I have just returned to a cold and sleety Clapham after the sunnier skies of southern Spain, where the scent of orange blossom was already in the air and the 27th edition of the Festival de Jerez filled the town with music.
My body still feels the compras, the rhythm, while my head is full of the sound of the guitar and, when I close my eyes, I see exquisite and dramatic stage pictures. Sara Calero dancing, joyously and spikily, to a jaunty Day of the Dead number, while Gema Caballero’s smoky voice sang words which prompted smiles in the audience. Flamenco with humour and wit. The intensity and athleticism of Eduardo Guerrero, in a pose beneath the spotlights with was both Christ-like and evocative of Japan. Maria Jose Franco amid a swirl of motion and fringed silk, a more traditional show, but marked out by the stunning skill of the dancer. Then, the final night, fabulous guitarist Manuel Valencia with long time collaborator, singer David Carpio, two of our favourites so obviously having as wonderful a time on stage as we were in the audience.
Sitting in Plateros we described what we had seen to friends who didn’t go to flamenco. It wasn’t ladies in polka dot dresses with
castanets dancing to black clad male guitarists, although you could see that if that was what you wanted. No, something fascinating has been happening for a number of years at this festival and this edition was no exception. Younger practitioners are examining the boundaries of what flamenco means, exploring and expanding their art.
Some of our other favourites weren’t there this year, or our timing meant that we missed them. There was no Manuel Lignan, the man who often dances in a dress and explores gender roles, nor was there Santiago Lara, the Jerezano flamenco guitarist who plays jazz a la Pat Methany and is currently writing a concerto for guitar and orchestra. We missed Rafaella Carrasco and Antonio Rey because of dates, but would have loved to have seen them.
We did see an amazing reflection on life and death in Finitud, the aforementioned Calero Caballero collaboration. We saw the pair ten years ago when their skill and artistry was expressed beautifully through the traditional forms and we’ve looked out for them ever since. Boy, have they developed. The show included an electric base guitar as well as flamenco guitar and, astonishingly, Mozart’s Requiem. A singer, a dancer and two musicians conjured up the vibrancy of the south American Day of the Dead, the solitude of graveyard contemplation and a lot in between. We had a fun 1930s cartoon of skeletons dancing to make us laugh and ended with an auto de fe. Stunning! This show was hugely emotionally engaging and created some stupendous images which will fill my mind for quite some time. It encapsulates what a new generation of flamenco artists are doing, developing themselves and their art.
Valencia and Carpio were less unusual in their set, although I recall a tremendous concert some years ago in which Carpio and the dancer, Lignan, performed a duet, the one singing, a cappella, the other responding in dance and with rhythm (Valencia was the guitarist that day too). But their set lastr3orillas (The Three Shores) on Tuesday was wonderful and the thirteenth century church rang to the sound of shouts and applause. We’ll be back to listen to them again.
All this gave me lots of food for thought. How do artists use the creativity of other artists in developing their own work? In music,
in art or, as a writer, on the page? What is creativity? I, for one, will be reflecting on this, with friend and fellow writer, Sunday Times best-selling novelist, Elizabeth Buchan in a talk for The Clapham Society at Omnibus Theatre on 20th March at 8 pm. Come and join us if you’re free.
Deep inside the Blavatnik Building, itself recently the subject of a Supreme Court ruling, sit two small ‘rooms’ white painted ‘blocks’ from outside, but full of light, water and reflection within. These are Yayoi’s Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms, global phenomena. Tickets are limited and even when you have them you will queue to enter each room. At four fifteen on a Friday those queues were each about ten minutes in length, but getting longer as time went on. When you get to the doors you are allowed inside in groups of six people only and, when you’re inside, it’s easy to see why numbers are restricted. 
). It is disorientating; difficult to tell who is real and who is reflection – and it wasn’t any easier looking at the photos afterwards. The chandelier repeats into an apparently vast chasm in the floor as well as along corridors into space. There are reflections of reflections, not all in the manner you imagine either, but when, say, a pair of bodyless photographing hands gets caught in the regressions.
