In 1961 the Venezuelan-American sculptor Marisol Escobar made a startling appearance at the New York artists’ group known as the Club that would set the tone for her unconventional career. The Club was where the alphas of contemporary American art met. Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and their ilk gathered there to take
‘In many ways,’ Georg Baselitz muses, ‘I behaved against the grain of the times I grew up in.’ The era was 1960s Germany; in that context, Baselitz feels he was subversively respectable. ‘For example, I never took any drugs. I have been a very faithful husband, I just wanted to hold on to my wife,
Every ballet company wants a box-office earner. But why Scottish Ballet’s leader Christopher Hampson kept on at David Dawson until he agreed to do a new Swan Lake is difficult to understand given the meh results. Dawson is a polite, undemonstrative choreographer, and his lack of enthusiasm has rather predictably produced an asthenic result. Obviously,
It’s slightly galling, after years of sticking up for Paul McCartney, to read a new biography of the bloke and realise that you don’t, in the end, really like him that much. But that’s how good Philip Norman’s book is — Macca has no agenda, it simply lets you make up your mind. And for
BBC Proms 2016 is about as exciting as my sock drawer. But it’s unclear who exactly is to blame. The new head David Pickard claims only half the stalest socks are his — the rest inherited. The festival enjoys an incredibly privileged position. Some might even say it’s dangerously spoilt. Free from commercial pressures, free
Tamara Rojo programmed three female choreographers for her English National Ballet spring bill because, she said, she had never danced a ballet by a woman, and wanted to see what women would produce. Just the two begged questions here. First, that female choreographers are being stifled by institutionalised sexism in the ballet establishment. Second, that
The feeding frenzy over the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death has reached its peak. Recently we’ve had Shakespeare’s complete works performed through the puppetry of kitchenware. On books pages, you can read about everything from Edward Wilson-Lee’s Shakespeare in Swahililand (surprisingly beguiling) to Simon Andrew Stirling’s Shakespeare’s Bastard: A Life of Sir William Davenant
[audioplayer src=”http://feeds.soundcloud.com/stream/260046943-the-spectator-podcast-obamas-eu-intervention-the-pms.mp3″ title=”Lloyd Evans and Dr Daniel Swift discuss how Shakespeare died” startat=1008] Listen [/audioplayer]How did the Bard kick the bucket? The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death reignites interest in a great literary mystery. All we know for sure is that he was buried on 25 April 1616 in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford, and it’s
Paris Opera Ballet plays hard to get. It doesn’t deign to travel all the way over here, thanks to a combination of exorbitant expense and a languid disdain for the little Britons with their Johnny-come-lately ballet tradition (not even one century old, let alone three and a half). So if the mountain won’t come to
Ballet’s romantic mantra could be summed up by John Keats’s ballad ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, in which a young man remembers his terrible encounter with a supernatural ‘fairy’s child’. Beguiled to sleep with this ravishing fantasy creature, he dreams of a ghostly corps of other chaps similarly beguiled, who warn him that she was
You revisit an old love with wariness. Time’s passed for both of you — sharp edges have been smoothed, and reputations built. But seeing Kaash again last week, Akram Khan’s tremendous debut ensemble work, made when he was 26, revived at Sadler’s Wells now that he is 41 and a world name, I felt the
In 1896, a group of five young Swedish women artists began to meet regularly in order to access mystical zones beyond the confines of mundane everyday reality. Every Friday, they would gather in order to contact the incorporeal beings they called ‘spirit world leaders’ or ‘High Masters’; among these were five named Ananda, Clemens, Esther,
The setting for Il tabarro, the first drama in Puccini’s 1918 triptych of one-act operas, is not the Paris of tourists and honeymooners, nor even the Paris of impoverished poets and painters. On a bend in the Seine a Dutch barge is moored at a soot-blackened wharf. A tableau of stevedores and seamstresses unfreezes. Sirens
That joke about the young bull who tells the old bull, ‘Hey, Dad, see all those cows — let’s run and get one of them,’ and the old one replies, ‘Let’s walk and we can have the lot,’ is of course far too politically incorrect to tell these days. But it did creep into my
Finding St Peter’s is not straightforward. I approach the wrong way, driving up a pot-holed farm track between a golf club and a wood until a fly-tipped sofa blocks my way. Beyond the sofa, behind padlocked security fencing, stands an old stone bridge. Someone has sprayed ‘Go Home’ on the pillar. I prowl through the
Piero della Francesca is today acknowledged as one of the foundational artists of the Renaissance. Aldous Huxley thought his ‘Resurrection’ ‘the best painting in the world’. His compositions marry art and science with cool precision and a sophisticated grasp of perspective — he was, after all, a mathematician. But he was only rediscovered in the
Dear, good, kind, sacrificing Little Nell. Here she is kneeling by a wayside pond, bonnet pushed back, shoes and stockings off, while she rests her blistered feet. She scoops a palm of water with cupped hands and tenderly washes those of her grandfather: her feckless, gambling, on-the-lam grandfather. It is an old Oscar Wilde chestnut,
How could it possibly go wrong? The magnetic, seething Russian star Natalia Osipova playing the tragic woman in John Singer Sargent’s magnetic, enigmatic portrait of Madame X, all alabaster skin, black dress and arrogantly sexy profile. A Mark-Anthony Turnage-commissioned score, a top-prestige Bolshoi co-production, and enough scenery to rebuild Canary Wharf. If only Christopher Wheeldon’s
How much of a compromise does a fashionable choreographer loved by all have to make with his paymasters? When he’s unfashionable, it’s only the Arts Council he has to please. When the world wants a piece of him, he has London’s Sadler’s Wells and the Roundhouse, Grenoble, Paris, Luxembourg, Montreal, Hong Kong, Taipei, Wolfsburg, Brighton,
I’ve seen some people saying that English National Ballet’s Le Corsaire is so out-of-date it’s risible to see it staged in the 21st century. Sex trafficking, men in black with scimitars in Istanbul, pirates trading slaves across the Mediterranean, rich fat men rubbing their jewelled paws over fresh young bodies — pshaw indeed! But I’d
