20th century
Adam Sweeting
One can only speculate about the mysterious allure which dictators seem to hold for Jonathan Meades, and perhaps one should keep one's conclusions to oneself to avoid reprisals. Having previously turned his perverse eye and tumultuous vocabulary on Stalin (Joe Building) and Hitler (Jerry Building), Meades arrived perforce at Ben Building, in which (with director/cameraman Frank Hanly) he took a trip around Benito Mussolini and the cultural trappings of fascist Italy.For all his militaristic grandstanding, operatic posturing and enthusiasm for quasi-imperial fancy dress, Mussolini was unusual Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Painted during his first trip to Paris in 1900, Picasso’s Le Moulin de la Galette is an outsider’s view of an exotic and intimidating new world. Men and women are seen as if through some strange distorting lens, their blurred, mask-like faces indistinct but for red-slit mouths and coal-black eyes. We seem to be in the room with them, and yet we are isolated. Even a woman looking out from the edge of the canvas gazes straight past us: if not invisible, we are certainly inconsequential.The painting is a heavily symbolic start to this exhibition, which tells the well-worn but, to all but the Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Last seen at the National Theatre over 10 years ago, Brecht and Weill’s The Threepenny Opera is back in a new adaptation by Simon Stephens. But looking at Rufus Norris’s epic-theatre-lite production – all exposed stage-mechanics and makeshift sets – and listening to Stephens’s brutal but non-committal text, you’d swear it had never been away. There’s no aggressive update, no attempt to reinvent or make relevant, and the result is a clean, cold stab of a show, a theatrical assault every bit as cool and casual as Mack’s own murders.It starts badly. For all that this is a “play with music” Read more ...
Sarah Kent
The second exhibition staged by Damien Hirst in his stunning Newport Street Gallery is of work from his collection by the American artist, Jeff Koons. Hirst was still a student at Goldsmiths when, in 1987, Charles Saatchi showed Koons and other young Americans at his gallery in St John’s Wood. Hirst was blown away by the freshness and ambition of work that took Warhol’s love affair with consumer culture one stage further. This mini-retrospective can be seen, then, as a tribute both to Saatchi and Koons – inspirational figures in the 1980s. A huge, sugar-pink bowl filled with Read more ...
Bill Knight
Asking theartsdesk's theatre photographer to review Photo London is like asking a car mechanic to review the London Motor Show. "Remember the big picture!" I kept telling myself as I tried to deconstruct the lighting of a particular shot or measure the depth of field.And big picture it certainly is. Now in its second year at Somerset House, Photo London aims to be the best photographic fair in the world – "the first photographic fair of the smartphone generation" – with over 80 galleries and 480 artists exhibiting. The exhibitors are a selection of London galleries alongside a range of Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
There’s a beautiful moment at the start of Act II of Anthony Minghella’s Madam Butterfly. Butterfly kneels, leaning forward to kiss Pinkerton, seated in his defiantly Western armchair. A paper screen moves swiftly across our view, and almost before it has passed he is gone, just another evanescent vision in this gorgeous, ephemeral world where cherry blossom no sooner flowers than it fades and falls.Now on its sixth revival, Minghella’s production has lost none of its visual appeal. Quick on its feet, thanks to sets that suggest rather than assert, swiftly reconfigured from moonlit grove to Read more ...
David Nice
It often sounds as though Richard Strauss makes the ascent of his Alpine Symphony in too many layers of clothes. Hopes were that Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic Orchestra would give us a characteristically sinewy, more lightly-clad mountaineer. What we got was something different: a perfect blending of rich textures, an objectivity that left humans more or less out of the natural landcapes, and an often swift expedition that gave space to climaxes.This was the third performance I've heard in a row which shed minutes from the average length of the work in question without seeming Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
An exceptionally wide-ranging exhibition of paintings, sculptures, drawings and lithographs by Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966) commemorates the 50th anniversary of his death. Amidst the flurry of Giacometti exhibitions – the National Portrait Gallery’s Pure Presence last autumn and a huge exhibition at Tate Modern to come next spring – this anthology is unmissable for the different contexts it offers.Giacometti’s close and lifelong working relationship with his brother Diego, the designer whose work has recently come to deserved prominence, is also explored. Throughout their lives, Diego was Read more ...
Florence Hallett
You wouldn't judge a painting on how it would look in your own home, but textiles are different: in fact it is exactly this assessment that counts. A length of fabric laid flat is a half-formed thing: it needs to be cut, stitched and draped before we can appreciate it, and even then it must take its place within an interior, domestic or public, before we can really understand it. Fabrics need – to coin a terrible, but useful expression – to be activated.There are examples of John Piper’s textile designs, like Arundel (1959, issued 1960), that look rather wonderful framed and treated like Read more ...
Sarah Kent
Bertrand Russell’s History of the World is a charming little booklet that carries a chilling message: “Since Adam and Eve ate the apple, man has never refrained from any folly of which he is capable.” A line drawing shows Adam and Eve sharing a neatly sliced apple followed by a comic depiction of medieval warfare. Next comes “The End” printed opposite a photo of a mushroom cloud. The juxtaposition of image and text drives home the point; all the polemics in the world couldn’t make a clearer case for nuclear disarmament. The booklet was published by the Gaberbocchus Press (colophon Read more ...
Graham Fuller
The most radical of the directors who forged a “cinema of resistance” at the BBC in the 1960s, Peter Watkins completed two groundbreaking docudramas there – Culloden (1964) and The War Game (1965) – before the suppression of the second prompted his eventual exile to countries more receptive to his internationalist films and his anti-capitalistic approach to financing and making them.Half a century hasn’t dimmed the seismic power of this pacifist diptych, now handsomely restored and packed with supplements by the British Film Institute for its release in a dual format edition. The antithesis Read more ...
Hugh Pearman
A lot of colour has drained out of world architecture with the unexpected death last week of Dame Zaha Hadid, aged 65. She was a vivid personality who made astonishing buildings, succeeding as an Iraqi-born woman in gaining worldwide renown from her adopted London. Her achievement was remarkable in a profession still dominated by white western males, and she played a considerable part in changing the status quo through talent, determination and character. She was difficult, fierce to the point of being alarming, caustic, funny, hypersensitive, and had a unique personal style Read more ...