Arts Reviews Archives

Saturday

29 Oct 2005

Light and dark

Mark Morris Dance Group has long been a regular feature of London dance seasons. Still, the power to surprise in Morris’s choreography has not waned. Take, for instance, the first of the two programmes presented last week at Sadler’s Wells, as part of the company’s 25th anniversary tour. Although signature traits informed each work’s choreography, their thematic construction, as well as their content, stood out for being anything but repetitive or monotonous. Morris has a unique way of working with music — any kind of music. His refreshing inventiveness seems to pour straight out of any score, be it a much-revered Baroque creation or the cheesiest pop tune in the

Andrew Lambirth

Moved and disturbed

In 1960, writing a postcard to her friend and mentor Marvin Israel, Diane Arbus (1923–71) worried that she was ghoulish. From an early age her photographs had recorded the marginalised and dispossessed, capturing the imperfections and frailties of humanity. She was a woman with a mission — scrutinising society and chronicling the damaged or eccentric, what she called ‘singular people’. She made square-format photographs of a startling clarity, but, despite her technical brilliance, her vision was dark and bleak. It comes as no surprise to learn that she suffered acutely from the devils of depression and that she committed suicide. The great empathy which informs her image-making in the end

Michael Vestey

Schoolboy favourites

I suppose if I had to name my favourite children’s author it would have to be Richmal Crompton and the William stories, followed not far behind by Anthony Buckeridge and Jennings, and Enid Blyton with the adventures of the famous five. There are numerous others, of course, but I enjoyed reading these three the most when I was a child. Buckeridge, who died last year at the age of 92, was the subject of The Archive Hour: Fossilised Fish Hooks! Jennings at the BBC on Radio Four (Saturday), an affectionate tribute as well as an exploration of Buckeridge’s influence on radio comedy. The presenter Miles Kington said that in returning

Alan Powers

Importance of ornament

The Modern Movement in architecture had scarcely succeeded in abolishing ornament before people began to speculate about how and when it would return. In Britain, the historian Sir John Summerson, as a young journalist, found it hard to believe that architecture would be able to communicate without it beyond the initial period of purification which he and many others believed was a necessary transitional phase. In 1935, the Peter Jones store was fitted with outward-opening bronze casements in its ‘curtain wall’ with only sections of blank wall behind them, and the architects suggested that not only could the walls be repainted periodically in different colours, but also that patterned wallpaper

Robin Holloway

Feels familiar

‘Time of Change: Journey through the Twentieth Century’ is how one of London’s major orchestras heads its publicity for the new season. But it’s impossible not to stifle a yawn of surprise as one reads the proudly marshalled highlights. ‘Mahler’s impressive Symphony 4’ is the earliest (completed 1900); next in time comes Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia (1910), then the suite from Stravinsky’s Pulcinella (1920). Bart

Laura Gascoigne

Voyage of discovery

Laura Gascoigne on the Pompidou Centre’s massive survey of Dada Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism: it’s funny how many names of modern art movements originated as insults on the lips of critics. Not Dada, though. The founders of art’s first anartism were ahead of the game, pre-emptively christening their movement with a silly name designed to put any critic off his stroke. The many derivations since attributed to the word ‘dada’ are missing the point, which is that, as founder Dadaist Tristan Tzara plainly stated, ‘Dada does not mean anything.’ Dada was a nickname given to a war baby born in 1916 at the Café Voltaire in Zurich and brought up by

Saturday

22 Oct 2005

Mark Steyn

Fantasy land

Hollywood’s two biggest animated features of the month both take place in England, or ‘England’ — in the case of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Victorian London; in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a bucolic northern mill town. The latter defers to the reality of contemporary Britain in certain respects (laser security alarms) but is otherwise unchanged from the Fifties. Both films confine any kind of social commentary to the subject of class and both feature the voice of Helena Bonham Carter as lead piece of posh totty — indeed, she plays a lady called Lady Tottington in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while as the eponymous Corpse

