Arts Reviews

Everyone knows about the magnetism of Paris and New York in the annals of modern art, but Belgian painters such as Van de Velde, Toorop, Van Rysselberghe, Evenepoel, Khnopff, Rops, Magritte, Delvaux and Permeke are remarkably significant. The galleries of satellite cities such as Brussels (now only two and a quarter hours away from London by Eurostar) always repay study. On the other hand, actual works of groundbreaking art were often executed far away from large urban centres. They were produced in sleepier and more outlandish locations. Aix-en-Provence, Arles and Tahiti will conjure up the names of Cézanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin. The Belgian port of Ostend is currently conjuring

We were on holiday last week for half- term and, as so often when I have time off, I started to fret. What on earth was I going to write about in ‘Olden but golden’? Mrs Spencer gets very cross about this sort of thing. ‘If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, you can count yourself lucky,’ she said, before starting to grumble herself about her forthcoming ballet teacher’s exam. But my problem was a real one —though, to be fair, so was hers. The fact is that for the past month, instead of unearthing new delights, I’ve been continually indulging my obsession for classic Blue Note jazz, which

I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s Quest, featuring someone — from his accent, British — called Richard Quest, who fancies himself as a character and goes around barking at people. He also barks banalities at us. His topic was art. ‘Art. We all know it when we see it. But do we really understand it?’ His interviewees, including David Hockney and

‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case. Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in strength or Schmerz; and more, the bloom of the young animal in its pride: things soon disappearing in the no doubt deeper, more characteristic achievements of maturity, which can’t in themselves be regretted but don’t stifle a sigh for what’s lost. One composer notoriously never surpasses the tender brilliance of his early music: Mendelssohn. With

It is a tribute to various things, primarily to Janacek’s genius, that the new production of Jenufa by ENO is a triumph, an overwhelming experience, despite having some fundamental weaknesses. It is of the essence of the work that it takes place in a tightly knit, highly structured and small community, and that there is a feeling of claustrophobia about it almost from the start, reaching a peak or pit in Act II, one of the most hideously intense in opera. What does the director David Alden do? Puts the action forward by about a century, so that it is set in 1980-ish Slovakia where there was no particular strength

The word ‘flâneur’ — from the French ‘flâner’, to stroll — is enjoying a comeback among a new generation of artists attracted to the idea that art is more about looking than doing. It was Baudelaire who first used it to describe the modern artist with his finger on the urban pulse — a ‘botanist of the sidewalk’ was how he defined him. The sidewalk in question being in Paris and the botanist being French, it’s a fair assumption that the principal objects of his naturalist interest were not the weeds growing up through cracks in the pavement, but the millinery flowers adorning the hats of female passers-by. Baudelaire’s definition