Category Archive: ART
Andrei Rublev
(Dir. Andrei Tarkovsky) (1966) The great painter of iconography in medieval Russia is given a splendid, challenging (and long) tribute in this startling chain of magnificently filmed events, the mud and the blood and the tears, the acts of ruin and of creation making a kind of gritty surrealism over seven loosely connected episodes, the kind of picture Dostoevsky might make. Patience is repaid with interest.
Continue Reading →Ultra-kitsch
O tempora, o mores! Tosca’s taking up with fascists in the updated OA production (‘don’t cry for me, Mussolini, the truth is you can’t spoil Tosca…’). Fondation Louis Vuitton opened in Paris last October, described by Jonathan Meades in the Spectator (Xmas 14) as “yet another of Frank Gehry’s exercises in outsize origami.” Yet it would be hard to match, for sheer ugliness, the Centre Georges Pompidou. [Update note: The Times reports (September, 2017) that Richard Rogers, the man responsible for the Pompidou Centre, has criticized interventions by Prince Charles on additions to historic public buildings, calling the Prince “architecturally ignorant…[viewing…
Continue Reading →Dumbing Down Terracini
Sydney Opera House (photo by Diliff)
Every artist has occasion to groan about critics. Often it can amount to, in Verdi’s phrase, ‘stupid criticism, even stupider praise’, or argumentum ad hominem. As Peter Craven observed in last weekend’s The Australian, much online content falls into these categories but in the current context, the artistic director of Opera Australia has taken the bait and been hooked like a bullfrog. Diana Simmonds reports on her site Stage Noise that she was informed: “In response to some of your recent writing about the company, Lyndon [Terracini] asked that you be removed from the media list.” So what was Simmonds’…
Continue Reading →The Elgin Marbles
Image courtesy Andrew Dunn
‘And so this is Christmas and what have we done?’ Have we been friends of the earth and enemies of the people; open to change and closed to knowledge; fighting for peace and appeasing terror? Tu se’ pagliaccio! The squabbles over the Elgin marbles continue. There are many arguments pro and con; some ingenious, some tosh. Legally, you can paraphrase Mr Gutman from the ‘Maltese Falcon’ and say clear title rests with Pheidias, so how can another claim prevail except by right of possession? The only edifying aspect to squabbles over title is that it reveals a hitherto latent love…
Continue Reading →National Gallery of Victoria
December 2014 TVC wandered mainly in the European wing this trip but the floating wooden Japanese village by Takahiro Iwasaki was a highlight, as were hardy perennials ‘The Garden of Love’ by Vivarini (1465-70), with its formal marble fountain bordered by trellised fruits (tomatoes? pomegranates? Triffids?); Jan Brueghel’s ‘Calvary’ (c. 1610) with its blue oils on copper and a harsh landscape with dogs and prurient audience watching the faith-man suffer; a little ‘St Jerome’ (c. 1540) peering into the blue distance in which birds wheel like bomber-planes; Poussin’s ‘The Crossing of the Red Sea’ (1632-4) and its choppy sea and…
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