Arts Reviews

The good, bad and ugly in arts and exhbitions

Thursday

Laura Gascoigne

Are the British too polite to be any good at surrealism?

The Paris World’s Fair of 1937 was more than a testing ground for artistic innovation; it was a battleground for political ideologies. The Imperial eagle spread its wings over the German Pavilion; the Soviet hammer swung above the Russian Pavilion; and the Spanish Pavilion unveiled Picasso’s shocking monument to the civilian dead of the bombed city of Guernica, raising the clenched fist of the Spanish Republic in the capital of non-interventionist France. Not everyone was convinced by ‘Guernica’ as art. Anthony Blunt in The Spectator commended Picasso’s political gesture but dismissed the painting as ‘the expression of a private brainstorm’. Piqued on the artist’s behalf, the British surrealist Roland Penrose,

Richard Cork

The story of the first painting to sell for over a million pounds

Nothing could have prepared the art world for the astounding moment in 1970 when, at a Christie’s sale on 27 November, the world auction record for a painting smashed through the million-pound barrier for the very first time. It was Velázquez’s portrait of his assistant Juan de Pareja, and in the week leading up to its sale the international press became excited about the possibility that it would beat the previous record of £821,482, paid in 1961. I had recently become the art critic of the Evening Standard, and its enlightened editor, Charles Wintour, asked me to write a special article about this Velázquez portrait. Propped up on a chair

Damian Thompson Damian Thompson

No one in the Bible has been as elaborately misrepresented as Mary Magdalene

How would the real Mary Magdalene have reacted to her posthumous reputation? Not very kindly, one suspects. Our only historical source, the New Testament, does not even hint that she was a prostitute, and she’s unlikely to have been placated by Christians telling her: ‘It’s OK, we think you were a reformed whore.’ No one in the Bible has been so elaborately misrepresented. In addition to not being an ex-prostitute, Mary of Magdala was not Mary of Bethany, the sister of Martha and Lazarus, who anoints the feet of Jesus with ‘about a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume’ and then wipes it up with her hair. Nor was

Penelope Houston

The Spectator’s original review of The Graduate, directed by Mike Nichols

This review first appeared in The Spectator on 15 August 1968. In the United States The Graduate is already as much a phenomenon as a film. Critics have been treating it as an essential communiqué from the war between the generations; box- office takings are climbing towards the ultimate heights occupied by Julie Andrews and The Sound of Music; across the campuses they seem to have stopped identifying with Clyde Barrow and to be claiming as their own Benjamin Braddock, little Yankee brother of the Morgan who was a suitable case for treatment. Actually, though The Graduate is utterly unlike Bonnie and Clyde as a film, it is perhaps not

Polly Walshe

The Imagined Day

The imagined day includes sunshine and shopping And people saying Yes and being on my side. There’ll also be traffic and occasional drizzle So I know I haven’t died.

Kate Chisholm

Why radio is a surprisingly good medium for talking about art

You might think it a fool’s errand to attempt programmes about art on the wireless. How can you talk about pictures or sculptures or any other visual form without being able to see them? But features on artists and their work can have a surprising resonance on radio precisely because without any images the programme-makers and their listeners are forced to work harder, and to look beyond the canvas to the back story, the purpose of a self-portrait, a seascape, a domestic interior. You could say that’s why the great film Mr Turner lacks a certain meaning. The visuals are stunning but the dialogue disappoints. At the same time radio

Deborah Ross

Just because The Homesman has a few women in it doesn’t make it a ‘feminist western’

The Homesman, which stars Hilary Swank and Tommy Lee Jones and is set in the Nebraska territory in the 1850s, is being sold as ‘a feminist Western’, which is a bit rich. This is not a bad film. It’s modestly entertaining, in its way. And it does portray the harshness of life for the early women settlers. But feminist? When, at around the midway mark, it goes all John Wayne on us? ‘Oh please, don’t go all John Wayne on us,’ I begged the film. ‘Please be more interesting than that.’ But it was determined. And I suppose the clue was in the title all along. This is not, ultimately,

