More from Arts

Forging ahead

‘I am going to work to the best of my ability to the day I die, challenging what’s given to me,’ the American artist David Smith told an interviewer in 1964. Tragically he was killed in a car crash the following year, and one of the most original and inventive of 20th-century sculptors was lost,

Stone jewels

Sheffield seems to be in a constant state of redevelopment. Last time I went, the Millennium Galleries had just opened; now they’re already history, overtaken by newer developments that have turned the walk from the station into a rat maze of roadworks. But the maze is worth negotiating for the reward of Art at the

Picture this

The title of this absorbing, stylishly laid-out exhibition is possibly a misnomer. Extensive it is, but photo-journalism is largely excluded. Thus, except for Henryk Ross’s startling snapshots of a 1940s Polish ghetto and Emmy Andriesse’s stark conspectus of famine-ravaged wartime Amsterdam, plus uneven forays into Berlin or late Soviet Russia, the exhibition touches on politics

Mixed blessing | 11 November 2006

The subtitle ‘Artist, Author, Word and Image in Britain 1800–1920’ sets out the aim of one of those curator-inspired delvings into the vast stock of a great and fairly ancient museum. It repays several hours of study as the devil, as so often, is in the detail. The Fitzwilliam — unlike many other, larger art

Good time twangery

The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a

Best in show

Just as embroiderers working in the late 11th century will not have appreciated the achievement that was the Bayeux Tapestry until they stood well back at the finish, so garden writers are usually too caught up with describing the details of individual gardens to consider the overall magnificence of ‘the English garden’. It was not

James Delingpole

Growing pains

Before I go on, can I just ask: do any readers share my concern about the scrawny bum on the girl on the new Nokia billboard poster ad? For those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows a naked couple running, carefree, through the surf along a long, empty Atlantic-style beach. The chap’s backside

Czech mate

For a man who was told by Neville Cardus not to bother leaving Australia to find his true voice in Europe, Charles Mackerras has prospered to a degree that must have been unimaginable when he was growing up playing the oboe in Sydney. A knight of the realm, a Companion of Honour, and a recipient

Wonderfully mad

Everyone knows about the magnetism of Paris and New York in the annals of modern art, but Belgian painters such as Van de Velde, Toorop, Van Rysselberghe, Evenepoel, Khnopff, Rops, Magritte, Delvaux and Permeke are remarkably significant. The galleries of satellite cities such as Brussels (now only two and a quarter hours away from London

Fresh ears

We were on holiday last week for half- term and, as so often when I have time off, I started to fret. What on earth was I going to write about in ‘Olden but golden’? Mrs Spencer gets very cross about this sort of thing. ‘If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, you can

Royle class

I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s

Reithian values

‘It’s a potential social menace of the first magnitude,’ declared John Reith, founding father of the BBC, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967. He was horrified by the way that his single broadcasting station, set up in 1922 by a group of techie engineers who were looking for ways to market their newly

Multiple choice

Right, here is a quiz for you. As I have said, again and again, I’m fed up with doing everything around here and, as no one at The Spectator has offered to help in any way at all, I think it’s only fair that you, the readers, do some of the work. Ready? Let’s go,

First impressions | 28 October 2006

‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case. Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in

Overwhelmed by Janacek

It is a tribute to various things, primarily to Janacek’s genius, that the new production of Jenufa by ENO is a triumph, an overwhelming experience, despite having some fundamental weaknesses. It is of the essence of the work that it takes place in a tightly knit, highly structured and small community, and that there is

Followers of fashion

The word ‘flâneur’ — from the French ‘flâner’, to stroll — is enjoying a comeback among a new generation of artists attracted to the idea that art is more about looking than doing. It was Baudelaire who first used it to describe the modern artist with his finger on the urban pulse — a ‘botanist

Mary Wakefield

Beyond appearances

‘Hello, anybody here?’ The gate into Antony Gormley’s studio had slid mysteriously open as I approached, but there was no one behind it — just a courtyard, a row of trees and two metal figures. ‘Hello, hello?’ I walked across the yard up to a vast warehouse, and peered in through the double doors. Still