Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Simon Hoggart

Picture perfect

There are weeks when I even feel privileged to be a television critic. You’re vaguely aware that out there somewhere people are watching Celebrity Love Island (though not very many), those dreary Saturday-night dancing contests, and Your 100 Favourite Embarrassing TV Animal Moments on Channel 4. Then along comes a clutch of shows and you realise that there are still a few people in the industry who care about making good television. You want to find out where they live, and go round to give them a great big hug and a box of Black Magic. For example, I expected David Dim-bleby’s A Picture of Britain (BBC1, Sunday) to be

Marcus Berkmann

Station to be cherished

Like every red-blooded male, I do like a gadget, and the latest pointless item of electrical flummery to adorn our absurdly small flat is a digital radio. What a wonderful machine it is. The excellence of the sound quality, the ease of use, and the fact that Radio Two is no longer blotted out by some teenage pirate halfwit broadcasting grimecore out of his bedroom to an audience of eight (all of them actually trying to find Radio Two on the dial) have all justified the purchase, and I now find myself listening to music radio more than I have done for years. Terry Wogan, Ken Bruce, Jeremy Vine, Steve

Alan Powers

Draughtsman of genius

C. R. Cockerell RA (1788–1863) The Professor’s Dream is the title of a small exhibition (until 25 September) in the Tennant Room at the Royal Academy, a relatively new space that links with the John Madejski Fine Rooms, formerly the piano nobile of old Burlington House. Who was this professor, and what was his dream? For an architect of extraordinary ability, Cockerell seems destined to be overlooked, while some of his contemporaries, including Soane and Pugin, have entered the consciousness of the art-loving public. He was a designer and draughtsman of genius, the finest classical architect to work in the Victorian period. He was a bold and successful archaeologist, who

Saturday

Toby Young Toby Young

Pleasures denied

Well, it wasn’t quite the theatrical event of the year I was expecting. Theatre of Blood is an adaptation of the 1973 cult film in which a disgruntled actor murders a group of drama critics and I was hoping that members of the current crop, like the Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, would be instantly recognisable. That way, I could watch them squirm in their seats as their proxies on stage met with a succession of gruesome deaths. Alas, there are no such low pleasures to be had. Funnily enough, the only person on stage who reminded me of a critic was Jim Broadbent, who plays the disgruntled actor Edward Lionheart.

Michael Tanner

Rossini subdued

Glyndebourne began in what is now the traditional manner: high winds and driving rain. This year there was the further discouragement of being kept out of the theatre until 15 minutes after the performance should have begun, which seemed wantonly unprofessional. Then the overture to Rossini’s La Cenerentola began, and we were in whatever kind of paradise it is — a decidedly equivocal one — that Rossini provides. Vladimir Jurowski conducted with sovereign skill throughout, the rhythms gloriously crisp, the actual sounds of the piece often disconcertingly modern, every witty comment from the orchestra pointed but never overstressed. What Jurowski effected in the pit, however, he seemed unable to communicate

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Glimmer of hope

To be honest, I haven’t been watching an awful lot of TV lately. It gets in the way of bedtime reading and an early night. You think you’re safe watching a programme at 9 p.m., which is when all the best ones are on, but that means you can’t start your pre-bed countdown (lights; cat; front and back doors; nocturnal slug-/snail-killing session; dishwasher; bath; teeth; floss; four-year-old-daughter-weeing; semi-supine-lying-down-exercise-because-your-back’s-knackered; lost-book-finding; herbal-sleeping-pill-taking, etc.) till 10 p.m. at the earliest, which means lights out not much before quarter to midnight. Which, if you’re planning on getting up for your 6.30 a.m. swim, isn’t ideal. Or am I getting old? I feel old, certainly,