A myriad of lights are hung from the ceiling ( at least that’s how I reasoned it must work, I don’t actually know if that’s correct ) reflecting in multiple mirrors again, but also in the water on the floor. The visitor walks along a three foot wide pathway between the lights from one side of the ‘room’ to the other, something which takes but two or three minutes, if one was walking at normal pace. In fact one walks then stands, marvelling at the reflections and the lights, before starting out again. What the photographs in this piece don’t show is the variation in the colours of these lights as they slowly change from colour scheme to colour scheme. That is best shown when you look into the water (see below for a slightly better representation).
biographical details which place the rooms into context of Yayoi Kushama’s life and work, plus the wonderful mirror box which in featured in an earlier piece I wrote when the Tate extension first opened. That too is worth seeing and playing with. Booking is currently until April though the exhibition is closed for maintenance in March. At a tenner it’s worth visiting (and you can catch the wonderful standing collection and some superb, free exhibitions, like A Year in Art; Australia 1992, which I’ve also written about elsewhere ). Highly recommended.
In April of this year I posted a piece about images of Tosca ( see ‘
The artist most associated with Tosca, partly because he designed many posters for the Comedie Francais, where Bernhardt performed, and partly because his style is such a good example of Art Nouveau is probably Alphonse Mucha. Even the Hohenstein poster for the opera’s premiere in Rome in 1900 owed much to Mucha’s style. But his is not the only style which was copied and often other artist’s works were rifled for use on the posters. See the use of the Gustav Klimt’s ‘Judith’ in the poster for Middlebury Opera’s production (right) .
I found a very striking poster from Poland, probably for a production by the opera company of the city of Bydgoszcz which was very reminiscent of the style of Frieda Kahlo (see left). It drew many comments on social media and divided people, they either loved or hated it.
colour in the poster. I’m not sure if this was a sneaky subliminal message, but it is certainly surreal and I do not pretend to understand it, though it seems to be trying for an analysis of the opera at a subconscious level – Tosca pulling Cavaradossi’s strings.
life, so there are plenty of leering Scarpias and retreating, suffering Toscas, though often clutching a dagger. The Italian ones are even more lurid than the Hollywood ones ( I suspect because Hollywood treated it as ‘high art’ ), but here is a more restrained offering – ‘The tragic love of Floria Tosca and Mario Cavaradossi commemorated in the immortal melodies of G. Puccini’. The director, ‘Carlo Koch’ is actually the noted German art historian and film director, Karl Koch, who undertook the film in 1939, jointly with Jean Renoir, at Mussolini’s invitation. Koch was Renoir’s assistant on Le Regle de Jeu
and Renoir was instrumental in getting Koch out of Germany in 1936. Renoir eventually withdrew from the film, but Koch completed it, together with his assistant, one Luchino Visconti. Incidentally Koch and his wife settled in Barnet, north London once the war ended.
preparation I’ve been collecting and sharing images relating to Tosca for some months and I plan to use them at the launch event. These range from copies of the original posters for the premieres of both the play by Victorien Sardou, in Paris in 1887 and Puccini’s opera in Rome in 1900, through to film posters of the 1970s and modern posters for productions of the opera. In the course of searching for these images, however, I have discovered that ‘Tosca’ is also the name given, presumably in honour of the diva and Puccini, to a number of other items, including several types of perfume, at least two cars and a cocktail.
The Tosca Eau de Parfum can still be bought today for £16.74 and accompanied by shower gel, deodorant and moisturiser in the same fragrance. There is also an extremely expensive version by Xerjoff Casamorati, available from Harrods – a snip at £81.95 for 30ml (see above). It seems that the original perfume was created by Farina 4711 and vintage bottles are now traded on ebay and etsy (see left). The very expensive, bright pink/purple bottle of the Xerjoff is much less attractive, to my eye, but it is certainly distinctive. I have yet to discover why it was designed as it was.
fast ( and, in most of the images I could find, red, which continues a colour theme found in the Tosca opera posters. More of a surprise is that it is a hybrid with a traditional V10 engine, as well as electric batteries. Even Italian super cars are going green these days. Just as surprising is the La Tosca, a 1955 concept car from Ford. It was designed to be remote controlled, so is driverless and in that is very modern, but it has the sort of design which owes much to aircraft and was thought to 
be ‘space age’ at the time. The pictures of it that I have seen show a car which seems to float above the ground with huge wing fins, a plexi-glass bubble over the passenger compartment and an exhaust which looks like a jet engine. The car is often a bubblegum pink, which makes me think of a sort of very sporty version of Lady Penelope’s Rolls Royce from Thunderbirds. This was the Ford La Tosca, an actual car, though it was never put into production.
