Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Martin Gayford

Seeking closure | 13 August 2015

A while ago, David Hockney mused on a proposal to tax the works of art stored in artists’ studios. ‘You’d only have to say they weren’t finished, and you are the only one who could say if they were,’ he suggested. ‘There’d be nothing they could do.’ This is the state of affairs examined in Unfinished, a thought-provoking little exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery. Once upon a time, it was as clear whether a painter had completed a picture as it was whether the gardener had thoroughly mowed the lawn. Indisputably, Perino del Vaga downed tools for some reason halfway through his ‘Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist’ (1528–37).

Sarah Wardle

Recombobulation

My fiancé has coined a word for Saturday recuperation which describes what much of the world does to allay its tension. From schoolchildren to the orthodox this is a time to reboot, rest, restore and relax, but none of these words quite suit in the way his term translates, acknowledging the week’s angst which the process encapsulates, as we purge the Sturm und Drang. I hear household gods dictate: ‘Thou shalt recombobulate

Kate Chisholm

Words on war

It’s really hard to imagine now a world before 24-hour news, continually and constantly accessible in a never-ending stream of on-the-spot, up-to-the-minute reports. What, then, would it be like to have no news summaries on the quarter-hour, no ‘live’ bulletins, no way of knowing what’s going on at this very moment in Kathmandu, Kabul or Khartoum? In his new three-part series for the World Service, War and Words (Sundays), Jonathan Dimbleby looks back to the late 1920s, when the fledgling BBC was not allowed to broadcast any news item until it had first appeared in print. Newspapers reigned supreme when it came to reliable and up-to-date reportage. The Corporation had

James Walton

Sick and tired

When the link between tobacco and lung cancer was first established in the early 1950s, one obvious question arose: should doctors tell people not to smoke? These days, of course, the answer seems equally obvious — but at the time, medical opinion was divided. According to the highly distinguished Dr Erich Geiringer in a letter to the Lancet, ‘the best advice a doctor can give …to many non-smokers’ was that ‘they should get a pipe and dissolve their …body-destroying frustrations into blue smoke’. Less radically, Sidney Russ, a London University professor, pointed out that if doctors started nagging their patients about smoking, then logically they might as well nag them

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Edinburgh round-up

Propaganda is said to work best when based upon a grain of truth. Ukip! The Musical assumes that most electors are suspicious of the movement and its leaders. And in Edinburgh that may well be the case. The show portrays Nigel Farage as a bewildered twerp with no charisma and little talent for oratory. His first speech at an Essex shopping centre begins, ‘I am not a pretty nationalist, sorry, a petty nationalist.’ He then falls under the influence of a manipulative racist named Godfrey Bloom. I should point out that ‘Bloom’ in this piece refers to the character in the show, not to the retired politician. Bloom is first

Michael Tanner

Watching the clocks

When I saw the first performance of this production of Ravel’s two operas at Glyndebourne three years ago, I thought it was the nearest thing to operatic perfection I had witnessed. But this revival is even finer. Whereas I concluded last time that L’heure espagnole was fundamentally an old-time bore that goes on for far too long — only 50 minutes, but it seemed much longer — this time I found it absorbing from start to finish, though I still think it is no funnier than most of what used to be called dirty jokes. The decisive difference, I think, is the conducting of Robin Ticciati (or was it where

Ismene Brown

Afterthoughts

The blackness that sweeps along the stage behind Sylvie Guillem’s disappearing figure in the Russell Maliphant piece on her farewell tour is an astonishing moment. One flinches. An eclipse has happened and the light has just run away with her. All gone. Michael Hulls’s momentous lighting states Guillem’s intentions as clearly as Elias Benxon’s filmwork in the closing piece, Mats Ek’s Bye, which shows this singular performer quitting her elite world of imagemaking and humbly, nervously, going out to join the masses in the street. After lights out, she intends there to be no legacy. As I had hoped might happen, elements of Guillem’s closing show, unveiled at Sadler’s Wells

Paul Deaton

August

The weather is unseasonably cold, the flat’s floorboards cold. In the garden the courgette flowers but fails to fruit. The tomatoes hang green and heavy, like water bombs. Everywhere the boughs bend, the elder with its black beaded bunches, its little popping mice eyes. The crooked old pear across the street is having a stellar season, lit up like a winter tree with row upon row of olive green light bulbs. No one comes or the boughs are too high. In disgust it is chucking them on the road.

Mark Ford

A Broken Appointment

I opened the envelope: it contained a ticket in my name from London St Pancras to Paris Nord, departing at 9.17 on the 12th of the 12th, a Friday; coach 3 seat 27, non-smoking; and another for returning the following day, at 13 minutes past two, in the afternoon – dans l’après- midi; and a postcard of Pierre Bonnard’s Le bol de lait, and there was just one word on the back — ‘Come’, followed by an ‘x’. Whenever I pour a dish of milk, or dwell on the loop in the ‘C’ of her flowing unfamiliar hand, I can’t help thinking — ‘Oh what a poem — what a

Thursday

Claudia Massie

Life after death

This is not the biggest exhibition at Edinburgh and it will not be the best attended but it may be the most daring. While the main gallery at the Royal Scottish Academy, commandeered as usual for Festival season by the National Galleries of Scotland, hosts a glittering exhibition of David Bailey photographs, the lower galleries offer three small rooms of Jean-Etienne Liotard. Who? You may well ask, because for anyone not schooled at the Courtauld, Liotard is likely to be as obscure as Bailey is recognisable. Drawing the two together in the same building is less of a leap than it might appear, however, for Liotard was also an eminent