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

Norman Mailer’s wife comes out of the shadows

‘It’s not as bad as I thought it would be,’ said Norman Mailer to his wife, Norris Church, after reading the first chapters of a novel she wrote in the 1970s. It took her decades to recover from this accolade and the book remained unpublished until 2000. Here’s a two-handed drama she drafted in the 1980s. The setting is a New York strip joint. A social anthropologist finds a girl in a booth and hires her to describe her daily life. He feeds her banknotes through a slot, like a zoo-keeper giving peanuts to a caged marmoset, and she prattles away at him earning a dollar every 60 seconds. She

James Walton

Jaw-dropping confessions of a very un-PC Plod

There can’t have been many people who watched Confessions of a Copper (Channel 4, Wednesday) with a growing sense of pride. Among those who did, though, will presumably have been the creators of Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes — because, in its frequently hair-raising way, the programme confirmed how well they did their research into old-school policing. Of the seven ex-officers interviewed, the most old-school of the lot was probably Ken German (sample quote: ‘We all have a view on political correctness: it’s bollocks’), who began by explaining in full the admission procedure that he’d gone through to join the force — he was told to bend over

Mark Irving

Why are students of curation being taught to ignore the public and be suspicious of enterprise?

The world exists and then it disappears, piece by piece, the gaps widening until one age is replaced by another, leaving only fragments of the past. With luck, these pass through the hands of curious collectors dedicated to bridging the gaps formed by the desecrations of time, before reaching a terminus point in a museum as votive offerings on the altar of culture. And that’s where it so often goes wrong. Charged with the care and conservation of these precious fragments, curators can all too easily become anxious hoarders of knowledge instead of agile communicators serving a synaptic function between object and audience. Curating as an art of defence —

Stephen Bayley

The reopened V&A Cast Courts are a fabulous spectacle of Victorian theft and reverence

The great municipal museums are products of the 19th-century imagination, evidence of lofty ambitions and cringe-making limitations. They are exact contemporaries of department stores: the whole world acquired, catalogued, labelled, displayed and inspected. Only at the moment of consumer interaction do they differ. In a department store, everything is for sale. In a museum, everything is for edification. The V&A is the most complete example. From the beginning it had populist and didactic intentions: collecting photographs began in the 1850s. There was a campaigning instinct: its exhibitions worked as Victorian social media, encouraging the public and rebuking manufacturers on questions of ‘taste’. And the magnificent Cast Courts were a database

Wednesday

Ismene Brown

English National Ballet’s star ballerina infuriates fans

Which would you rather dance in: Milton Keynes or Moscow’s Bolshoi? It’s that age-old dilemma for a star ballerina like Alina Cojocaru, who last week decided not to fulfil a matinee performance with English National Ballet in Bucks in order to fly to Russia to save a Bolshoi show. It left fans fuming. The Bolshoi are presently fielding La Dame aux camélias by the distinguished American choreographer John Neumeier, from which their ballerina Olga Smirnova had to withdraw because of injury. No other dancer, it is said, were available in Moscow to cover. The tiny, sweet-faced Cojocaru is one of Neumeier’s favourites. ENB’s star freed herself from her scheduled Swan

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Why Paddington is anti-Ukip propaganda

Well, I’ve just been to see the new Paddington film – the one Colin Firth bowed out of on account of not feeling up to being the voice of the most famous bear in literature, not including Winnie the Pooh. And yep, there were marmalade sandwiches at the launch. Two things. One, it’s nothing like the book, apart from a couple of episodes. In the original, Mr Brown spots Paddington among the bicycles and both he and Mrs B are willing to take him on. In this version, Mr Brown, as played by Hugh Bonneville, is an ol’ curmudgeon, a risk assessor who regards bears as trouble and this one

Elle Jay Smith

Like everyone else, I want to think Bob Geldof’s awful – but I can’t

Band Aid 30 is officially the fastest selling single of 2014. Yet this attempt by successful musicians to heal Africa through song has not met with universal cheer. Instead, a fickle and febrile debate has raged over whether this is something to be approved of. Unless you subscribe to the ‘primacy of celebrity-hating’ school of foreign policy, approval should be bestowed. As soon as news broke that Band Aid was reforming to raise funds for ebola victims, the instinct was to deride. The Guardian posted a comment piece slamming it as a condescending and reductive portrayal of Africa. Nick Dearden, director of the World Development movement, feared that Band Aid

