Arts Reviews

Since every mafiosi’s favourite movie is Goodfellas and favourite TV programme is The Sopranos, I suppose similar rules apply to Islamic terrorists and Sleeper Cell (Channel 4). Probably, every Wednesday night secretive groups of sinister bearded men all over Britain tune in in the eager hope that this will be the episode when scary Faris Al-Farik (Oded Fehr) finally gets to blow thousands of infidels into a million pieces. I dare say they will also be watching to see whether American scriptwriters have any useful insights into the Islamic terrorist mindset. If so, they’re going be disappointed. Sleeper Cell is just another generic action-drama series like a cross between The

That eminent Victorian George Frederick Watts — Strachey thought of including him in his seminal study but was sadly deflected — is at last undergoing something of a revival. In his lifetime one of the most famous of contemporary painters (though his works never sold for quite the vast sums realised by Millais or Burne-Jones), Watts has been neglected. His ambition was to be a history painter, and he spent much of his long life and considerable energies on allegorical pictures, which today find little favour. His portraits, which he often used as a means of subsidising his less popular High Art compositions, are recognised as supreme examples of the

If you haven’t been abroad so far this summer, go and see Pedro Almodóvar’s Volver — it will have almost as invigorating an effect as a weekend in Spain. To see it is to be immersed in a strange and likeable culture, populated by agreeably batty characters whose tale is completely absorbing. So absorbing, in fact, that when I emerged from the screening I was surprised to find myself fogged in by the dull mash of London greys, and not among a blaze of Spanish colour. When I opened my mouth to speak I was amazed that a torrent of Spanish didn’t issue forth. I was puzzled (and, yes, it

Forgery in painting has enjoyed a long history of scandal and from time to time spills more ink than paint, in part because we all enjoy reading about an art expert or moneyed person getting taken in by a fake. Our pleasure derives from that cocky-smug common-sense feeling that no painting is worth the prices currently being fetched in the marketplace — Picasso’s ‘Boy with a Pipe’ sold for $104 million (£56.3 million) in 2004, and more recently Klimt’s ‘Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer 1’ was snapped up for a reputed record $137 million — especially when the naked eye can’t tell the difference between the original and a well-executed copy.

The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally. Once it opened in 1982, I visited regularly and watched the development of the collection with interest, particularly the addition of the Charles Kearley Bequest in 1989. At that point, the collection was a little gem of 20th-century art — mostly British, with some European additions. Now it has received a further boost. The house

, Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) was born in Pochlarn, Bohemia, studied in Vienna, enlisted in a smart cavalry regiment at the outbreak of the first world war, got shot in the head and bayoneted, went back into action after a spell in hospital in 1916 and suffered shellshock. He had a stormy affair with Mahler’s widow Alma, a very trying woman whose other husbands or lovers included Schoenberg, Franz Werfel and the conductor Willem Mengelberg. The Mahler affair ended badly, so Kokoschka had a life-size doll with her features built for him which was part model and, for some years, constant companion. But there also emerged from their relationship one of

Satire is one of the great British traditions, closely associated with the notions of personal liberty, readiness to express opinion and our much-vaunted freedom of thought. The English appetite for satire has long set standards of democratic licence unequalled in the rest of the world: the lampoon is sacrosanct in our culture, a guarantee of a healthily sceptical attitude to authority and self-importance. It is a great safety valve, as well. Perhaps because the British have been so effusive and inventive as satirists, as a nation we have felt less need to rebel in more active ways. Instead of dragging politicians from their seats of power and stringing them up,

Within the expanding aquatic metropolis that is Istanbul, two late-20th-century bridges straddle the continents of Europe and Asia. These traffic-laden steel bridges, spanning high above the ferries and other boats which ply the busy waters of the Bosphorus below, are visibly useful links between two civilisations. They are also symbols, perhaps, of the noble dream of bringing the mentality of the Muslim world closer to that of the non-Muslim world in a spirit of mutual admiration and respect. A cultural event like a Rodin exhibition is worthwhile for its own sake. Held in a Muslim country, it may also nurture such a noble dream. Alas, a recent Franco–Italian diplomatic catastrophe