‘Everything looks menacing,’ Edward Burra once told the Tate’s director Sir John Rothenstein. ‘I’m always expecting something calamitous to happen.’ This was late in Burra’s career, when his by then well-known and characteristic figure paintings had mostly given way to landscapes and still lifes, though without any diminution in their imaginative power or their peculiar
On the evening of 4 May at Christie’s in New York, a previously unknown, seminal sculpture by Constantin Brancusi, probably the first of his admired ‘Bird in Space’ series produced around 1922–23, was expected to fetch a mighty $8 million– $12 million. In the event, there were at least six serious contenders for the piece,
Could Caravaggio draw? That might seem a startling, even a ridiculous, question, but it expresses a doubt with which I was left by the admittedly magnificent exhibition that is about to close at the National Gallery. It is a concern that has led on to another, even more perplexing. That is, what is good drawing
Tragically, I missed the recent reality TV show in which celebrity love rat (and, weirdly enough, brother of my old riding teacher) James Hewitt was filmed receiving hand relief from a young woman desperate (very, clearly) to win £10,000. Instead I’m going to talk about something if possible even more depressing: Armando Iannucci’s new sitcom
I had intended to devote this article to the subject of artists on film and in particular to a newish archive, the Artists on Film Trust, which was founded seven years ago by Hannah Rothschild and Robert McNab, and affiliated this February to the newly created University of the Arts, London. Under this inelegant umbrella
There has been a lot of tut-tutting about the Royal Opera being ‘bought’ by Lorin Maazel for him to put on his first opera, 1984. I don’t really see why, considering the number of foolish or fairly disgraceful things that it gets up to there anyway. Admittedly, it would be nice for someone visiting London
Leonard McComb (born Glasgow 1930, of Irish parents) is a figurative painter of rare particularity and achievement. He is also a sculptor and his work spans a broad range of utterance: polished bronze, oil on canvas, pastel, pencil and gold leaf on paper (in his affectionate portrait of fellow painter and friend, the late Carel
As a former winner of Britain’s most prestigious award for painters, the John Moores prize (other winners include Hamilton, Hilton, Hockney, Hoyland), a new show by Andrzej Jackowski should not be missed, especially not these notably small but powerful paintings in his latest exhibition at Purdy Hicks. The phrase ‘depth charge’ is used in the
The British have developed a number of garden styles over the centuries but none more unexpected than the ‘woodland garden’. No one in 1800, when the first rhododendrons were arriving in this country, could possibly have predicted that a sizeable number of large country gardens, situated on acid soil in rolling wooded countryside or in
It’s always useful to be reminded of the remarkable stoicism and bravery of the generation of people that lived through the second world war. It’s hard to imagine it being repeated today. I felt it this week listening to Coming Home, a five-part series celebrating the 60th anniversary of VE Day. Charles Wheeler, who in
‘Art for art’s sake,’ sang 10cc in 1976, ‘Money for God’s sake.’ And promptly split in half shortly afterwards. It’s a conundrum every new young band has to grapple with sooner or later. You want creative freedom, of course you do. You want trillions of dollars, of course you do. You want to have your
In painting, as in music and literature, artists whose work in old age is comparable to that of their youth are rare beasts: Titian, who traditionally if implausibly lived to be 99, was one; Goya, who died aged 82, was another. But of neither can it be claimed that they saved their greatest work for
How should opera, and particular operas, be made ‘relevant’? And what kind of relevance, anyway, should they try to achieve? The questions are too big to answer in a brief review, but Birmingham Opera Company’s largely magnificent production of Monteverdi’s Il Ritorno d’Ulisse in Patria heroically attempts to cope with them. Using the highly individual
It is difficult to place oneself in the position of the pioneers of graphic art shown at the Estorick Collection: their extraordinary leaps of the imagination have become the standard vocabulary; the shift from old to new they represent now distant history. Born in the 19th century when 90 per cent of human understanding came
Conwy in north Wales is among the most enchanting of our small towns. It’s like a toy fort, its encircling walls surviving intact until Thomas Telford had to breach them for his bridge. He did it elegantly, even delicately, creating a suspension bridge that actually enhanced the little town. It was for our brutal, automanic
When you are so addicted to writers’ works and feel bereft after finishing all their novels, you become restless and fretful. It happened to me last year with the Aurelio Zen detective novels of Michael Dibdin, as I lamented in The Spectator Diary column. Zen is the Italian policeman who is sent to different parts
The television broadcasts of the late Pope’s funeral and the marriage of Prince Charles, coming as they did on consecutive days, gave the opportunity to compare two different styles of choral singing at their most typical. Of course I am going to go on to say that the British version, as represented on that occasion
Andrew Lambirth on an exhibition by one of the country’s foremost sculptors Forms in Light and Shade, an exhibition of Nigel Hall’s new work at Annely Juda Fine Art (23 Dering Street, W1, until 14 May), confirms him as one of our foremost sculptors, who has received too little official recognition in his country of
ENO’s production of Berg’s Lulu, first mounted three years ago, is one of its outstanding successes. Richard Jones, the director, seems to feel a special affinity with Berg, to judge from his recent and wonderful Wozzeck for WNO. Yet Berg’s two operas couldn’t be more different. Stravinsky complained, as many people have, about the big
It’s quite hard to enjoy Shakespeare’s history plays these days if you have any sympathy for Blair’s decision to throw in Britain’s lot with America in the Iraq war. First, Nicholas Hytner gave us a revisionist version of Henry V in which the young king was portrayed as a shallow glory-seeker willing to embark on