Modernism

Thursday

Bruce Anderson

What Quique Dacosta knows that Picasso didn’t

Chefs have a problem. Think of much of the best food you have ever eaten. Caviar, English native oysters, sashimi, foie gras, truffles, jamon iberico, grouse, golden plover, properly hung Scotch beef; Stilton, the great soft cheeses: all have one point in common. They require minimal intervention from the kitchen. With the assistance of one female sous-chef, even I could roast a grouse. The chef would come into his own over pudding, and indeed with Welsh rarebit, but one can understand why this does not provide enough outlet for creativity. There are always the great French bourgeois dishes, which few of us eat often enough. Navarin of lamb, blanquette de

Thursday

Stephen Bayley

The man who gave the world (but not London) the glass skyscraper

Modern Architecture, capitalised thus, is now securely and uncontroversially compartmentalised into art history, its bombast muted, its hard-edge revolutions blurred by debased familiarity. You have been to Catford? You have seen a heroic vision compromised. Modern Architecture is no more threatening than abstract art, although the Swiss-French Le Corbusier retains a heady whiff of the opprobrium which attaches to bogeymen. His rival in stature was the German-American, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a very different designer. With Corb we think of head-butting bravura concrete. With Mies, as he is always known, we think of magnificently refined steel and glass: the beautiful architectural full stop of Hegel’s history. Mies was the

Thursday

Bevis Hillier

A book on Art Deco that’s a work of art in itself — but where’s the Savoy, Claridge’s and the Oxo Tower? 

Over the past 45 years, there have been two distinct and divergent approaches to Art Deco. One of them — which was mine when I wrote the first little book on the subject in 1968 — was to treat the subject as a sociological, as well as artistic, phenomenon. As I wrote then, it was ‘the last of the total styles’, affecting almost everything, from letter-boxes and powder compacts to luxury liners and hotels. With that approach, one shows the dross as well as the gold, and asks such questions as ‘Why did the style become so universal?’ ‘How far did it succeed (with mass production) in coming to terms

Thursday

Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton’s diary: Finding Scrutopia in the Czech Republic

Hay-making was easy this year, and over in good time for a holiday. I am opposed to holidays, having worked all my life to build a sovereign territory from which departure will be a guaranteed disappointment. However, the children have yet to be convinced of the futility of human hopes, and therefore must be taken for a week or so to places that renew their trust in Scrutopia, as the only reliable refuge from an alien world. As always we choose the Czech Republic; and as always it disproves my point. I don’t know what it is about Brno, but I am as home there as I can be anywhere.

Thursday

William Cook

Wandering eye

‘When Matisse dies,’ declared Picasso, ‘Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what colour really is.’ Wandering around this splendid show you can see exactly what he meant. Chagall never used colour for cheap effect, but to convey meaning and emotion. The effect of seeing so many of his works together is almost overwhelming — a symphony hung upon a wall. But these aren’t the romantic paintings of Chagall’s later years, the visions of young lovers floating over seas of flowers. These are the urgent artworks of his youth, made at a time of immense upheaval. By focusing on these early years, to the virtual exclusion of his