Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Wednesday

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Building on success

Alain de Botton has done it again and I hate him. A few years ago, I decided to make him my friend as a way of warding off the bitterness and jealousy I might otherwise have felt about his increasingly nauseating success. And for a while it worked. He still is a friend, up to a point. We still have dinner together; we still fancy each other’s wives; we could still conceive of having a gay relationship together if, one day, we end up stranded for ever on a Lost-style island or we’re the only people to survive the Apocalypse; we still ring each other up now and then to

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Comfortless aesthetic

The classic Modernist interior familiar to us all is a white cube, minimally furnished and adorned, the clean geometric lines of the architecture given prominence at the expense of fittings and fixtures. As the visitor steps into the V&A’s homage to Modernism, it’s at once clear that the design of the show will not mirror that aesthetic. This is a busy, multicoloured display, crammed with pictures and artefacts, full of red or blue arrows linking labels to exhibits, and vamped up with variant wall patterns. It’s big on visual excitement, not restraint. There are over 300 exhibits and more than 50 film clips to be seen, and at times it’s

John Spurling

Charcoal mastery

In his foreword to the catalogue of John Hubbard’s Spirit of Trees, Duncan Robinson, the director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, invokes John Constable. Indeed if Constable were alive today he might be John Hubbard. Although Hubbard is American, he has lived in Dorset for 45 years and although his paintings are far more abstract than Constable’s and have been inspired by foreign places as well as British — the Atlas Mountains, Spanish gardens, the Vaucluse in France — they approach nature in a similar way, with romantic feelings but a pragmatic eye. They express the artist’s deep passion for and curiosity about elusive nature, almost as a force or idea,

Michael Vestey

Honours and rebels

With the government and the opposition flogging peerages to raise money for party funds, Radio Four decided to look back at the 1920s master of this practice, the former Liberal prime minister David Lloyd George, and J. Arthur Maundy Gregory, the crook he used to negotiate prices (The Man Who Sold Peerages, Easter Saturday). Matthew Parris told the presenter Shaun Ley that it was one of the three worst political scandals of the 20th century. We don’t know for how long the present government has been doing this and the exact going rates it charges, but back then a knighthood would set you back £10,000, a huge sum, more than

Simon Hoggart

The nuns’ story

Nostalgia is not what it used to be, but then in television it rarely is. For example, Dr Who (BBC1, Saturday) is back with David Tennant as the 10th full-time doctor and Billie Piper as his 21st female assistant. The show was first screened the day after JFK was assassinated. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess. At the risk of sounding like an old fart, a risk I am generally prepared to take, a large part of the appeal of the old Doctors was the cheap, sticky-tape-and-string nature of the sets and the villains. Children might have needed to watch the Daleks through threaded fingers from behind the sofa,

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Pastel-shaded surprise

Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin is an argument in favour of ordinary life, as opposed to a life ruled by passion and intensity. It’s a kind of anti-Tristan, in which Isolde decides, in the terminology of Act II of Wagner’s drama, to call it a day as far as uniting with Tristan in undying (or unliving) love goes, and to settle down with King Mark. Actually, Tristan is far more ambivalent about the bliss of love than it at first seems to be, and Onegin about the value of domesticity. The only person in Tchaikovsky’s minor masterpiece who comes off really well is Prince Gremin, and to judge from his music and

Toby Young Toby Young

World of fear

According to theatrical lore, no play can be considered an out-and-out masterpiece unless it’s initially rejected. The most famous example is Look Back in Anger, which received a critical mauling in the dailies and was only saved from closure by Kenneth Tynan’s rave in the Observer. The second most famous is The Birthday Party, which had actually closed by the time Harold Hobson’s favourable review appeared in the Sunday Times. (According to legend, one matinée was attended by just six people.) The Crucible, too, passes this test: its initial Broadway run in 1953 was not a success and no critic was willing to stake his reputation on the play’s merit.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Quality control

Really, it isn’t me who decides what TV programmes to review. It’s my wife. Like, the other night I’d started watching Ricky J. Dyer’s fascinating documentary I Love Being…HIV+ (BBC3, Monday) about pozzing up, the disgusting gay underworld perversion of deliberately getting yourself infected with the HIV virus by seeking unprotected sex with known carriers, and the wife came in and said, ‘Oh God! We’re not watching this, surely? Huh, this is just the sort of stuff you’d watch, because we know you’re gay really…’ So to shut her up I had to dig out some art programmes I’d ordered up instead. The first, The Private Life of an Easter

Ariane Bankes

Utter madness or good fortune

I work at the V&A and walk every day through galleries packed with marvellous things, but the other day I was stopped in my tracks by something unique: eight contemporary illuminated manuscript pages, flecked with gold and shimmering with light and colour in their display cases. They are, I discovered, from the Saint John’s Bible, a project of visionary scope and ambition described by the manuscript expert Christopher de Hamel as ‘either utter madness or magnificent good fortune’: a handwritten and illuminated Bible for the 21st century, the first to be made since the invention of printing more than five centuries ago. The four openings on display, from the Book

Saturday

Olivia Glazebrook

Family at war

In a dark corner of the Museum of Natural History in New York there is a diorama of a giant squid caught between the jaws of a whale. It is huge, vivid and quite alarming — two mighty beasts tussling, and never a victor. This is the spectacle which gives this film its curious title: as a young boy, Walt Berkman was taken to see it by his mother but he was too frightened to look, except through his fingers. At 16, he returns and gazes at it head-on. We are in 1980s Brooklyn. The aforementioned Walt (Jesse Eisenberg) and his younger brother, 12-year-old Frank (Owen Kline), are pitched into