Tuesday

Digby Warde-Aldam

Damon Albarn at the Royal Albert Hall: I’m sorry to say he killed it

You can’t help but want to hate Damon Albarn. While he may not be the most irritating of the Britpop survivors, (as long as fellow Blur-ite Alex James is still droning on about cheese, there’s no competition) he’s a convincing candidate for second place. He spent the 90s as a pop idol, singing chirpy Small Faces rip-offs and gnomic industrial rock. There were some great songs, but most of it sounds dated, lost to a cutesy strain of that most meaningless catchall – quintessential Englishness. Then around the turn of the century he decided to become a sort of proto-hipster renaissance man, a Jonathan Miller figure for fortysomething men who

Monday

Elle Jay Smith

Newsnight’s arts coverage has descended into a string of fawning advertorials

Newsnight‘s decision to interview misogynist comedian Daniel ‘Dapper Laughs’ O’Reilly has been slammed as a cynical ratings grab, a descent even from the depths plumbed by devoting 15 minutes to Russell Brand’s latest booky-wook. The criticism is misplaced, however. In both interviews, the respective hosts, Emily Maitlis and Evan Davis, dissected their subjects’ work and challenged their arguments. It’s in Newsnight‘s coverage of high culture, not popular culture, where the rot has set in, with a proliferation of glossy advertorials that have no journalistic purpose. In the past six weeks, Newsnight has presented us with the following: an interview with Howard Hodgkin to coincide with his exhibition at the Alan

Sunday

Lloyd Evans Lloyd Evans

When Arnie met Ross

Arnie mania struck the capital last night. A thousand fans crowded into the Lancaster London Hotel to see Schwarzenegger in conversation with Jonathan Ross. He came bounding on stage, in a Club Class business suit, and peered out at us with a glazed, lipless smile. He has dark tufty hair, an ochre tan, and a hint of cruelty about the anvil jawline and the small unflickering eyes. A deferential Ross gave him an effusive welcome. They sat opposite each other, like bores in a Pall Mall club, in matching armchairs upholstered in blood-red velvet. Arnie compels our attention because his career is unparalleled. He began as a bodybuilder which is

Thursday

Ismene Brown

Sylvie Guillem interview: ‘A lot of people hate me. Bon. You can’t please everybody’

If you follow dance or music closely, make them part of your life, you look on certain performers as your daemon. These are the artists who become part of your inner landscape. They act as a tuning fork for your emotions and imagination. And you mark their progress with particular hope that you won’t be disappointed. When the 25-year-old Sylvie Guillem arrived in London in 1989 from Paris Opera Ballet, with a flaming reputation as Rudolf Nureyev’s prodigal daughter, one’s first reaction was wariness. She seemed so flashy in her incredible bodily gifts. In Swan Lake, this Swan Queen showed no modesty in her headlong dives — the legs shot

Martin Gayford

Without a model, Moroni could be stunningly dull. With one, he was peerless…

Giovanni Battista Moroni, wrote Bernard Berenson, was ‘the only mere portrait painter that Italy has ever produced’. Indeed, Berenson continued, warming to his theme, ‘even in later times, and in periods of miserable decline, that country, Mother of the arts, never had a son so uninventive, nay, so palsied, directly the model failed him’. It was a harsh judgment, but the great connoisseur inadvertently managed to put his finger on exactly what was so marvellous about his victim. A splendid exhibition at the Royal Academy triumphantly demonstrates that when Moroni actually did have a model in front of him, he was one of the most remarkable painters of later 16th-century

Ismene Brown

Thomas Ades’s Polaris at Sadler’s Wells: the dance premiere of the year

This has been an extraordinarily exciting fortnight, on and off stage. Premieres in anything from ice-skating to classical ballet, charismatic soloists in flamenco and Indian kathak, the front-page news of Sylvie Guillem’s retirement, and, even more astonishingly, English National Ballet’s announcement of its new Giselle next year by Akram Khan. Consequently I have to short-change some of the highlights (note for next year’s diaries, folks — October is invariably the dance month of the year), including the liberation of ice-skating by the Canadians of Le Patin Libre, who made Alexandra Palace rink feel like a frozen field with their casual pyrotechnics (ice-o-technics?). And then there was the compellingly odd flamenco