrived by daily packet for a waft of ozone, cockles and jellied eels. There are tall terraced houses in Regency stucco and Georgian brick, and knapped-flint cottages; a gloriously kitsch Winter Gardens, a shell grotto and the Royal Sea Bathing Hospital, sponsored by George III. There is also the wreckage of mass tourism — bingo,

Deborah Ross

Meryl’s movie

So, to cut straight to what you really want to know without having to wade through several paragraphs of plot-rehash followed by the director’s CV and his favourite seasonal vegetable, will you like this film? Hell, how should I know? I don’t know the first thing about you. But I will say this: OK, The Devil Wears Prada is no Pour Toi, Un Bon Morceau de Fromage (André Labourious’s seminal masterpiece about a morsel of cheese drifting aimlessly around Paris in the rain) but it does have its merits. True, when Meryl Streep isn’t in a scene the film tends to die on its arse somewhat, and as a satire

Michael Tanner

Lessons from Tristan

It’s more than three years since there was a production of Wagner’s ultimate masterpiece, Tristan und Isolde, in the UK, and I have been looking forward eagerly to Welsh National Opera’s revival of the one they share with Scottish Opera. Yannis Kokkos, who was the original designer and director, pays tribute in the programme to the great Swiss designer Adolphe Appia, and his sets, spare, concentrating the action and suggesting a lot that isn’t to be seen on stage, are rather similar to the ones that Toscanini used in La Scala in 1923. For me, they are virtually ideal, lovely to look at and enabling the singers to move freely

Simon Hoggart

Bare cheek

Normally I detest people who use laptops on crowded trains, but if you’re watching a DVD your elbows aren’t flying, and with earphones you’re no more of a nuisance to your neighbours than you would be reading a paper. So on a train crawling towards Bournemouth for the Tory conference, I set up the machine and popped in a preview disc of Trinny & Susannah Undress (ITV, Tuesday). At roughly the point where the couple they were bullying got naked and slipped behind a screen, an elegant middle-aged Frenchwoman took the seat next to me. The camera then went behind the screen and we saw the couple rubbing, stroking and

Michael Henderson

Ken Dodd: still happy at 78

More than 50 years after his debut, the Squire of Knotty Ash plays 120 shows a year, each lasting five hours. He tells Michael Henderson what comedy is — and quotes Aristotle There are certain goals in life that one might accomplish, given the time and the will: climbing the Matterhorn, say, or sitting through the Ring cycle in a week (both need a head for heights). There are other things one might do in dreams, like scoring a century at Lord’s. But one thing every person sound of mind and body can and should do before they die is catch Ken Dodd, the once-and-forever king of comedy, working his

Saturday

Christopher Frayling

Pushing the boundaries

Like myself, both the Arts Council and the Arts Council Collection are celebrating their 60th birthdays this year. I was born just as the modern concept of the welfare state was being incubated, which is why I find so moving that moment in Humphrey Jennings’s film Diary for Timothy (1945) when E.M. Forster’s commentary asks whether or not Timothy will be able to make all these post-war dreams come true. As part of this year’s celebrations, the Hayward Gallery’s current exhibition, How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art (until 19 November), features a selection of works from the collection, exploring what I believe to be one of

Andrew Lambirth

Overwhelming legacy

What a spectacle at the Royal Academy: the main galleries packed with the sculptures of Auguste Rodin (1840–1917), in a massive show which dazzles with its vehement and emotional handling of materials. Here is a giant of an artist, but the paying public is overloaded with visual stimulus. It is simply impossible to take in so much at one time. How many visitors will return? How many have the time or will spend the money? (Admission is £10.) And yet this is work of central importance to the development of Western art in the last century and a half, not some petit maître like Modigliani, who is being given his

Deborah Ross

Exercise in patriotism

Honestly, first it’s restaurant reviews and now it’s films, too, which does make me think: what next? Deborah, when you get a minute, would you mind changing the toner in the photocopier? Deborah, would you make sure to empty the bins before you leave? Doesn’t anyone else at The Spectator do any work at all? Oh, all right, I’ll do it. I seem to do everything else, so why not? I’ll just empty the bins, change the toner, and then get to it, OK? So, what is my brief, then? My brief, it appears, is to see the films ‘ordinary punters’ are likely to see rather than, say, Les Soupes