Modernism

Artists, poets and philosophers have not paid much attention to Milton Keynes …although comedians have. This urban experiment has been mocked by lazy satirists who find ambition derisory and concrete cows hilarious. Milton Keynes is 50 this year and it has an honourable place in the history of that ancient chimera, the Ideal City. It was conceived in a decade when the improving influence of the ‘white heat of technology’ could be cited without irony (or embarrassment). In those days, technology involved calorific value, not cold, invisible bytes. The name sounds like an ad-man’s invention. But until 23 January 1967, when the new city was designated, Milton Keynes was an

Here in Munich, in the gallery that Hitler built, this year’s big hit show is a spectacular display of modern art. Postwar: Art Between the Pacific and the Atlantic, 1945–1965 is a massive survey of international modernism, curated with typical Germanic can-do. Talk about ruthless efficiency — even the catalogue weighs several kilograms. All the stars of German modern art are here, from Joseph Beuys to Gerhard Richter, but the most interesting exhibit isn’t in this huge central hall, where Hitler staged his Great German Art shows, it’s in a quiet corner of the gallery, at the end of a deserted corridor, up an empty flight of stairs. Haus der

‘Radical’ is like ‘creative’, a word that has been enfeebled to the point of meaninglessness. Everybody seems to want to be both, but nobody has any clear idea of what might be involved. In the case of this exhibition, radical could refer either to aesthetic or political themes; neither seems quite right. Never mind, ’modernist’ has, with the passage of time, become more firmly anchored. We now know it was a movement in the arts that began in about the 1880s and ended in, very roughly, the 1950s or ’60s. It was a period in which art became preoccupied with form as a determinant — rather than the servant —

Elsie de Wolfe was the pioneer interior designer whose motto was ‘plenty of optimism and white paint’. She banished brown Victoriana from America. And her work on Henry Clay Frick’s private apartments introduced new American money to old French furniture. If only she were with us today. For his first television interview as president-elect, Donald Trump appeared, imperiously, sitting on a golden throne in the style of Louis Quinze. My vision may well have been blurred by circumstances beyond, but I think there were period-incorrect wall and ceiling paintings on classical-allegorical themes in the background. All of this on cantilevered decks behind mirrored glass about 200 metres above Fifth Avenue.

In 1932 Paul Nash posed the question, is it possible to ‘go modern’ and still ‘be British?’ — a conundrum that still perplexes the national consciousness more than 80 years later. It is true that the artist himself answered that query with an emphatic ‘yes’. But, as the fine exhibition at Tate Britain makes clear, his modernism was deeply traditional. The truth is that Nash (1889–1946) was what the author Alexandra Harris has termed a ‘romantic modern’. In other words, his art was a characteristic Anglo-Saxon attempt to have things both ways. Equally typically, he managed to do so — but only some of the time. Nash’s early drawings and

‘At last,’ wrote Patrick Heron, a British painter, in 1956, ‘we can see for ourselves what it is to stand in a very large room hung with very large canvases by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and others.’ Just over 60 years later, we, too, can stand in a series of grand galleries at the Royal Academy’s Abstract Expressionism and see what Heron saw, and much more. He was at the (greatly anticipated) first showing of those fabled American artists in Britain. Since then, they have frequently been exhibited individually, but there has been just one collective show of the movement. Now Pollock, de

Depending on your point de vue, Haussmann’s imperial scheme for Paris created townscape of thrilling regularity or boring uniformity. Whatever; against a backdrop of serene haute-bourgeois perfection, intrusions have always been controversial. Eiffel’s tower of 1889 was attacked by the intellos of the day. Maupassant, Gounod and Dumas fils thought it a hideous construction of riveted tin. Le Corbusier’s unrealised 1925 Plan Voisin, replacing monuments with motorways, was designed as a shock to the system. And the 1973 Tour Montparnasse, central Paris’s only tall building, is, by general agreement, brainless. The Centre Pompidou of 1977 was a test for taste while the 1989 Bastille Opera is grossly ham-fisted, the last

Utopia dons some unlikely guises, crops up in some odd places. On the sea wall a couple in their teens stood clutching their baby and gazing half a mile across the opaque river to where streets run down to the shore: spires and warehouses, inns and gables announced a town. The boy asked me if I knew over there. He said that that was where they wanted to go to, where they wanted to be. There’s so much happening over there. Not like here. Here there were only vast ships, big sheds, cranes, mean houses. And nothing to do. No life. We were between Tilbury Fort and a pub called

On Saturday night, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra makes its first appearance at the BBC Proms under its new music director, the 30-year-old Lithuanian Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla. It’s all a bit sudden. Grazinyte-Tyla only conducted the CBSO for the first time last July, and she’ll have made her debut as official successor to Simon Rattle, Sakari Oramo and Andris Nelsons at Symphony Hall, Birmingham, the previous night. The programme comprises Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and the London premiere of Hans Abrahamsen’s Grawemeyer Award-winning song cycle let me tell you. That’s right, the ‘London premiere’. It says so on the BBC website. Auntie has blessed the venture; the metropolis is poised to give

Woolworth’s spectacles. Pudding-basin haircut, rather sparse. Norfolk jacket. Pyjama cuffs below trouser legs and sleeves. Paints and brushes in an old black perambulator. And a sign propped up on a gravestone: ‘As he is anxious to complete his painting of the churchyard Mr Stanley Spencer would be grateful if visitors would kindly avoid distracting his attention from the work.’ This was Spencer in his Cookham dotage, a picture of wilful eccentricity, painting the church, cottages, meadows and Thames banks he had known since childhood. An odd little fellow, with the emphasis on little. He was 5ft 2in, by his family’s estimation, and better suited to the ambulance service than he

A story John Piper liked to tell — and the one most told about him — is of a morning at Windsor presenting his watercolours of the castle to King George VI and the Queen. She admired his storm-tossed battlements; the King did not. ‘You seem to have had very bad luck with your weather, Mr Piper.’ If this was a criticism of the artist’s gloomy and gothic tendency, it was an unfair one. Mr Piper was very unlucky with his weather. In Caernarvonshire in 1945, on a sketching trip with two small children in tow, it never stopped drizzling. In 1946, on another family sketching holiday in Pentre, his

Next week Frank Auerbach will be honoured by the British art establishment with a one-man show at Tate Britain. It’s a fitting tribute for an artist who’s widely (and quite rightly) regarded as Britain’s greatest living painter. Yet although Auerbach has spent almost all his life in Britain, what’s striking about his paintings is how Germanic they seem. Born in Berlin in 1931, Auerbach was only seven when he came to England (his parents subsequently perished in the Holocaust). By rights, he should stand alongside British artists such as Peter Blake and David Hockney, yet his work feels far closer to German painters like Georg Baselitz or Anselm Kiefer. Auerbach