Right until the end of his life, Euan Uglow remained one of the most elusive English painters. An intensely private man, known only to a small circle of devoted artists, critics, models, collectors and former students, he disliked promotional exposure and the celebrity cult. His reputation has always been high, but it was largely confined
Water opens with a beautiful little Indian girl sitting on the back of a cart joyously chewing on sugar cane. She has luscious hair, pinchable cheeks, dark eyes, a nose-ring and tinkling silver anklets. (So cute; Madonna would kill for her.) A middle-aged man is on the cart, too, lying on his back and groaning.
Very sadly I couldn’t get hold of Sea of Fire (BBC2, Friday), the (reportedly superb) drama documentary about the destruction of HMS Coventry in the Falklands War, because tapes weren’t available till just before broadcast. But not to worry. I think I can still tell you with some confidence how it went. The first thing
A large portrait of Mark Elder hangs backstage at the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. It’s not a flattering representation; in it the Hallé’s music director looks tired, haggard, old. Interestingly, the picture is positioned so that the conductor doesn’t have to go anywhere near it as he passes through the corridors from his dressing room
How do you react to the news that Kay Hartenstein Saatchi, ex-wife of Charles, the woman who helped to discover (or invent) the original Brit Art brat pack, is putting on a exhibition of London’s best young artists this week? Perhaps your eyes have already begun to widen with excitement? Perhaps you feel a sudden
Futurism was originally an Italian manifestation in art and literature, a cult of speed and movement, triumphantly urban and dynamic, a sort of souped-up Cubism, which lasted from 1909 until its deathblow in the first world war and final dissolution in the 1920s. It was pretty much invented by the poet Filippo Tomasso Marinetti (1876–1944),
An officially commissioned company history: recipe for yawns! Most such hardly amount to more than an exercise in corporate piety with surreptitious window-dressing. But let me ‘declare an interest’ (which I’ll hope to convey and share). Boosey & Hawkes have been my publisher for even longer than I’ve been writing Spectator columns — 32 and
Strange business walking into the Three Sisters at the Barbican. A vast new temporary seating complex has been built over the auditorium, and as you wander along the reverberating walkways you can peer down through the gaps and make out the familiar opulent cushions of the stalls below you, all shadowy and deserted. It’s like
The Glyndebourne season began this year in a striking fashion, with a new production of Verdi’s Macbeth which treats it as a broad comedy — and naturally, from this audience, gets the laughs it is begging for. The production is by Richard Jones, as anyone who has seen one or two of his other operatic
It’s your last chance this afternoon to catch one of the best programmes on Radio Four, guaranteed to come up each week with something a bit different: an unusual voice or opinion or insight. For the last couple of years it’s been infuriatingly easy to miss, broadcast at 5.30 on a Saturday afternoon when you’re
An estimated one in three of the world’s six billion people will watch the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games. How will Britain fare in that global spotlight? Having committed more than £600 million to prepare our athletes and competitors, there’s not much more that the government can do on the haul-of-medals front. The
Sir Peter Blake is much in demand. A popular figure since he rose to fame with his unforgettable design for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album (1967), he has long been a spokesman for his generation and for the arts. His knighthood in 2002 brought a whole host of new requests and obligations, much of it
Having spent a chunk of my life living, mentally, in 1888 with Vincent van Gogh in Arles I find that I still have not completely left that place. The book is published, the paperback is out, my surrogate literary life is in another country and a different time — with John Constable and his wife-to-be
Given his interest in the merging of blue with green, David Cameron would presumably feel at home in the United Arab Emirates while Sharjah’s 8th Biennial is on. The Biennial’s title and theme is Still Life: Art, Ecology and the Politics of Change. I imagine that the first two words refer not only to the
‘It is a compelling moment in the art world,’ says Robin Woodhead, Sotheby’s executive vice president and chief executive, Europe and Asia. ‘There has been a fundamental change in the market worldwide. Growing numbers of people have begun to take an interest in art, and we see continuing effective economies and new emerging markets —
Is the National Theatre a cemetery? Its administrators seem to think so. Last week they decided to cover the Lyttelton fly-tower with a sort of vertical putting green which gives the NT bunker a completely new look: no longer a stone-circle of squatting oblongs and failed turrets laminated with slow-drying cow-dung. It now resembles a
Second Movement: Triple Bill; Angela Gheorghiu; Pelléas et Mélisande Second Movement is a young opera company which gives singers who have graduated from their college but are not yet on the opera house circuit a chance to demonstrate their gifts, and in unusual repertoire. Since standards at Second Movement are evidently very high, it also
There’s a really horrible stage you go through as a writer when you’re working on a new novel, and I’m in the middle of it right now. It’s called the ‘research and planning’ stage and what you do is spend lots of time reading relevant books, watching documentaries, visiting museums, travelling abroad, interviewing interesting people,
You may have caught an extraordinary programme of interviews with Peckham’s Lost on Radio Four a couple of weeks ago. Winifred Robinson (of You and Yours) went to meet some of the teenagers of that notorious south-east London parish, and also their parents. At one point she found herself talking to the father of the
Sometimes you absolutely know, beyond the gentlest breath of a doubt, that you’re not going to like a person; something you’ve heard, or read about them, has tipped you over into a flinty conviction that they’re not your type. I took a preconception of this sort with me to meet the cult film-maker Julien Temple.