Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Tanya Harrod

Surprise tactics

Suddenly the word craft has resonance. While not exactly on everyone’s lips, it has certainly won unexpected allies. Take the fashionable sociologist Richard Sennett. In his book Respect: the Formation of Character in an Age of Inequality (2003) Sennett seizes on what he calls ‘craftwork’ as a defence against a world dominated by audits and assessments in which comparatively few are singled out for recognition. By ‘getting the act right in itself…the craftsman can sustain his or her respect in an unequal world’. But the term is a slippery one. Craft is being embraced by the art world in the form of DIY of the homeliest kind. Grayson Perry’s evening-class

Angela Summerfield

A very British medium

Watercolour, that quintessentially British medium and form of expression, is currently enjoying a revival of interest among contemporary artists and academics alike. Following on from Tate Britain’s riveting Thomas Girtin exhibition and Hockney’s forays into the Nordic and Yorkshire landscapes come two exciting and enchanting shows, a short bus journey between the two. Both offer a rare opportunity to see in London otherwise inaccessible works. At Messum’s, the show of north Yorkshire artists includes small-scale atmospheric watercolours and mixed-media works, of the dales, by Peter Hicks. In Len Tabner’s small- and large-scale works, one can see how the thick handmade paper has been flooded with watercolour to create dramatic tensions,

Andrew Lambirth

Unalloyed delight

André Derain (1880–1954) has a somewhat mixed reputation. He is widely praised for his early paintings, done when he worked alongside Matisse and Vlaminck and they took the art world by the throat with their Fauve extremism, but his later work is largely dismissed. To quote the Yale Dictionary of Art & Artists, it ‘combined traditional modes with modern sketchiness attractive to those who seek academic assurances in new art’. Fairly slighting, but, in some cases at least, justified. Derain’s post-war work was certainly unadventurous, but then he had determined to be the solid classical reactionary. What we need now is a well-chosen retrospective of his entire career to highlight

James Delingpole James Delingpole

. . . but make up your own mind

My favourite programmes this week were Cold Steel: Ray Mears’s guide to the knife-fighting techniques of Anders Lassen VC (Channel 4, Monday); Das Reich: From Poland to the Ardennes with 2nd SS Panzer Division (BBC2, Wednesday); Richard Holmes’s Kohima and Imphal: the Untold Story (Channel 4, Thursday); and Götterd

Charles Spencer

Jazz riches

I’m still trying to get on with the blasted novel, over which I have been procrastinating for several years now. Though there are occasional exhilarating hours when it proceeds apace, there are others when I sit at my desk, drinking cold coffee and smoking roll-ups, when I conclude that, on balance and all things considered, I’d rather slash my wrists than try to write another bloody word. Never believe anyone who says they love writing. It’s mostly horrible. After 30 years on the job, I still think I’m going to be found out with every review I write, still feel the terror of what was once the blank piece of

John Spurling

Uneasy encounters

Now that Georgia is independent again — it was annexed by Russia in 1801 and broke free from the Soviet Union in 1990 — it is keen to reassert its identity and encourage visitors. But there is a PR problem with its three best-known celebrities: in ancient times the murderous Medea and in modern times Stalin and his hatchet-man Lavrenti Beria. On a recent trip organised by the Georgian Department of Tourism, with a direct flight with BMED from Heathrow, I and three other British journalists were driven to and from an ancient cave city, passing through the town of Gori. Were we not going to stop in the birthplace

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Escapism at its best

More than a year since its re-emergence from oblivion, Frederick Ashton’s Sylvia keeps eliciting thunderous ovations. Not surprisingly, one might add. The restored three-acter is not just a shimmering tribute to Ashton’s genius; it is sheer fun, too. Indeed, ‘fun’ more than ‘artistic pleasure’ is what should be expected, for Sylvia is not one of those monoliths of ballet culture we normally attend in religious awe and contemplation. Originally created in 1876 in Paris, the work mirrored the crisis that underscored French choreography at that time. Little had survived of the golden epoch of the French Romantic ballet, and French theatre dance of the post Franco–Prussian war period suffered greatly

Mark Steyn

Missing Magic

Formula gets a bum rap from critics, but I’m rather partial to it myself. In the Bond movies, it’s pretty much the best bits — take out the flirting with Moneypenny, Q going ‘Pay attention, 007’, Shirley Bassey bellowing the theme song over silhouettes of dolly birds gyrating round giant pistols, and what’s left isn’t that interesting. J.K. Rowling’s decision to revive the English school story in supernatural form lent an instant shape to the Harry Potter adventures and, although I’ve never read a word of the books (for the same reason as Julie Burchill refuses to visit America, on the grounds that everybody else already has), I liked the

Michael Tanner

Two out of three

Glyndebourne on Tour has discovered outreach and access, etc. In an attempt, which I desperately hope will be vain, to ingratiate themselves with young audiences, they have conceded, in their mendacious publicity, that ‘traditional’ opera is a matter of fat ladies singing, drawn-out death sequences and the rest of the anti-elitist claptrap, and state that ‘dispelling the myth of these stereotypes has long been a priority for Glyndebourne’. So how do you dispel the myth? Commission an opera which deals with contemporary life, involving back-packers, terrorists, drug-dealing and people-trafficking, and set it to music which could easily be mistaken (by elitists) as an unwelcome resurgence of minimalism, advertise it with

John Spurling

Politics of patronage

‘The state is ruined, but mountains and rivers remain,’ wrote the Chinese poet Du Fu in the 8th century AD during a rebellion that temporarily overthrew the Tang Emperor. Four centuries later, ‘Give us back our mountains and rivers!’ was the slogan of Chinese nationalists after the conquest of northern China by the J