Giannandrea Poesio

Loss of sensation

France has long been the cradle of ground-breaking new dance, thanks to a score of provocative performance-makers. It was about time, therefore, that an internationally renowned festival such as Dance Umbrella paid tribute to a country which has produced radical and revitalising choreography over the past three decades. Former enfant terrible of what has been appropriately referred to as the ‘French choreographic avant-garde’, Angelin Preljocaj is one of the leading figures of post-modern choreography. Creations such as Liqueurs de Chair (1988), which explored rather explicitly dark eroticism and sexual perversions, Noces (1989), a vibrant and somewhat violent sexist reading of the 1923 Stravinsky ballet Les Noces, and a fairly controversial

Michael Tanner

Stunning overture

Beethoven’s Fidelio is one of my favourite operas, even a touchstone, but all my most moving experiences of it for a very long time past have been on records, and records of a certain age. The time when we could take its message of heroic hope at its face value seems to have passed, anyway for contemporary directors. My hopes for a concert performance, with no intrusive directorial questioning of the opera’s values, etc., opening the Great Performers series at the Barbican were high, especially since Sir Charles Mackerras is celebrating his 80th birthday on top form, and always conducts operas with fresh vitality. But for the first part of

Laura Gascoigne

Solitary ambition

Also at Ben Uri Gallery, 108a Boundary Road, London NW8, until 19 November Four years ago, the painter Christopher P. Wood was browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Harrogate when he came across something very unusual. Opening one of a series of Victorian Magazines of Art, he discovered that the inside was full of drawings, scrawled over both the text and illustrations. They were obviously not the doodles of a child, but the work of a trained artist — albeit one who had absorbed Picasso’s lesson of relearning how to draw like his younger self. The handwriting was witty and literate, revealing a thorough knowledge of modern art. When Wood

John Spurling

Animal magic

Graham Greene in his ground-breaking essay on Beatrix Potter published in 1933 writes of ‘her great comedies’, her ‘great near-tragedies’ and ‘her Tempest’ (Little Pig Robinson). He calls Peter Rabbit and his cousin Benjamin ‘two epic personalities’ and invokes Dickens, Forster, Cervantes, Rabelais and Henry James as well as Shakespeare. He gets some of his dates wrong, underrates The Tailor of Gloucester, quite unaccountably dismisses The Tale of Mr Jeremy Fisher as a failure, but considers Samuel Whiskers (The Roly-Poly Pudding) her masterpiece, and characteristically revels in her ‘dark period’ and her ‘gallery of scoundrels’, among whom he rather unfairly includes Mrs Tittlemouse’s muddy-footed neighbour, Mr Jackson the toad (‘No

Michael Vestey

Digital watch | 22 October 2005

As we’ve seen in the past week, the full cost of providing services that no one asked for, digital radio and television, will fall on the licence-fee payer, with the BBC demanding annual increases of 2.5 per cent above inflation. It wasn’t entirely obvious in the early days of digital promotion that this was something the government was pushing hard for; the BBC case was based largely on how vital it was that broadcasting should become digital, as this was a superior form of broadcasting to the existing analogue signal, and our lives would be immeasurably improved if we all went digital. Does anyone, apart from the BBC, really believe

James Delingpole

It makes you fat and stupid

I was waiting to go on The Jeremy Vine Show to explain why it was I thought Dave Cameron had done the right thing by evading the drugs question when I got talking to the next guest, an American scientist who has just written a book on the biological effects of TV on the brain. ‘That’s biological,’ he stressed, in case I’d missed the point. ‘Not social.’ What this chap had to say was really quite extraordinary. Of course we all know instinctively that watching TV turns you into a moron. But this chap had the scientific evidence: TV literally makes you fat; it literally makes you stupid; it damages

