Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Saturday

Ursula Buchan

Improving the soil

In our garden, there is a two-seater, brick-built privy. It hasn’t been used for 40 years or so, but its presence in the garden still has a direct influence on my gardening. Not only does the present paved path follow the direction of the original rough concrete one which led from house to privy but, more importantly, the soil in the borders close by is freer draining and more friable than that to be found anywhere else in the garden. The effect of the annual cleaning-out of the privy — on a moonlit night in August, I am told — and the spreading of the nightsoil (even the word is

Saturday

Mark Amory

Behaving badly

There has never been a film of The Merchant of Venice before. This is not surprising. Different Shakespeare plays give trouble to different ages: we are not at ease with Measure for Measure, The Taming of the Shrew or The Merchant because we do not share his views on, respectively, chastity, feminism and anti-Semitism. Also, the star part is neither large nor sympathetic. This is very much Michael Radford’s version. The director, whose work includes White Mischief and Il Postino, has adapted and cut, introducing nothing eccentric but successfully injecting a pace and thrust more suited to a film. Also, much can be done with a glance or a gesture

Seamus Sweeney

Virtuous living

Penguin Classics uses details from the landscapes of Caspar David Friedrich to illustrate the covers of some of its Nietzsche volumes (for instance, ‘Riesengebirge’, on display here, features on the cover of its Nietzsche Reader). Walking around this exhibition, one gets the same heady, slightly giddy feeling one gets from reading a lot of the philosopher in one sitting. What seems, on later reflection, slightly hysterical in philosophy works much better as visual art. Heated religiosity, the towering figure of Goethe, nationalist fervour, hatred of Napoleonic domination of Europe, a longing for an imagined mediaeval world of chivalry and heroism — all were part of the cultural mix that led

Laura Gascoigne

Last pearl

In the official account of British 20th-century art, the big names belong to the international players whose universal vision won them a place in the annals of world art. This is understandable. What is harder to explain is the official version’s almost total neglect of those native artists who kept alive, through this century of global change, the peculiarly English tradition founded by Hogarth. Carel Weight, Ruskin Spear, Richard Eurich — names virtually unknown to the general public — all played a part in this unwritten history, as did the David Hockney of A Rake’s Progress before defecting to America. Another key figure was James Fitton (1899–1982), whose reputation is

Andrew Lambirth

Master of invention

The very fact that this exhibition’s subtitle has to explain who Nicholson is stands as a blatant admission of his supposed obscurity. The Academy is surely faint-hearted here — does it underestimate the intelligence of its audience? How many visitors might, without benefit of subtitle, have naturally assumed that Nicholson was an Iranian swordsmith? I have no doubt that a good percentage of the Academy’s core support group will be acquainted with Nicholson’s work or with his secondary role as father of the more-famous Ben. After all, people become Friends of the RA because they’re interested in art, and have some knowledge of that world. As for the rest of

Simon Hoggart

Who dares wins

Two programmes this week made the case that popular music has taken over the tradition of the great classical composers. In Howard Goodall’s Twentieth Century Greats (Channel 4, Saturday) the composer told us that modern ‘serious’ composers had abandoned the Western musical traditions of melody and harmony. By going on their journey to nowhere, they had forfeited their claim to the public taste. In contrast, Lennon and McCartney followed the paths cut by Bach, Beethoven and the rest. No wonder, and I paraphrase, that ‘Sergeant Pepper’ was more popular than Harrison Birtwistle. This was far from the usual dumbed-down, relativist, ‘it’s all a matter of what you like, innit?’ attitude

Peter Phillips

Horses for courses

I wonder how many people are in my position, wanting the BBC to be seen to represent their own special interest, quick to belabour the authorities with their righteous indignation when they feel left out. It is too easy to expect a service which is publicly owned and paid for in effect by us all to play ‘my kind of music’ with the prominence it affords other repertoires, the desired prominence reflecting our private opinion of its worth. Incidentally, I still think that since Josquin was as great a genius as Beethoven he deserves more air-time, but I’ve said this before. Perhaps there are people complaining that the symphonies of

Sheridan Morley

Irish tale

It must have been some time in 1967: I was fresh (well, freshish) out of Oxford and had, rather to my amazement, been invited by Sir No

Russell Chamberlin

Moor pride

The province of Extremadura is as different from the brochure-bright picture of tourist Spain as it is possible to be. Stretched along the Portuguese frontier, it has a sombre, restrained dignity, with mile upon mile of grassland like vast lawns studded with evergreen holm oak and cork trees, each handsome, solemn, monochrome in its private space. And every so often there is a jewel-like city embedded, almost unchanged, in a modern development. It was from here that the most courageous, most speculative, most brutal of all Europe’s nascent imperialists, the conquistadores, set out to find the New World and, having found it, scourged it, plundered it, and brought back the

Saturday

Giannandrea Poesio

Magical touch

Mark Morris’s The Hard Nut occupies a special place in the history of ‘alternative’ versions of The Nutcracker. Created in 1991, it is an outstanding, wittily irreverent and thought-provoking example of choreographic revisitation. Without departing too radically from the familiar narrative of the 1892 ballet classic, Morris moved the action to the mid/late 1960s and adjusted the fairly silly original libretto, creating a tighter link with the E.T.A. Hoffmann story on which it was originally based. Hence a bemusing sequence in which the tale of the Hard Nut and Princess Pirlipat is enacted in Act II to entertain a flu-ridden version of the ballet’s young heroine, Marie. The fairytale within