Saturday

Mark Steyn

Feel the farce

Vengeance is mine, saith the Sith, whith thoundth like Violet Elizabeth Bott. No such luck. Instead, it’s George Lucas, with what he insists is the final film in the Star Wars sextet. My guess is the first film in the new Star Wars septet will be opening circa 2008. Anyway, Revenge of the Sith is, so Lucas assures us, a ‘tragedy’. It might have been wise to have stationed an announcer at every movie house to announce this fact over the PA system since it eluded the audience I saw it with last weekend. When the Sith hits the fan, the fan bursts out laughing. Oh, to be sure, they

Michael Tanner

The more the better

It seems a strange way to celebrate the centenary of Michael Tippett’s birth, as many people have remarked, to have multiple productions of his third opera The Knot Garden, while neglecting the more approachable first two, though the Royal Opera will be mounting The Midsummer Marriage next season. Yet for those who have been to each of the productions of The Knot Garden, the first by Scottish Opera, the second by Music Theatre Wales, and now the third, a one-night ‘concert staging’ at the Barbican, all of them excellent in quite different ways, the work is likely to have grown in stature, and I for one would welcome the chance

Tom Rosenthal

Serious wit

Visiting this large (172 works) retrospective for Max Ernst (1891–1976) at the Metropolitan was in a way a sign of the times. Here was revealed, in all its witty and eccentric glory, the art of the most influential German Dadaist, born in Br

Andrew Lambirth

Outstanding trio

George Rowlett’s new paintings have wonderfully tousled, wind-rucked surfaces, the paint stirred and whipped up in moving emulation of the effects of the elements on water and landscape — his principal subjects. He paints the Thames and the seashore of east Kent; he also records the passage of the seasons on the landscape around Deal where he has a studio. In his latest solo exhibition, the groundfloor gallery of Art Space is dominated by a large and splendid painting called ‘Ramsgate from the Tidal Flats, Pegwell Bay, January’. The pigment is heaped on with spatulas and fingers (Rowlett has given up using brushes) in great joyous horizontal swathes of pink,

Simon Hoggart

Buffeted by unkind fates

The most affecting programme of the week was Lost in La Mancha, a film shown as part of the Storyville series on BBC 2 (Sunday). It was about Terry Gilliam, who used to do the cartoons for Monty Python and who now has a reputation for being a ‘maverick’ director. This means that sometimes he works outside the Hollywood system successfully (Brazil) and sometimes disastrously (The Adventures of Baron Munchausen). He often refers to the catastrophe of Munchausen. We all have events that define our sense of ourselves; how awful it must be when the central incident in your life was a devastating failure. But Gilliam can never do anything

Russell Chamberlain

Sicilian treasure

Throughout a newly affluent Western Europe in the 1960s and 1970s, and under the spur of a technological revolution, people — country people, in particular — began to throw out their artefacts of wood and metal and natural fabric in favour of the exciting new plastic that never wore out and rarely needed cleaning. Newly-weds could have furnished their homes for a pittance from what, in Britain, were known as ‘junk shops’ — if they could face the embarrassment of living with somebody else’s grandmother’s chaise-longue or somebody else’s grandfather’s armchair. Horse and cart gave way to the internal-combustion engine. Children’s table games gathered dust as the family clustered round

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Power play

The distinction between operas and oratorios in Handel’s output is to a large degree an academic affair, depending on such contingencies as whether a work could be staged at a certain point in the ecclesiastical calendar. Glyndebourne showed that Theodora, an oratorio, could be staged with spectacular success, thanks to Peter Sellars’s intermittent genius. A couple of years ago, Welsh National Opera mounted Jephtha, Theodora’s immediate successor, to great acclaim, and that production, by Katie Mitchell, has now reached the Coliseum. If it hasn’t been changed much, I am at a loss to understand why it made such a strong impression in Wales, for it seems to be fundamentally and

