Arts Reviews

Art Deco is the style that succeeded Art Nouveau, enjoying a surprisingly long global life, stretching from 1910 to 1939, and from Europe to America, India and Australia. As the curators of this vast exhibition (over 300 exhibits) maintain, Art Deco was ‘arguably’ the most popular style of the 20th century, affecting everything from skyscrapers, night-clubs, cocktail bars and cinemas, to handbags, shoes and letterboxes. It was a style of contradictions, an inter-war hold-all which was modern without being Modernist (though the two fruitfully overlapped, as in the Modernist icon, Lubetkin’s Highpoint One building in Highgate), frivolous in some manifestations, austere in others, hand-crafted yet industrially moulded and mass-produced, universal

I had the strangest experience at the ballet in Dresden: all perfectly pretty onstage, the company well schooled but I couldn’t believe the orchestra. I’ve never heard a ballet orchestra playing with such love for the music – beautiful phrasing, elegantly balanced winds, seamless ensemble, the right notes all the time, in tune…I had to pinch myself. Of course, this was no ordinary ballet band; at the Semper Oper in Dresden, the Staatskapelle, with a 455-year-old reputation to guard, has the longest record of continuous work of any bunch of musicians. The orchestra did first performances for Wagner and Weber, nine premieres for Richard Strauss, his dream team. It was

Barbara Hepworth died in a fire in her St Ives home in 1975 and, although her reputation has not diminished since then, it has hardly risen. Rather, perhaps, it has spread, at least among visitors to her studio and garden in St Ives, where she lived the last 26 years of her life, or to Wakefield, where she was born in 1903 and near where her nine-piece group ‘The Family of Man’ stands magisterially on a grass slope in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. She was much honoured in her lifetime and much relished the recognition, since she was always very conscious of her status as the first internationally famous woman

If faith can be said to have fashions, then it has been worn loosely for several seasons. The Christian belief that underlies the great religious paintings of the Renaissance is for many people an alien concept: it can appear, to modern eyes, too structured, too certain, too sentimental. At this time of year in particular, surrounded by painted-by-the-yard Nativities, the faith that brought them into being seems as distant as the age in which they were created. The German painter Caspar David Friedrich, 1774-1840, is perhaps a type of artist more suited to our times. His Christianity is not insistent but comes wrapped in another – more widely practiced –

The big play at Edinburgh this year – the one with Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon in it – was The Guys, a heartfelt tribute to the ‘ordinary’ heroes of 11 September. Written by a journalist called Ann Nelson, it tells the story of her encounter with a New York fire captain who asked for her help when he was landed with the task of composing eulogies to the eight men who died under his watch. I didn’t manage to get a ticket to The Guys so I’ve no idea how Nelson handled this assignment, but it sounds like a walk in the park compared to covering the Edinburgh Festival.