2019 production of Tosca at La Scala, Milan and was served in Il Foyer bar there. It is made with the south American spirit, Mezcal, two types of Martini (we are in Italy after all) elderflower foam and, to dress, tomato powder and chilli pepper. If it appeals you can find the recipe 
women through the ages. I went along yesterday and found it informative and interesting. It’s a small exhibition which considers an enduring subject, the presentation of a female likeness looking out of a window, sometimes directly at the viewer, sometimes not. Women have often been represented like this, usually by men, for various purposes, the sacred, the profane, the decorative or the titillating. I was hard pressed to think of more than one or two examples where men were represented in this way.
man climbing a ladder to present apples to a woman in a window, probably a hetaira or courtesan. The fun times in the ancient world give way during the medieval period to the discouraging of looking at women, in the window or elsewhere, for fear of arousal and sin. In this period the ‘woman’ is the Madonna (see by Dirk Bouts left) in her role as the ‘window to heaven’, a symbolic window at her back. Or the saint suffering for her faith (a striking and slightly unsettling stone bas relief/sculpture of an incarcerated woman pressing her face against the bars of her cell). Moving on to the Renaissance and non-divine women are the subjects again – I was particularly struck by the Botticelli (his ‘line’ is always mesmerising). Through the Dutch interiors, showing women if not through windows then beside them, playing instruments, reading letters; then to the wonderful Rembrandt of an un-named young woman who leans out of the canvas in all her human glory (see above right).
Degas and a Sickert, but the exhibition didn’t follow a linear timeline, interspersing modern works with the old. Some of these were more successful than others. Some were interesting – the ‘swap’ of poses and locations, between a female photographer and a female prostitute (I cannot remember the name of the photographer, which is annoying). Both women looked very much at home in their new personas.
being beckoned forward by a faceless man in a car and rejecting his summons by holding up her palm. This, like the Codrington, with its dead hen and half drunk bottle of what looks like vodka, was a story in a picture, or many possible stories. There were some beautifully staged photographs, the woman reading a letter (an eviction notice, it is mounted in a frame next to the photograph) which echoed those Dutch interiors and a super Australian piece ‘The Apartment’ showing two women in a domestic scene overlooking an industrial harbour – its perspective was remarkable.
Britain’s Summer exhibition on Walter Sickert (1860 -1942). A pupil of James Macneill Whistler, friend of Edgar Degas and member of the New English Art Club as well as founding member of the Camden Town Group, Sickert seems to have been the most connected of painters. Forster was twenty years younger (1879 – 1970 ) and, similarly, a member of groups, in his case, the Apostles and then the Bloomsbury Group. Forster went on to pre-eminence, rather more than Sickert did, although the visual artist’s influence is felt, as the exhibition demonstrates, on generations of later painters, especially in England.
The exhibition is also good in showing the young Sickert’s obvious admiration for both his teacher and for Degas. He attempts drawing in Whistler’s style and paints seascapes and urban landscapes and, later in life, attempts the unusual compositional style of Degas. The latter is most evident in the perspectives in pictures, like Trapeze ( so very close to Degas’ Miss La La at the Cirque Fernando
) and the subject matter – the circus, the music hall and the demi-monde of Paris and London. When considering the paintings, comparisons favour the Frenchman ( and, indeed, the American ) in my view. That said, Sickert produced some wonderful art, very much in his own style. I especially liked his music hall paintings, where the effects of light and the gilded, glistening interiors of the theatres are captured so well. I also enjoyed his urban landscapes.
He chose to paint the music hall, rather than the more prestigious venues and concentrated on ordinary urban life, purchasing studios in the 1890s and early 1900s in working class areas the better to draw and paint everyday existence. I also like his way with a single light source, in evidence in the ‘music hall’ pictures but also in little gems like The Acting Manager, a small sketch for a larger painting, found near the beginning of the exhibition.
I liked the solo nudes of ordinary women, often middle-aged and recumbent in non-classical poses, which, clearly, were influential upon later artists, most notably Lucien Freud. Sickert’s heavy impasto style is a forerunner of Bomberg, Auerbach and Gerhardt Richter. I also enjoyed his later paintings with more use of colour, like Brighton Pierrots and his interest in using photographs and photography in his art. In the twenties Sickert mentored and championed the artists in the East London Group; often untutored, working class individuals with little formal education. He encouraged and showed alongside them.
when researching this article that I discovered the generous patron, the committed supporter of the working class and documentary realism, the teacher ( at Westminster, where David Bomberg was one of his pupils ) and, ultimately, the establishment man – he was President of the Royal Society of British Artists and a Royal Academician, though, typically, he resigned his RA status on a point of principle. I had thought of Sickert as a flamboyant, self-publicising former actor, now I think of him as a guiding force, a helping hand to modern British painting. I don’t know why the exhibition didn’t bring that out more. Perhaps there was a reluctance to focus on the man – in the past much has been made of Sickert’s own interest in Jack the Ripper and Patricia Cornwell’s claim that he was the infamous Jack. Perhaps the curators wanted to concentrate instead on the paintings – entirely understandable.