Laura Gascoigne

New world orders

This year’s Tate Triennial has been so universally panned it seems cruel to add to the chorus of criticism. Still, it’s fair to ask why it’s so dreadfully dreary — and the answer, I think, is a lack of fantasy. Fantasy, as an ingredient of visual art, has fared badly under modernism and postmodernism. Somewhere along the line, art’s original raison d’

Andrew Lambirth

Taking shape

The Serpentine Gallery is a pleasure to visit, which makes it all the more frustrating that its exhibition programme in recent years has been so dominated by the modish and ephemeral. Thankfully, from time to time, an exhibition of real worth manages to squeeze past the art censors. American painters seem to have fared better recently than the British, with memorable shows by Brice Marden (2000), Dan Flavin (2001), Cy Twombly (2004) and now Ellsworth Kelly. Kelly is billed as one of the greatest living artists, and was last shown in this country in any depth when his 1997 retrospective came to the Tate. This show features just 18 new

Simon Hoggart

Real life

Like everyone else I loved Planet Earth (BBC1, Sunday), which came to only a temporary end this week. The images are fabulous. If the global-warming doomsayers are right, and if in 50 years’ time what’s left of us are living on mountain tops, chewing grey squirrels and watching DVDs powered by lichen, it will be a perfect way of remembering what we have lost. Or rather what we never quite managed to catch in the first place. Where, for example, have you been able to see thermal imaging of kangaroos slobbering on themselves to keep cool? It could be number 983 on our cable box: the Kangaroo Saliva Channel, 7.00

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

‘Enemy of obviousness’

‘Quelle catastrophe.’ Thus Samuel Beckett on hearing that he had won the Nobel Prize in 1969. He would doubtless have been similarly disdainful of the events arranged to mark his centenary, which falls on 13 April. A disregard for fame and success, and even for his followers, was one of Beckett’s artistic hallmarks and it stems from his extraordinarily painful and prolonged emergence as an author. Why care about his reputation or his readers? For half of his life he had none. He was born in 1906, to prosperous Dublin Protestants, and educated at Portora, the same school as Oscar Wilde. He was an all-rounder. A brilliant linguist and a

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

England, my England

The Old Country, an Alan Bennett play that dates back to 1977, covers much the same ground as An Englishman Abroad and A Question of Attribution. The central character is clearly based on one of the Cambridge Spies — in this case, a former Foreign Office official called Hilary, who is rotting away in the Soviet Union while pining for the comforts of home. This figure — the ruling-class dissident overcome with nostalgia for the country he’s betrayed — clearly fascinates Bennett. Does he see a parallel between his experience as a semi-closeted homosexual and the secret life of the Cambridge Spies? Or is this figure simply a handy way

Michael Tanner

Stark vision

English Touring Opera’s spring tour reached Cambridge the week after the undergraduates left for the Easter vacation, and, though I realise that enthusiasm for opera among students is fairly uncommon, I think there would have been enough curious ones to make the Arts Theatre less bleakly empty than it was for the second performance of Janacek’s great Jenufa, which, together with Tosca, is being taken to 16 locations over a couple of months. Notwithstanding the rows of unoccupied seats, the performance was of the no-holds-barred kind that the work demands, but that must be quite difficult to deliver to order. It was oddly under-directed by the company’s general director James

Andrew Lambirth

Spiritual journey

There has been a certain amount of controversy about this exhibition, the first Michelangelo show at the British Museum for 30 years. The exhibits are drawn almost entirely from the collections of three museums — the Teylers in Haarlem (where the exhibition was shown last year), the Ashmolean in Oxford and the BM itself. These are three of the greatest repositories of Michelangelo’s drawings, but over-reliance on them does exclude, for instance, the remarkable presentation drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor. The exhibition has also been attacked on the grounds of authenticity. As the Daily Telegraph’s art critic Richard Dorment points out, ‘Only three of the 80 or so

Ursula Buchan

Lessons from abroad

British gardeners are often accused of being parochial, and we rarely make much attempt to defend ourselves against the charge. We think it is probably true but wonder what anyone expects, considering the advantages of climate, soil and geography we enjoy and how beautiful our gardens can be as a result. It is scarcely surprising if we rarely see much reason to raise our eyes above, and beyond, the horizon. We can rely on nearly 5,000 gardens opening their gates to us, for charity or profit, at least once a year, not to mention our own gardens to enjoy each day. Who can blame us, we say, if we lack

Saturday

Andrew Lambirth

Bath time | 25 March 2006

Three fine exhibitions are currently gracing the public galleries of Bath, and even though the new spa is shamefully late in opening, art-lovers are spoilt for choice. In fact, these shows are well worth a day trip from London if you live in town. Bath is a relatively easy hour-and-a-half’s journey from Paddington, and the rewards are considerable. Apart from the distinguished beauty of the city itself, all mellow Bath stone rising in proud tiers on the surrounding hills, this trio of shows provides an uncommon range of visual stimulation and entertainment. For those interested in the contemporary, the etchings and lithographs of Paula Rego make compulsive viewing, while a