The Engine

COLD WAR MODERN, VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM, SOUTH KENSINGTON, LONDON  The Cold War Modern exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum is an attempt to reconcile versions of modernity represented by both sides in the Cold War. The exhibition includes a detailed Cold War chronology beginning after 1945 and then the thaw in East\West relations after the death of Stalin and Kruschev's famous speech denouncing Stalin (and his crimes of the 1920s and 1930s, including the famine in the Ukraine that was probably manipulated for political ends, the show trials and the era of the purges). There was some mention of the pre-1939 era, a prelude to the Cold War, but the chronological division also echoed the ideology of the exhibition which focused on how detonated and defused all the various legacies of the Cold War had become. Later versions of Communism in Eastern Europe, particularly in Yugoslavia, harked back to the 1917 era as a Golden Age which could be somehow recaptured only if...

Liberty by Glyn Maxwell, dir Guy Retallack at The Globe Theatre, London So just time for my yearly visit to The Globe Theatre, London. The Globe Theatre is more a museum than a theatre and all the events staged there have a self-consciously staged or 'theatrical' feel. I wouldn't describe this is real theatre but something between tourism and a museum visit. One spends at least 50% of ones time soaking up the atmosphere, the ambience and that's great of course. Therefore Glyn Maxwell's play 'Liberty' has certain limitations imposed by the self-consciousness of The Globe Theatre project, ie this is a really ancient and very beautiful theatre and part of history ITSELF. Its unsurprising then that The Globe Theatre chooses historical subjects to supplement its Shakespearian efforts. 'Liberty' deals with the French Revolution, the politics and ideological struggles rather than the actual events or personalities. Because of that it has a strongly abstract...

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...