The good, the bad and the ugly in books, exhibitions, cinema, TV, dance, music, podcasts and theatre.
Numerous research academics have contributed to this highly cogent show celebrating the craftspeople of Ancient Egypt. My pre-teen companion, though a big fan of Egypt, was still slightly hesitant about whether this would be the most interesting angle. It began with a 4,000-year-old stele, or tombstone, on loan from the Louvre, praising the sculptural and
The Two Roberts, Robert MacBryde (1913-66) and Robert Colquhoun (1914-62), are figures of a lost British bohemia. Both born in Ayrshire, they met on their first day at the Glasgow School of Art, becoming lifelong partners and painters. Well-connected in louche literary London, their conversational barbs were recorded by Julian Maclaren-Ross, their jig-dancing antics noted
The room is dark, the lighting deliberately low. At its centre stands a solitary object: a yellow and green earthenware vessel decorated with biblical symbolism. It’s a fireguard – or ‘curfew’ – used to keep households safe as peat fire embers smouldered through the night. Around it is a mocked-up fireplace, conjuring up that liminal
Of all the moronic decisions made by cultural organisations over the past 50 years, probably the most insulting and retrograde is the decision, in 2021, by Unesco to strip Liverpool of its world heritage status. Unesco said the development of the docks amounted to an ‘irreversible loss’. The regeneration of the waterfront, including the building
Taking place every October in Regent’s Park, the Frieze fair is probably the biggest event in London’s art calendar. It is also, as a spectacle, by far the least enjoyable. With works crammed into cubicle-sized booths, and punters battling a crossfire of air kisses and the palpable stress ricocheting around the flimsy partitions, I struggle
In 1982, Pope John Paul II surprised a few people by beatifying Fra Angelico, the 15th-century Dominican friar from near Fiesole. It’s not clear why he put Beato Angelico on the road to sainthood, given that the artist didn’t perform any miracles. And yet, after spending a few hours immersed in his works, which are
When Richard Ovenden of the Bodleian Library wrote to John le Carré asking if the writer would leave it his papers, he got more than he could ever have bargained for. Le Carré not only responded with enthusiasm, explaining that ‘Oxford was Smiley’s spiritual home, as it is mine’, but also sent along 85 boxes
The National Railway Museum is 50 years old, and it’s come over all literary. A quote from Howards End stands at the entrance to the newly refurbished Station Hall: railway termini, proclaims Forster, ‘are our gates to the glorious and the unknown’. T.S. Eliot salutes you on the way out: ‘You are not the same
So, the Turner Prize: where do we start? It’s Britain’s most prestigious art award, one that used to mean something and now attracts little more than indifference. Taking place every year, it grants £25,000 to a winner chosen from four shortlisted artists, all of whom are obliged to display work together either at Tate Britain,
This exhibition will be busy. You’ll shuffle behind fellow pilgrims. But it’ll be worthwhile. It’s a tour de force that tells the story of Marie Antoinette’s 17 years on the throne with detail, focus and flair. There are 34 items here that she owned personally – opulent, carefree objects that resonate with impending disaster. These
In Sunday in the Park with George, Stephen Sondheim catches something of what makes Georges Seurat so brilliant – not just his technical flair, but his engagement with ordinary life. Sondheim has Seurat sing, or rather woof, a little duet between two dogs meeting on the island of La Grande Jatte; later, Sondheim gives Seurat
Asolo exhibition opened at Oxford’s Ashmolean in October 1980 that appeared to mark the belated arrival of a major new painter. ‘For an intelligent artist to paint the familiar, and clearly to enjoy painting it,’ wrote critic and dealer David Carritt in the catalogue, ‘now demands single-mindedness and courage. Jean Jones has both.’ The city’s
August is always a crap month for exhibitions in London. The collectors are elsewhere, the dealers are presumably hot on their heels, and the galleries are filled with makeweight group shows staged to hold the fort until the end of the holidays. This year, however, even events of that kind are thin on the ground:
Jean-François Millet (1814-75). One Room. 14 items. Eight paintings. Six drawings and sketches. Modest, interesting. No masterpieces. The show appeals to the contemporary English preference for the unassuming, the humble, the unpretentious. Take ‘The Wood Sawyers’ (oil on canvas, 1850-2). Two figures are sawing a tree trunk with a long two-man bucking saw. Two thick
If you came to this show accidentally, or as a layperson, it could confirm any prejudices you might have about avant-garde sculpture. Pretentious, ugly and resorting to kink. Those pendulous string bags, that enormous turd – gimme a break. Except that would be a mistake. Because the work here is the real thing: the 1960s