Jasper Rees

The Trump doctrine

Were you ever not very nice at school? A bit of a tosspot to others, perhaps. Ever so slightly a jerk now and then and here and there? Were you inclined to take advantage of the weak, the vulnerable, the defenceless and lonely, to tease and wound and give not a single thought to the profound and lasting consequences that may come back to bite you in the posterior decades later? No, neither was I. At least I don’t think I was. Still, The Gift is enough to give you pause. If you are affected by any of the issues in this film, best log on to Friends Reunited, locate

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Chekhov by numbers

Chekhov so dominates 19th-century Russian drama that Turgenev doesn’t get much of a look-in. His best known play, A Month in the Country, was written before Chekhov was born but Patrick Marber’s adaptation, with its new nickname, feels like Chekhov scripted by a Chekhov app. Turgenev’s characters, his atmosphere and his scenarios feel entirely familiar but they lack the tragicomic gestures that give Chekhov his unique appeal. There are no fluffed murders or dodged duelling challenges. No one tries and fails to blow his brains out. We’re on a rural estate where a group of crumbling, damaged sophisticates pootle around falling in love with each other. Every affair is doomed.

James Delingpole James Delingpole

Nuclear overreaction

When I was growing up in the 1970s, my three main fears were: being blown up by the IRA; being eaten by a Jaws-like great white shark; being vaporised by a nuclear bomb. I expect it was the same for most kids of my generation. The first two, obviously, were a function of the Birmingham bombings (et al.) and the Peter Benchley/Steven Spielberg axis of shark terror. And the third was the product of the relentless propagandising of CND as rehearsed faithfully on pretty much every BBC programme going from John Craven’s Newsround to The Archers, Animal Magic and Roobarb and Custard. I don’t actually remember the notorious episode where

Matthew Dennison

Portrait or landscape?

One of the default settings of garden journalists is the adjective ‘painterly’ — applied to careful colour harmonies within a border (or equally considered clashes) and long, swooping vistas. It evokes soft sfumato smudges of pink and green, much as I imagine the interior of the late Queen Mother’s wardrobe must have looked. But it’s also misleading. Among minor inconsistencies of British culture is that, despite the national obsession with gardening and an attachment to landscape painting, the two have failed to find one another. We still have no more than a fitful tradition of garden painting. Granted there have been moments. Under the later Stuarts, a gaggle of Netherlandish

Kate Chisholm

Selective memory

It’s 70 years since the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and yet there has been no rush to commemorate this anniversary. It’s perhaps not surprising. Who would choose to recall the events of 6 August 1945 when the world first witnessed the effects of nuclear warfare? Yet the absence of date-setting, the annual forgetting, makes it appear that we’re much less keen to remember something that might make us feel uncomfortable or discredit us. One exception was on Radio 4 on Monday morning, when, in Under the Mushroom Cloud, Shuntaro Hida, a 98-year-old survivor of Hiroshima, told us frankly and without sentiment his memories of that day in

Stephen Bayley

Zaha Hadid

Zaha Hadid is the most famous woman architect in the world. Would women or, indeed, architecture, be better off without her pushily hard-won, global celebrity? She established her studio in London in 1980. For nearly 14 years Hadid, absurdly, became famous for not having built anything. Her reputation was boosted by a clique of fawning admirers who saw in her uncompromising angles and, later, zoomorphic blobs a fearless repudiation of stuffy tradition. The competition entry for Cardiff Opera House was her celebrated cause. This, with genius, managed to alienate both the left and the right. The former thought it elitist, the latter outrageous. It was, after years of well-publicised struggle,

William Cook

The Long view

On the green edge of Clifton Downs, high above the city, there is a sculpture that encapsulates the strange magic of Richard Long. ‘Boyhood Line’ is a long line of rough white stones, placed along the route of a faint, narrow footpath. When Long was a boy, this was where he used to play. There are children playing here today. They pay no attention to Long’s new artwork. Already ‘Boyhood Line’ has melted into the scenery. Half a century since he rolled a snowball across these Downs, and photographed the wobbly line it left behind, it feels as though Long has come home. Richard Long was born here, in Bristol,

Roy Kelly

Dreams

Early August and not yet half past eight, but all along the dual carriageway more than half the cars have headlights showing in the air from which daylight moves away — the summer, not the hour, being late — the shapely boxes streaming and glowing under the sky that was brighter two weeks ago, and two weeks before at this time, the season turning at the speed it must as the cars race or dawdle, and dark leaks through the porous heavens, and the stars climb to visibility in blue August early dusk, the beautiful headlight beams illuminating what leaves. Children. Dreams.

Thursday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Look at my Fringe

Like everyone performing at the Edinburgh Fringe I’m about to make a lot of mistakes. I’m about to lose a lot of money too. But after ten years covering the festival as a reviewer I’m at least able to predict which errors I can’t avoid blundering into. First, the campaign to attract a crowd will be pointless. This stands to reason. Five or six thousand hopefuls swarm up to Edinburgh each year and they all use the same marketing strategy. Attention-seeking stunts on the Royal Mile. Tiresome afternoons forcing leaflets on unimpressed Americans. Fly-posting after dark, on tiptoe, by torchlight. Desperate texts to friends of friends promising five-for-one discounts. Bravura

Martin Gayford

Watery depths

I learnt to splash about in watercolour at my grandmother’s knee. Or rather, sitting beside her crouched over a pad of thickly ‘toothed’ paper and a Winsor & Newton paintbox on a wind-swept East Anglian seashore. Now, looking back, I see that what she was doing belonged to a tradition. Her predecessors, idols and reference points are to be seen in an admirable small exhibition at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, Watercolour — Elements of nature. This consists of works from the museum’s collection, but is much more full of delightful surprises — even for those who know the Fitzwilliam well — than that description suggests. The reason is that, while