Toby Young Toby Young

Miscast playboy

I walked into The Philadelphia Story with a real spring in my step. Admittedly, I’d never seen this play before, but how bad could it be given that the film — surely one of the two or three greatest romantic comedies ever to come out of Hollywood — was so closely based on Philip Barry’s 1939 hit? With Kevin Spacey in the Cary Grant role, Jennifer Ehle playing Tracy Lord and Broadway veteran Jerry Zaks at the helm, it couldn’t fail, could it? Alas, what I’d expected to be a long, tall glass of vintage champagne turned out to be vin ordinaire. The play is much more of an ensemble

Laura Gascoigne

One in a million

If you took a national poll on our greatest watercolourist, Turner would win hands down, Girtin would come second and Cotman might get honourable mention behind TV artists Alwyn Crawshaw and Charles Evans. Cotman’s name means nothing to the general public, and carried so little clout in his own day that his death in 1842 didn’t even rate an obituary in his native Norwich. Yet in Landscape 200, Norwich Castle Museum’s triple bill of watercolour shows celebrating the bicentenary of the Norwich Society of Artists, it is Cotman who comes out on top. John Sell Cotman was born in Norwich in 1782, the son of a barber — the one

John Spurling

Potent venom

‘Everything looks menacing,’ Edward Burra once told the Tate’s director Sir John Rothenstein. ‘I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen.’ This was late in Burra’s career, when his by then well-known and characteristic figure paintings had mostly given way to landscapes and still lifes, though without any diminution in their imaginative power or their peculiar sense of humorous unease. There were still figures in some of them, though they had become more insubstantial. ‘Why,’ asked his friend William Chappell, ‘are you painting transparent people?’ ‘Well,’ said Burra, ‘don’t you find as you get older, you start seeing through everything?’ Like so many of the best British artists, Burra was sui

Susan Moore

Cheap old art

On the evening of 4 May at Christie’s in New York, a previously unknown, seminal sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, probably the first of his admired ‘Bird in Space’ series produced around 1922–23, was expected to fetch a mighty $8 million– $12 million. In the event, there were at least six serious contenders for the piece, and one of them was prepared to pay $27.4 million to capture the sleek, grey-blue marble bird. Unsurprisingly, ‘Oiseau dans l’espace’ set a new auction record for the artist. It also became the most expensive sculpture sold at auction. What does that reveal about the current art market? That blue-chip modern and contemporary art is

Martin Gayford

A certain something

Could Caravaggio draw? That might seem a startling, even a ridiculous, question, but it expresses a doubt with which I was left by the admittedly magnificent exhibition that is about to close at the National Gallery. It is a concern that has led on to another, even more perplexing. That is, what is good drawing anyway? Of course, Caravaggio is now just about everybody’s favourite old master. One of his pictures was casually parodied on last week’s Spectator cover, in the confident expectation that most readers would get the point. For the past few months the crush in front of his paintings in the basement galleries of the Sainsbury Wing

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Bitter truths

Tragically, I missed the recent reality TV show in which celebrity love rat (and, weirdly enough, brother of my old riding teacher) James Hewitt was filmed receiving hand relief from a young woman desperate (very, clearly) to win £10,000. Instead I’m going to talk about something if possible even more depressing: Armando Iannucci’s new sitcom The Thick of It (BBC4, Thursday). What’s depressing isn’t that it’s bad — it’s not: it’s quite brilliant, the new Yes, Minister — but that it dissects with such merciless accuracy the failings of the New Labour project that you find yourself thinking, ‘Phew! Thank God, we’ve finally seen through those charlatans. Imagine how awful

Andrew Lambirth

Getting to know them

I had intended to devote this article to the subject of artists on film and in particular to a newish archive, the Artists on Film Trust, which was founded seven years ago by Hannah Rothschild and Robert McNab, and affiliated this February to the newly created University of the Arts, London. Under this inelegant umbrella (it used to be The London Institute) are huddled most of the capital’s art schools — Camberwell, Central St Martins, Chelsea and the London College of Communication (formerly the London College of Printing) — because university status is an essential means of self-protection and funding in an increasingly aggressive commercial world. Likewise for the Artists