Andrew Lambirth on Tate Britain’s exhibition celebrating our landscape art This summer seems to be developing into a season of British Art — with exhibitions of the quality of Stubbs at the National, Reynolds at the Tate and Sutherland at Dulwich, and now also with A Picture of Britain (until 4 September). This generously mixed
The curtain goes up late in Israel. Performances start at 8.30p.m. or 9p.m. On a Saturday this is considered so early by the partygoers of Tel Aviv that it is dubbed ‘the matinée’. Intervals are often dropped, too. Audiences go in for a short, sharp hit and are then released into the night. We could
Of the Royal Opera’s Verdi productions of recent years, David McVicar’s seems likely to be the most durable. It evokes and sustains an atmosphere which is entirely suited to the particular tinta of the music that pervades this work, a combination of levity and desperation, glamour and sleaziness, ardent love and lechery. The extraordinary set
Collecting art is an addiction. Neither its cost nor its supposed value as an investment has much to do with it. If you are rich you buy expensive art by recognised masters and get advice from experts, but if you are poor you follow your own taste among the lesser or little known and probably
In the first room of the Royal Academy’s Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting — a strangely mixed and muted Impressionist exhibition — a Monet ‘Haystacks’ is flanked by two lively open-air scenes by Sargent, one of them depicting Monet himself at work. This group is obviously intended to set the tone and pace of
I read an interview last week with David McVicar, director of Glyndebourne’s new production of Handel’s Giulio Cesare, in which he stated that he is ‘very intense’. For the span of this production, he seems to have been seized by a ‘very intense’ fit of the giggles, which has led him to a quite hateful
Poor Robin Soans. His new play, Talking to Terrorists, opened just three days before the bombs exploded last week. Most playwrights hope that their work will have ‘some’ contemporary resonance, but not quite that much. Talking to Terrorists is a ‘documentary play’ in which actual terrorists explain why they’ve committed various atrocities. Anyone going to
What is folk art? It is usually defined as being made by ‘the people’ as opposed to by academically trained artists. Its 19th-century admirers liked to emphasise that it was made for love, not money, and was therefore beyond vulgar commodification. It was heartening to think that in Sweden a young lover would carve a
George Stubbs (1724–1806) is best remembered as the dedicated anatomist of the horse, a man who would spend weeks alone in a room with a suspended equine carcass, gradually stripping away the muscles and recording what he learnt. Neither the stench nor the decomposition deterred him, for he was as resolute and methodical as a
Quite the most important programme on TV last week — possibly all year — was Bjorn Lomborg on Environmentalism, part of Channel 5’s excellent Big Ideas series. It was well-argued, punchy, intelligent and persuasive, and it ought to become compulsory viewing in every school in Britain. But, of course, it won’t be for reasons that
When I heard of the London explosions last Thursday — I was rung shortly before leaving to catch a train to London, which I had to abandon — my first thought was, why did it take them so long? We knew the manpower was here, either coming in as bogus asylum-seekers or by using false
Sir Edwin Lutyens reckoned that there will never be great architects or architecture without great patrons, and I rather think the same is true of botanical art. The exhibition presently on show at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, entitled A New Flowering: 1,000 Years of Botanical Art, seems to reinforce the point. Displayed are works
Last Saturday. BBC1 was showing the most exciting women’s Wimbledon tennis final for many years and Sky Sports had what turned out to be a thrilling tied one-day cricket final between England and Australia. On BBC2 you could catch the Live8 concert. In all cases — whatever the loss in atmosphere or the excitement at
I’m confused. Did five-sixths of the world’s population really watch Live8? If so, what did the other sixth think they were doing? Did they ask permission? I and my friends were playing cricket on the day, and during the tea interval, while stuffing cheese and pickle sandwiches into our faces, we naturally and automatically tuned
Andrew Lambirth on the Courtauld’s superb exhibition of work by Gabriele M
I had quite high expectations when the curtain went up on The President of an Empty Room. The writer, Steven Knight, produced the Oscar-nominated screenplay for Dirty Pretty Things and the director, Howard Davies, was responsible for Mourning Becomes Electra, one of my favourite productions of 2003. Nor was I the only one who thought
It’s a good thing that the Royal Opera keeps its revivals of standard Italian repertoire in good shape, considering the many acute disappointments we have had this season from new productions, Italian, German, French. John Copley’s La Bohème was first staged in 1974, but the latest revival, with a fair number of fresh touches added
For the first time since 1990 I decided not to go to Glastonbury this year. It was a purely practical decision: the drug intake needed to get you through those three days is so vast that it wipes you out for the rest of summer and, for a change, I thought it would be interesting
As a landscape painter, Graham Sutherland (1903–80) enjoyed a meteoric rise to fame through the 1930s and 40s, culminating in the Venice Biennale in 1952, a prestigious Tate retrospective in 1953 and the Order of Merit, Britain’s highest award, in 1960. His later years saw success as a portrait-painter to the rich and famous, and
Strange goings-on at the Globe. After a Tempest performed by Mark Rylance as a Reduced Shakespeare skit, we now have Pericles directed by Kathryn Hunter. This is a tricky, strange and fascinating dream-work. The text is so complex and elusive that the obvious approach is to play it straight and let the audience’s imagination fill