Ursula Buchan

Late-flowering loves

It is a sign of the times that the Great Autumn Show, which has been staged by the Royal Horticultural Society in London in mid-September since God was a small boy, is moving to a date in early October from next year. Autumn starts later and lasts longer; that’s official. And this at a time when the modern predisposition to restlessness — part affliction, part asset — demands that we no longer treat the autumn, when it does come, as a plodding, ‘putting the garden to bed’ time of year but as a vibrant season, full of colour and life. To underline this, a seminar was held at this September’s

Susan Moore

Special relationship

For the past 20 years or more the auction houses have been doing their utmost to wrest the retail art market out of the hands of the dealers. Few would disagree that they have had considerable success. In taking over Sotheby’s in 1983, the Detroit shopping mall billionaire Alfred Taubman saw what he called ‘a unique marketing opportunity’ in transforming what was essentially an up-market but loss-making wholesale operation — the majority of saleroom buyers were dealers — into a glamorous retail business. The allure of turning a profit by circumventing the dealers was irresistible. And the real beauty of it was that this ‘retail’ business did not require any

Mark Glazebrook

Fitting Tributes

We live in a Post-Modernist age, or so we are told. Within it the legacy of Modernism clings on. The Modern movement in art, of course, based itself on the rejection of many typical 19th-century ideas, values and images. Post-Modernism is pluralistic and capable of accommodating revivals, however. One of the many possible positive readings of Marc Quinn’s ‘Alison Lapper Pregnant’ on the empty plinth in Trafalgar Square is that it is a revival of Neo-Classicism, inspired by the Venus de Milo. The maquette for it is also a revival of Realism by direct casting from the human body — more Madame Tussaud than Michelangelo, perhaps. One school of current

Andrew Lambirth

Portraying the self

This is the season of the self-portrait. At the Royal Academy until 11 December are 150 self-portraits by Edvard Munch (reviewed in this column three weeks ago), the depth of his obsession bordering on sheer tedium. Just opening at the National Portrait Gallery is the first major museum study in this country of the self-portrait, from the Old Masters to now. A most distinguished collection of self-portraits by 20th-century British artists assembled by the writer Ruth Borchard, which has been touring this country and will visit America next year, has now found a permanent home in London. And an exhibition of 30 pictures by Cherry Pickles (born in Bridgend, South

Saturday

15 Oct 2005

Toby Young

Mood swings

One of the hardest things about being a drama critic, at least for me, is that so many plays stubbornly resist categorisation — and Shoot the Crow by the Northern Irish writer Owen McCafferty is a prime example. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? Is it a proper, grown-up piece that wants to be taken seriously or a commercial production designed to put bums on seats? Is it high art or low entertainment? It starts off as a fairly conventional West End comedy. We’re introduced to two pairs of Irish builders, one pair played by Conleth Hill and James Nesbitt, the other by Packy Lee and Jim Norton. The

Giannandrea Poesio

Bewitching sylph

It was with the 1832 ballet La Sylphide that Marie Taglioni acquired international repute and legendary status. Her angel-like, gravity-defying dancing earned her the affectionate appellation ‘Christian’ dancer, which sits somewhat uncomfortably with the mischievous nature of the eponymous role. Stark contradictions, however, were typical of the Romantic era: the idealised woman could be angel and demon, saint and whore, victim and executioner. Thanks to the enlightened vision of the Royal Ballet’s artistic director, Monica Mason, this Romantic work has now re-entered the company’s repertoire 173 years since its creation. And what a splendid addition it is. Based on Auguste Bournonville’s Danish version, the most performed worldwide, this Sylphide is

Kate Chisholm

Umbrellas for peace

Stiletto heels, a baby’s dummy, Spice Girls ephemera and glittering embroidery — the predictable paraphernalia of womanhood is all on show in What Women Want. But the latest exhibition at the enterprising Women’s Library in the East End of London is underpinned by some surprising revelations. So we have a 1972 edition of Spare Rib magazine (which I had thought always prided itself on being a feminist alternative to Good House-keeping) advertising an article by ‘Georgie Best’ on sex. Another case of books, diaries and postcards contains Married Love by Marie Stopes, opened at the title page to reveal that it was first published in 1918 and that it was