Ditchling in East Sussex is a small, picturesque village with all the trappings: medieval church, half-timbered house, tea shops, a common, intrusive new housing developments down the road, a good walk from the nearest train station and the Downs on its doorstep. But the resonance of the place owes much to the remarkable artistic activity
Last month, I got the train down to Margate to interview the Egyptian-Armenian artist Anna Boghiguian (b. 1946), whose exhibition The Sunken Boat: A glimpse into past histories was about to open at the Turner Contemporary. Long story short, the conversation did not go well: Anna reacted to my questions with some irritation, swatting them
This show was largely panned in the papers when it opened in April, with critics calling it ‘awkward and snarky’, applying that sturdy English put-down ‘arch’, and generally carping at ‘rich insider’ Sir Grayson Perry for posing as an outsider artist. Word-of-mouth reviews were completely different, however, almost as if gallery-goers, free from the necessity
Slowly the canvas was unfurled across the concrete floor of a warehouse on an industrial estate in Suffolk. On and on it went, a flurry of paint marks and brush strokes, yellow, green and occasionally blue, like a cornfield at harvest time. By the time we got to the end some seven metres of it
Unesco doesn’t hand out world-heritage status to absences, but if it did, there would be memorials all over the western world to our genius in erasing death from our consciousness. We have airbrushed the deceased from our lives with a ruthless efficiency, banishing them to suburban cemeteries where they can spend eternity unvisited. Burials and
Through the grey downbeat years of postwar austerity, we nursed cheering fantasies of a life more lavishly colourful and hedonistic. Oliver Messel fed them: born into Edwardian privilege, the epitome of well-connected metropolitan sophistication, he doubled up as interior decorator and stage designer, creating in both roles a unique style of rococo elegance and light-touch
If you’ve been reading the more excitable pages of the arts press lately, you might be aware that the London gallery scene is having one of its periodic ‘moments’. A fair few spaces, mostly concentrated around Fitzrovia, have sprouted up since the pandemic, notable for their bacchanalian openings and tantalisingly gnomic Instagram posts. Their online
The most-watched TV programme in human history isn’t the Moon landings, and it isn’t M*A*S*H; chances are it’s Ramayan, a magnificently cheesy 1980s adaptation of India’s national epic. The show has a status in India that’s hard to overstate. Something like 80 per cent of the entire population watched its original run; in rural areas
‘Remember, Roy, white flowers are the only chic ones.’ So Cecil Beaton remarked to Roy Strong, possibly as a mild put-down to the young curator. But it was a curious put-down to make because Beaton broke his own rule happily, buying mountainous armfuls of speckled yellow, pink and scarlet carnations at Covent Garden and longing
In last week’s Spectator, Richard Morris lamented museum collections languishing in storage, pleading to ‘get these works out’. There’s an alternative solution: bring the public in. V&A East Storehouse, which opened last weekend, was designed by New York architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro to do just that. The museum’s collections were previously holed up in
The Royal Collection Trust has had a rummage in the attic and produced a fascinating show. Displayed in the palatial gallery adjacent to Buckingham Palace, and described on headsets in the reassuring tones of Hugh Bonneville, are public tokens and personal treasures of two generations: Edward VII and Queen Alexandra, and George V and Queen
Much of Venice’s Giardini this year was as boarded up as a British high street. The Israeli pavilion was empty, apparently awaiting refurbishment. (At the 2024 art biennale, the curators had closed it in the face of pro-Palestinian protests, prompting the latter to demand it should be opened, presumably so they could protest its closure.)
A little under a year ago, it emerged that builders working on the redevelopment of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing had discovered an unusual time capsule embedded in a pillar they had been instructed to knock down. It contained a letter signed by Sir John Sainsbury, who, along with his brothers, had thrown the museum
Why is Hiroshige’s work so delightful? While his close predecessor Hokusai has more drama in his draughtsmanship, Hiroshige’s pastoral visions conjure a sense of timeless continuity that appealed to his contemporaries as much as to present-day teens who love the merch. His is a world in which everything has happened before, and will happen again.
