The Engine

THE POVERTY OF SILENCE: VILHELM HAMMERSHOI AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY The Danish artist Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) was the sort of technically competent yet uninspired artist who crops up in all kinds of guises throughout history. Normally figures like Hammershoi acquire a quiet celebrity in their own lifetimes, then are quietly forgotten about after they die. Now this happened to Hammershoi. But he has somehow been miraculously resurrected at the RA this summer. Why? The RA's audioguide, the assorted 'experts' gathered there describe Hammershoi's work as 'poetic', 'beautiful', 'mysterious', 'enigmatic'. His works consist of interiors (usually with a single female figure whose back is turned), landscapes and postcard-like representations of Copenhagen and London, his favourite European city. A typical Hammershoi interior has light flooding through windows into a beautiful but empty drawing room. However, the effect of Hammershoi...

Eric Rohmer's new film is a wonderful, light comedy of love, jealousy, loss and lovers re-united, perfect for this season. It seems to follow after the lightest of Shakespeare's comedies, there is a deliberate concatenation of eras and epochs as a Bucolic idyll set in 5th century Gaul is reformulated through the 16th century and then finally to our own time. The story of Astrea and Celadon is fitted exactly to the 16th century, the era of the High Renaissance, because of the intensity of its idealisation of 'nature' (as against culture) and the themes of jealousy, loss echoed in Celadon's death and subsequent posing as a woman. Celadon then falls in love again with Astrea, who suffers the jealousy of the other shepherdesses and her own sexual ambiguity in falling in love ardently with another 'woman'. There are some beautiful touches, such as Rohmer's handling of Astrea's friends, the gentle but wonderful comic dialogue and a sudden reinvention o...

British Orientalist Painting, Tate Britain, London  Perhaps moving on from Edward Said's groundbreaking study 'Orientalism' this is a full-scale attempt to come to terms with, interpret, explain, account for Britain's continuing involvement in Middle East affairs from the seventeenth-century onwards. The Renaissance period is indeed the exhibition's starting point with an already evolved and evolving interface between Britain and the Ottoman Empire. It has to be remembered that the West developed in tandem with the East and didn't really begin to accelerate in terms of its development until 1870 or so, when it adopted dynamite, the machine gun and other modern, epoch-defining inventions. The exhibition references this and intriguingly attempts to contrast British images of the Orient with French ones, perhaps the most revealing aspect of this exhibition for it subtly contrasts and sends up two attitudes. The exhibition maintains that French artists tended ...

Street and Studio: An Urban History of Photography at the Tate Modern, South Bank, London Street and Studio seems to be a roundup of all the greatest photography of the late 19th and 20 centuries. Obviously the exhibition attempts to make a contrast between impromptu camerawork and studio photography, yet it’s hard to make sense of what exactly is being done here. For all that, the exhibition is patently very enjoyable so long as you’ve seen the photos already, know the great names and their significances, but if not then it does seem a mite confusing. That hardly matters though for there’s so much on offer here it’s hard to know where to begin to describe it all. Work by Lee Miller, Robert Mapplethorpe, Diane Arbus contrasts effectively with the work of more conventional or more established photographers such as Cecil Beaton and Henri Cartier-Bresson. However, the exhibition often tries to do too much, leaving the spectator waiting to fill in the dotted lines between each phot...

THOMAS HOPE, REGENCY DESIGNER: VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON Thomas Hope (1769-1831), eminent Regency period designer and visionary, is given a makeover at the V & A Museum. What's interesting about Hope giving his life and work a very modern inflection is his eclecticism, travels through the former Ottoman Empire, willingness to experiment, to create fusions and juxtapositions of the different cultures that captivated him. In this sense his work is thoroughly Post-Modern (but Post-Modernism seems also to be so retrograde). Recreations of his travels, rooms at Duchess Street off Portland Place, London and mansion at Deepdene, Surrey complement this exhibition. Hope is portrayed at the entrance to the exhibition in Ottoman gear. Themes of exoticism and orientalism are entwined in his design, something that had begun to surface in Europe as a fashion or fad at this time. For instance, in Mozart's opera Die Entfuhrung aus dem Serail the Tur...

The Story of the Supreme s from the Mary Wilson Collection, Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington, London 1.) Strange Fruit The background to the story of The Supremes, the history of America in the 1960s, the era of the fight against racism and segregation in the deep south. Berry Gordy jnr, head of Motown records, sought a black group that could crossover, appealing to black and white audiences simultaneously. The Supremes, the group with more number ones than any 60s band apart from The Beatles, managed to do that, and they did it with an admix that guaranteed a wholesome, positive image and appeal which also catered to the black community in the US that desired positive images but also criticised The Supremes for ‘not being black enough’. This retrospective offers plentiful historical background information about the period, including material about the legitimate face of black liberation represented by the Reverend Martin Luther King and more confrontational move...

PROMETEO by Luigi Nono (1924-1990) If you know the works of Ligeti and Stockhausen, then you can imagine what Luigi Nono's (1824-1990) opera PROMETEO is like. The evening was fantastic and surely very like the premieres of Wagner's DAS RHEINGOLD or Mozart's DIE ZAUBERFLOTE although the Royal Festival Hall was almost half empty. (shame on you British music lovers, do you really exist at all?) However this didn't detract from the importance of this event, the UK premiere of PROMETEO by Luigi Nono. It's taken 20 or more years for this work to be premiered in the UK, which tells you something about how much Britain lags behind the continent in its appreciation of the artistic avante garde. In Germany alone there have been 56 performances of this work since then. The libretto is obviously derived from the well-known legend of Prometheus, but the text itself is incomprehensible to the ear, if not to the eye. I had the text before me, it was part of the programme, b...