I hadn’t appreciated the level of sophistication of the dwellers in this land from about 6,000 to 4,000 years ago. The world-view of the earliest, revolving around nature and the seasons, like many hunter-gatherer people, was shared across northern Europe. Of course, until about 6500 BCE and the rising of post Ice Age sea levels, the UK was part of the landmass of that continent. Although subsequently an island archipelago, the peoples who lived here had regular contact with their counterparts on the mainland. This can be seen in their art and craftwork, but also measured by their DNA. One of the most striking examples of this was of the Amesbury Archer. Bones belonging to this man, buried with his bow, were DNA tested. He was originally from the southern Alpine region, though he had lived in southern England for most of his life. Near his grave is that of another, younger man who shares the first’s DNA and is likely to have been his grandson. This man was born and lived most of his life in the Alps, but he was clearly in Amesbury when he met his end. A family visit? Or did the grandson come to live with his grandparents?
beautiful. Perfectly carved and turned stones, with elaborate patterning, these weren’t to be used for everyday, but were ceremonial and included in burials. I was fascinated by one aspect of that early culture, that ‘art’ lay in the act of creation, not, or not only, in the item produced by it. Thus, things did not have the same value as the ability to create them, which seems an eminently sensible value system to me. There is also a wonderful, finely wrought golden collar from this era. Gold was used, not because it had any intrinsic value, but because it was the colour of and reflected the light from, the sun.
The exhibition explains, through artefacts, how that culture changed, with the introduction of farming and a concentration on animals and other aspects of nature as a commodity. Art was still relatively fluid, in that stone carvings were made outside and weren’t ‘finished’ objects, but people added to them all the time. This is also true of Stonehenge itself. The landscape in which it was built was already crossed by ceremonial ditches and banks and, after the great sarsen stones were raised, carved on mortice and tenon principles ( see photograph, left) it was added to years later with blue stones brought from Wales, over 220 miles away.
on Troy. This exhibition places the British pieces in that cross-cultural context, with a collection of armour, roughly contemporaneous to the Illiad and not dissimilar to that worn in ancient Greece (though the helmets look more like Janissaries). There were also exquisite golden drinking bowls and fine copper horsehead artefacts (the horse featured strongly as did the snake, the bird and the sun and moon ). This was a culture close to nature, even when that nature was largely tamed.
the time of the lunar month. This shows a level of sophistication in understanding of the movement of the stars and planets which is reinforced when one sees how many barrows and henges were aligned with sun and, or, moon. The exhibition ranges across many of these, from Denmark, Ireland, the islands of Scotland as well as Wales, Spain, France and elsewhere in England. It also shows how the sea began to play a greater and greater role in the culture of the people living here, as trading took place and the sea itself became a place to worship. There is a recreation of the remarkable Seahenge discovered in the saltmarsh of the Norfolk coast and which, incidentally, features in the crime fiction of Elly Griffiths’ Ruth Galloway books.
… but the singing of songs. St Paul’s Opera, Clapham, presented the Big Birthday Bash last Friday and great fun was had by all, as much on stage as in the audience.
Opera and classical favourites, mostly ‘big tunes’, formed the first half of the evening’s entertainment, followed by cabaret and show tunes in the second. Two Australians, a Greek and a Latvian as well as those native to these British Isles formed the company for the evening, several prize-winners among them. The singers were current and former members of SPO, clad in their shiny best (and that was the baritone’s black satin suit). A theme reflected in the audience by SPO super-fan Teresa, in her sparkly rainbow biker jacket. Puccini and Rossini formed the backbone of the first half, spiced with Lehar, Bizet, Leoncavallo and Strauss with one Mozart piece to add a touch of the sublime. It ended with Brindisi, the famous drinking song from La Traviata. Post interval ( more wine, that song was prophetic, and meeting yet more friends and neighbours ) there was Offenbach, Britten and Bernstein, plus Cole Porter, Rogers & Hammerstein and Sondheim.
Highlights? There were many. Lyric tenor Martins Smaukstelis singing ‘Maria’ from West Side Story – ‘knocked it out the park’ said my American neighbour; the aforementioned Mozart ‘Soave sia il vento’ from Cosi fan Tutti sung by Tanya Hurst, Alexandra Dinwiddie and Louis Hurst and birthday girl and SPO co-founder Patricia Ninian singing ‘Glitter and be Gay’ from Candide.
