The subtitle ‘Artist, Author, Word and Image in Britain 1800–1920’ sets out the aim of one of those curator-inspired delvings into the vast stock of a great and fairly ancient museum. It repays several hours of study as the devil, as so often, is in the detail. The Fitzwilliam — unlike many other, larger art
You won’t find a grander monument to failed marriage than the Mount, the New England picture-book palace built by Edith Wharton a century ago. Wharton was a house and garden designer first, a novelist second. She wrote The Decoration of Houses in 1897, almost a decade before she embarked on the novels. Belton House in
The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a
Just as embroiderers working in the late 11th century will not have appreciated the achievement that was the Bayeux Tapestry until they stood well back at the finish, so garden writers are usually too caught up with describing the details of individual gardens to consider the overall magnificence of ‘the English garden’. It was not
Before I go on, can I just ask: do any readers share my concern about the scrawny bum on the girl on the new Nokia billboard poster ad? For those of you who haven’t seen it, it shows a naked couple running, carefree, through the surf along a long, empty Atlantic-style beach. The chap’s backside
For a man who was told by Neville Cardus not to bother leaving Australia to find his true voice in Europe, Charles Mackerras has prospered to a degree that must have been unimaginable when he was growing up playing the oboe in Sydney. A knight of the realm, a Companion of Honour, and a recipient
The first thing to be said is how good this exhibition looks upstairs in the main body of the National Gallery, hung in large, well-proportioned rooms, in natural light, rather than in the dungeons of the Sainsbury wing, where most temporary shows have been consigned in recent years. At last common sense has prevailed at
Everyone knows about the magnetism of Paris and New York in the annals of modern art, but Belgian painters such as Van de Velde, Toorop, Van Rysselberghe, Evenepoel, Khnopff, Rops, Magritte, Delvaux and Permeke are remarkably significant. The galleries of satellite cities such as Brussels (now only two and a quarter hours away from London
We were on holiday last week for half- term and, as so often when I have time off, I started to fret. What on earth was I going to write about in ‘Olden but golden’? Mrs Spencer gets very cross about this sort of thing. ‘If that’s all you’ve got to worry about, you can
I was in Zagreb last weekend. The city closes early on Saturday, so I ended up watching television in my hotel. Once you’ve flicked past German stock-market reports and volleyball from Belgrade, there’s not a lot of choice, except one or two English-language cable programmes you would never dream of watching at home. Take CNN’s
‘It’s a potential social menace of the first magnitude,’ declared John Reith, founding father of the BBC, in an interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1967. He was horrified by the way that his single broadcasting station, set up in 1922 by a group of techie engineers who were looking for ways to market their newly
Labelling is an annoying trait. The practice, instigated by some highbrows for their own pleasure, has rapidly spread among dance-goers, generating irritating generalisations. ‘It’s post-modern stuff,’ commented a young thing last Monday at the end of Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s 2006 D’un soir un jour. Whether the comment was intended as praise is difficult to
Right, here is a quiz for you. As I have said, again and again, I’m fed up with doing everything around here and, as no one at The Spectator has offered to help in any way at all, I think it’s only fair that you, the readers, do some of the work. Ready? Let’s go,
‘Late Art’ has nowadays become a weary cliché: the notion of a closing vision — summatory, transcendent, prophesying future or making retrospective farewell — is too truistic to go much beyond the obvious facts of any case. Let’s try ‘Early Art’. It implies a quality of freshness, juvenescence, stretching the muscles, rejoicing (often pugnacious) in
It is a tribute to various things, primarily to Janacek’s genius, that the new production of Jenufa by ENO is a triumph, an overwhelming experience, despite having some fundamental weaknesses. It is of the essence of the work that it takes place in a tightly knit, highly structured and small community, and that there is
The word ‘flâneur’ — from the French ‘flâner’, to stroll — is enjoying a comeback among a new generation of artists attracted to the idea that art is more about looking than doing. It was Baudelaire who first used it to describe the modern artist with his finger on the urban pulse — a ‘botanist
‘Hello, anybody here?’ The gate into Antony Gormley’s studio had slid mysteriously open as I approached, but there was no one behind it — just a courtyard, a row of trees and two metal figures. ‘Hello, hello?’ I walked across the yard up to a vast warehouse, and peered in through the double doors. Still
What do you find at the world’s great antiques fairs these days? The answer, increasingly, is modern and contemporary art. Few will lament the disappearance of doleful, second-rate period furniture in favour of Art Deco and post-war design, or the introduction of major international art galleries offering the work of 20th-century masters. But as growing
There was a time when Chinese artists walked on eggshells for fear of offending the old men of power in Beijing. Now here, in the China Pavilion that is part of the Liverpool Biennale Fringe (until 26 November), one artist, Weng Peijun (pronounced Weng Fen), is building installations from eggshells. His satirical work ‘The Triumphal
Roger Hilton (1911–75) is one of our greatest abstract painters, an artist associated with the St Ives School (he lived in Cornwall for the last 10 years of his life, and visited regularly for a decade before that) whose work overleaps constraining categories. Abstract yes, but also profoundly figurative — he was one of the