Arts Reviews

Over in Notting Hill, at England & Co., 216 Westbourne Grove, W11 (until 12 June), is a fascinating retrospective of that underrated painter Albert Herbert (born 1925). Herbert studied at the Royal College of Art with the Kitchen Sink painters, Bratby, Middleditch et al., but was less drawn to gritty social realism than to an art altogether more symbolic and concerned with states of mind. (‘Art is not about meanings but feelings,’ he has said.) An early dose of Surrealism was compounded by the influence of Francis Bacon, briefly a tutor at the RCA, and Herbert began to explore his own intensely personal narratives through shared stories, many of them

Poetry and conflict are as old as each other. From war springs suffering and from suffering song. Fourteen months after the invasion of Iraq, the ancient association is as vibrant as ever. According to the Guardian, an anthology entitled 100 Poets Against the War has outstripped the opposition and become the nation’s most frequently borrowed book of poetry. Even now I hold the volume in my hand. And I read with tremulous fascination about its torrid and telling birth-throes. Last year, on the eve of conflict, Laura Bush was favoured with a visitation from Apollo. The god of verse implanted in the First Lady’s mind the bright idea of staging

How do people respond to Rubens these days? Is all that lush flesh so out of fashion that he is of historical interest only? The good people of Lille evidently think not, for a large and ambitious Rubens exhibition has been organised under the special patronage of M. Jacques Chirac to celebrate the fact that this year Lille shares with Genoa the status of European Cultural Capital. Rubens is considered an apt choice for a landmark exhibition, and certainly the sumptuous display at the Palais des Beaux-Arts is impressive. It is also the first major exhibition devoted to Rubens ever to be held in France. It deserves to be a

The Royal Academy’s retrospective exhibition The Art of Philip Guston: 1913–1980 (until 12 April) comprises some 80 paintings and drawings dating from 1930 to 1980, by one of America’s most original 20th-century painters. It’s not easy to look at, being in turn demanding, forbidding, horrific and beautiful, but it’s certainly real, and as an intensely moving human document it deserves to be seen. Guston was born of Russian-Jewish parents in Canada, and moved to America in 1919. When he began to paint in 1927, he was largely self-taught. He worked on government-funded mural projects and absorbed the drawing techniques of the Old Masters. The early work in this exhibition portrays

Andrew Lambirth looks forward to this year’s exhibitions — from El Greco to Ken Kiff The chief thrill of this year’s gallery-going has to be the El Greco exhibition at the National Gallery (11 February to 23 May). It will be the first major showing of his work in this country, and for many the first chance to study his visionary paintings in any depth. Domenikos Theotocopulos (1541–1614), who settled in the Spanish city of Toledo in 1577, was known as ‘the Greek’ because he hailed from Crete, whence he introduced a modern version of the Byzantine style to a shocked and admiring audience. Trained as an icon painter before

Those of us who have been cashing in on the centenary of Evelyn Waugh’s birth, which falls on 28 October, have had a good year. Stephen Fry has won acclaim for his direction of the film based on Waugh’s Vile Bodies, renamed — on orders from the marketing men, I guess — Bright Young Things. Michael Johnston has attracted attention by writing an unauthorised sequel to Brideshead Revisited, which at the behest of the Waugh estate will be available only on the Internet. My own account of adventures with Waugh in Abyssinia during Mussolini’s war in 1935 has sold more copies than I would expect any book of mine to

One of the most amusing broadcast moments of the early 1990s was a radio debate between the painter Patrick Heron and various citizens of St Ives. The subject was the proposal to build a new art gallery in the town. Several angry Cornish voices were to be heard going on about a swimming pool – the alternative project. On the other side, plaintively upholding the cause of Modernist art, were the reedy, patrician tones of the artist (a public-school voice that Heron, a staunch socialist, was very sorry he had). This almost farcical vocal contrast made vivid a continuing disagreement: on the one hand, bread-and-butter ‘community’ schemes; on the other,

One person I have been feeling a little sorry for over the past few days is Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph. His newspaper was a fervent supporter of the war against Iraq. I think we may say that it was motivated entirely by ideological concerns. There was no commercial benefit for the Telegraph in taking an aggressively pro-American line. Indeed, I believe many of its readers may have been disquieted. But the Telegraph never wavered. Before, during and after the war it has offered a strong case for taking on Saddam Hussein. All Mr Moore’s instincts of decency will have been aroused by the suicide of Dr David