Mark Amory

The balloon goes up

Enduring Love by Ian McEwan has the most memorable opening of any modern novel. This might be thought to be a virtue but it is more of a problem. It is intensely visual, which again might seem to be helpful but again is not. Every reader, and there were many, carries a vivid version of how it should look and will be irritated by any variation. It is a perfect summer day in the country. Birds twitter, the sun shines on the fields and woods, sheep graze. As the man is opening champagne, the woman actually says, ‘This is bliss.’ Then a hot-air balloon suddenly bumps to the ground, drags,

John Spurling

Rough stuff

The red spot for ‘Sold’ has appeared beside most of Julian Cooper’s mountain paintings at the Art Space Gallery. ‘I’ve always managed to sell work,’ he said in a previous catalogue, ‘since I was a child. That’s the way I was brought up: seeing art not just as a cultural thing, but in practical terms.’ His mother was a sculptor, his father and grandfather painters. Indeed, this dynasty of artists based in the Lake District still does a brisk business in reproductions and postcards of his father’s and grandfather’s landscapes — and some of the originals, too — from the Heaton Cooper Studio in Grasmere. Julian Cooper studied at Goldsmith’s

Mark Glazebrook

Degas Revealed

Once upon a time, before masterpieces cost millions, a museum director could win a modicum of immortality just with his acquisitions policy. Even now, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, has just paid $45 million for a Duccio. Usually, however, in the absence of Napoleon’s sword or Paul Getty’s bank balance, a public gallery director is as likely to achieve success by doing something intelligent with what we, the public, already own. A good start is to reunite preparatory studies with existing holdings by borrowing far and wide from other collections for a specially focused exhibition. Partly thanks to the Lane Bequest and the Courtauld Fund, the National Gallery boasts 11

Stephen Bayley

On the trail of Beauty

In desolate Ventnor on the south coast of the Isle of Wight, alongside ‘antique’ shops selling yellowed and scratched plastic buckets and broken digital clocks, there is a hairdresser with a fascia board that elegiacally proclaims ‘Beauty’. The world’s largest cosmetics business runs a global campaign with the strapline ‘Defining Beauty’ in pursuit of mascara and depilatory cream sales. Meanwhile, popular culture is deeply conflicted on the matter. Fitness cults and sun fetishes suggest near universal yearning for an idealised — and therefore unattainable — human form and brown coloration, but at the same time street culture, with its confrontational raggedness and disorder, its destructured style, its refusal of the

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Clash of egos

A few years ago on a Caribbean island, I tried smoking crack. It tasted absolutely delicious, like toffee bananas, and for about ten minutes I felt quite fantastic. But I still don’t think it’s nearly as stupid or addictive or bad for you as I’m a Celebrity…Get Me Out of Here (ITV1). I promised myself, as I always do, that I wasn’t going to watch it. But during North & South (BBC1, Sunday) — which I like but would probably like more if I weren’t slightly worried about the liberties I gather it has been taking with the novel — I couldn’t resist flicking over every now and again to

Robin Holloway

Glinka tribute

‘His music is minor, of course; but he is not’— thus Stravinsky characterised his compatriot and artistic ancestor Mikhail Glinka, whose bicentenary this year has passed virtually unnoticed: no Life for the Czar at Covent Garden (well suited to such a prevailingly Italianate work); no Russlan and Ludmilla at the Coliseum (well suited because of its fairytale, legendary quality). One delectable Saturday first-half at the Proms could have given Soirées de Madrid and Kamarinskaya, as well as the Valse-fantaisie and the Russlan dances demoted elsewhere to mere fillers, making a more than token tribute to a composer without whom the subsequent growth of Russian music, thence the main trajectory of

Saturday

Michael Tanner

Botched effort

ENO’s Siegfried is not a disaster, but the margin isn’t as large as one might wish. Seeing it hot on the heels of Opera North’s Cos

Mark Amory

Weirdness in Washington

They don’t make ’em like The Manchurian Candidate of 1962 any more. That weird, creepy, paranoid thriller of the Cold War flopped at first, was given retrospective topicality by the assassination of President Kennedy, and became a cult. Though it is, like Citizen Kane, a brilliant film rather than a profound or serious one, those virtues, too, have been ascribed to it. It dealt with an important topic — the ruthless manipulation of power in America then — but it did not deal with it in a convincing way. For years Tina Sinatra (her father Frank had the rights) has been trying to launch an updated remake and she was

John McEwen

Poetic eye

It is not Robert Frank’s fault, but one might think from the hype — ‘arguably the world’s greatest living photographer’, etc. — that he had invented documentary photography. When Humphrey Spender, who did for Mass Observation and Picture Post in the 1930s and 1940s what Frank did for social documentation in the 1950s, was similarly praised, he pointed out that photography had been an instrument of social change since the 1870s. And the photo-journalist’s favourite camera, the 35mm Leica, was invented in 1914. Spender, who at 94 is 14 years Frank’s senior, abandoned photography for painting long ago, but coincidentally also has a photographic show, Moroccan Diary (at the Photographers’