Theatre on 21st February about establishing this favourite local opera company from scratch. Unfortunately I’m unable to attend, but I will be going to the the Masterclass at St Paul’s by David Butt Philip (Sydney Opera, the NY Met and Wiener Stadtsoper) on 3rd March – tickets £10. He will also be performing a Gala concert with some friends, Lauren Fagan, Stephanie Wake-Edwards and David Shipley, all alumni of the Royal Opera’s Young Artist Programme. This takes place on Thursday 24th March, tickets £30. I imagine that all these events will be very popular, so buy early.
Yesterday I went to the British Museum to catch the Peru exhibition before it closes on 20th February. This relatively small but very interesting exhibition is in the Great Court Gallery (above the Reading Room) and is organised in conjunction with the Museo de Arte de Lima. It brings together artefacts from the BM’s own collection with those from Peru and elsewhere to reveal the history, beliefs and culture of a series of South American societies and peoples from BCE to the sixteenth century arrival of the conquistadors.
perhaps most personally, the 
In northern Peru the Moche people (100-800 CE), fabulous ceramicists (see figure of a Moche warrior, left), concentrated along the coasts and river valleys, while the Wari (600-900CE) developed in the Ayacucho region and expanded to cover the southern highlands and the northern coast. Then, between the 10th and 12th centuries the Kingdom of Chimu dominated, its capital Chan Chan having a population of up to 75,000 people. In the central Andes the Inca empire emerged in about 1400, expanding its territory throughout the region, via a system of roads and waterways between diverse cultures and communities. This included the creation of the mountain fastness which is Machu Pichu, or ‘ancient mountain’, including about 200 polished stone buildings, as well as terraces and pyramids. Though this was not the Inca capital, which was at Cusco.
ways of life followed. It is Pizarro’s first encounter and subsequent relationship with the Inca Emperor Atahuallpa which features in the aforementioned play (and film). The exhibition included artefacts from the colonial period, though not many of them.
They certainly had complex belief systems, centred on nature and the land, as shown by the exquisite ceramics in the form of felines and serpents (see left). It also included blood sacrifice (back to those childhood bloodthirsty yarns) with any prisoners captured during wars being slain as a sacrifice to the gods of the land. One funerary robe included no fewer than seventy four human figures in its border and central pattern, each of them carrying a severed human head. Ceramics and musical instruments were decorated with similarly gruesome patterns. The exhibition includes a number of sculptures of captured prisoners, roped and awaiting their fate.
One of Tate Britain’s big shows this winter, Hogarth and Europe looks at the ever popular eighteenth century artist in the context of the changing society of the time and the similarities with artists across Europe. I went to take a look last week.
were striking, the family resemblance between then and with their brother very evident. That said, there is always more to be found in his very full frames and this exhibition draws attention to particular aspects not focused on before.
The exhibition prompts you to look at the familiar scenes with a social historian’s eye, picking out that fine, oriental china cluttering the Squanderfield’s mantlepiece, noticing the French furnishings, the French and Dutch old masters on the wall in The Marriage Settlement, the exotics – the black slaves, the Italian castrato singer, the French dancing master – in later Marriage paintings. Whilst seeing his black characters, usually unfree, I hadn’t noticed before the way that Hogarth often positions them (not just household slaves, but in street scenes too) as a counter to white immorality. 
unfunny, though chock-full of detail, but I acknowledge its originality and influence. He was very famous during his lifetime mainly because so many of his ‘morality’ works were turned into prints (he studied, originally as an engraver). He has also been a major influence on later artists and the word ‘Hogarthian’ has come to represent many a teeming, rambunctious and satiric scene. This exhibition shows that, while his European contemporaries were painting scenes of the city, like him, they were far less assured in their social commentary and much less irreverent and satirical. Some, like Canaletto, were content to capture (very beautifully, it must be said) what was before them.
I appreciated the charitable work he did, with other artists and musicians, notably Handel, in supporting the Foundlings Hospital but I hadn’t understood that his preoccupation with the materialism and moral decline of ‘modern’ society was also fueled by his own history. His father got into debt and was imprisoned for a time, leaving the young Hogarth and his mother to provide for the family. The Madhouse final scene from Rake was only a metaphorical step away from the debtor’s prison where Hogarth senior had been incarcerated.
Julie Anderson 