Andrew Lambirth

From horror to the sublime

It was towards 11 o’clock on the 11th that I approached Paul McCarthy’s exhibition. The Two Minutes’ Silence caught up with me on Monument station and was properly observed apart from the distant wailing of a busker in one of the tunnels and the giggling chatter of a couple of youths. But as I walked into the welcoming and well-lit ground-floor space of the Whitechapel Gallery, I wondered what I had let myself in for. In the centre of the room was a group of small sculptures on plinths, mostly in chocolate or faecal brown. Around the walls was a series of large drawings, some with collage elements. The subjects

Michael Vestey

Anything goes

Concern for the English language is one thing but diehard pedantry is another. It seems that Stephen Fry has started shouting at the radio when Radio Four listeners write to or email Feedback to complain about grammatical errors and solecisms they’ve heard on the network. There are certainly more mistakes than there used to be, particularly in news. Fry has a point about absolute pedantry but he gives the impression that for him anything goes — which for someone who speaks and writes impeccably is rather strange. He told the presenter Roger Bolton that ‘language is alive and there are no grammatical rules that make real sense’ and that ‘we

Alan Powers

Regency revival?

W.S. Gilbert’s parody of Oscar Wilde, Reginald Bunthorne, wanted to make a minor scandal with his belief that ‘art stopped short in the cultivated court of the Empress Josephine’. In 1881 he was prophetic, although taste took at least 50 years to catch up. The English equivalent of Empire, the Regency period, has exerted a fascination that peaked in the period 1935–55, and has never completely faded. The Bunthornes of Bloomsbury in the 1980s, as noted by John Martin Robinson and Alexandra Artley in The New Georgian Handbook 20 years ago, were busy swagging their curtains, Egyptianising their cat flaps and faking ormolu in their reclaimed rooming houses. Dr Robinson

Andrew Roberts

Underneath the arches

Andrew Roberts on Feliks Topolski’s dramatic work of art, which is in desperate need of repair Adjacent to the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank under Hungerford Bridge are some Victorian railway arches which house one of the strangest, largest, most dramatic and most moving works of art in London, a painting that is moreover in immediate danger of disintegration and possible loss. Feliks Topolski’s ‘Memoir of the Twentieth Century’ is 600 feet long and between 12 and 20 feet high. Part autobiography, part historical narrative, part tribute, part satirical reproach, it is as enormous a statement on the last century as it is a vast physical entity itself.

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Cardinal crimes

In my view, and I think that of a fair proportion of opera goers, Madam Butterfly occupies a unique position in Puccini’s oeuvre. None of his other operas can seriously be entertained for tragic status, but Butterfly can and should be. Because its idiom is instantly recognisable, it is easy to assimilate it to the other works, perhaps above all to La Bohème. And then the inevitable invocation of sex, sadism and sentimentality happens, and the elements that make Butterfly a tragic masterpiece get overlooked, or sneered at. With a little attention, however, its amused denigrators might note that, though Butterfly is one of Puccini’s ‘little women’, she is much

Andrew Lambirth

Master of reverie

If there’s one exhibition Tate Modern has mounted which needed the attentions of a sympathetic designer it’s this one. Never have such vibrant paintings begun to seem so dull, displayed to disadvantage on the drab, no-colour walls of the unsympathetic boxes of the temporary exhibition galleries on Level 4. There’s something intrinsically disheartening about the proportions of these rooms: they don’t encourage study or celebration, and their spaces seem oppressive to the extent of being claustrophobic. For a moment, as the visitor steps into the first room to discover jungle-patterned walls, there is hope that this exhibition — so potentially full of a wild richness — will bring these dreary

Tom Rosenthal

Shipwreck of a genius

Simeon Solomon ‘has his place, not far from Burne-Jones, in any record of the painting of the 19th century. Had circumstances been kinder to him, or had he been other than himself, he would have been a formidable rival,’ wrote Arthur Symons in 1925. This Birmingham exhibition is the most comprehensive assessment yet of Solomon’s art, more wide-ranging than the last important show, held at the Jewish Museum in Camden Town in 2001 under the title From Prodigy to Outcast. Poor Solomon needs these evocative titles to pull people in because of his relative obscurity. Happily, the Birmingham show is sufficiently large and well curated that while the epithet poor

James Delingpole James Delingpole

More war

Now obviously in the light of last week’s column I did try to find a subject this week which had to do with something other than war. But then I looked in the schedules and saw that there was one documentary on about the Somme and another about the city of Benares, and that was my plan stuffed, basically. I spend much more time reading about the second world war than I do about the first world war and I think this is partly down to what you might call superstitious empathy. What I mean by this is that, whenever I read about real historical lives, I like to identify

Laura Gascoigne

Embracing Western culture

It’s five o’clock on a November evening, and I’m leaning over a balcony watching a pipe band parading in the concourse below. But it’s not the chill of a Scottish autumn I’m feeling, rather the mildness of autumn in Japan — and the pipers are not Scots, but Japanese members of the Tokyo Piping Society welcoming a touring exhibition of French and Scottish 19th-century paintings from the National Galleries of Scotland to the Bunkamura Museum in downtown Shibuya. If you think London is multicultural, you should try Tokyo — the main difference being that, whereas we British rely on others for our multi-culture, the Japanese are happy to do it

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Listen and learn

Michael Tippett’s first opera The Midsummer Marriage is so great that one can afford to admit that it isn’t perfect. He tries to do too many things in it, and so despite its considerable length — three full hours of music in the Royal Opera’s revival of the 1996 production — there is a sense at the end both that it is almost indigestibly rich but also that there are inconsequentialities, even inadvertencies, as with an exciting conversationalist who starts up so many lines of thought that he has to drop some of them. Even so, it is such an invigorating and uplifting work, especially when one thinks of its