Would a Miami porn baron hang an Allen Jones painting in his sex dungeon? November 14, 2014 Royal Academy★★☆☆☆ If tragedy plus time equals comedy, what does sexism plus time equal – satire? Mainstream acceptability? This has been the strange fate of Allen Jones, an artist whose work once prompted the hurling of smoke bombs outside the ICA, but who now gets a genteel Royal Academy retrospective without even a hint of [...]
Film review: The Imitation Game proves genius Alan Turing is a hard one to crack November 13, 2014 ★★★☆☆ Cert 12a A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, placed inside an enigma, bound with leather and slotted carefully onto a mahogany book case. That’s what Alan Turing biopic The Imitation Game feels like. For all the wonders of its subject’s mind, the film itself is a staid and conventional affair, with more quality [...]
World War Two technologies: From Alan Turing’s code-breaking Enigma machine to Robert Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project November 10, 2014 Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and it’s hard to think of a time when a society is under more pressure than during a war. It should come as no surprise, then, that many of the every-day technologies we take for granted were developed during periods of global conflict. From the radar [...]
Theatre review: Made in Dagenham starring Gemma Arterton November 7, 2014 ★★☆☆☆ Adelphi Theatre If you ever wondered why Carry On Camping, Carry On Up the Nile and Carry On Up The Jungle were never followed by Carry On Second Wave Feminism, or Carry On Women’s Liberation, then watch Made in Dagenham, a new musical in which slap, tickle and gender politics make uneasy [...]
Lord Mayor’s Show 2014 route: Where to watch the procession in the City of London November 6, 2014 With gleaming skyscrapers home to the world’s leading corporations, it can be easy to forget that the City of London is rooted in centuries of tradition. That tradition will be on full display again this weekend during the 799th Lord Mayor’s Show. The event, which has endured Black Death, Blitz and Great Fire, is [...]
Studio Harcourt Paris’s photographs are coming to London: From Jean Paul Gaultier and John Galliano to Ingrid Bergman and Marlene Dietrich November 4, 2014 Despite the countless imitators, nothing comes close to the real thing. The dark, smoky glamour, the halo of light, the coquettish half smile that looks both effortlessly natural and made for the stage. The European equivalent of a star on Hollywood boulevard, in the 30s and 40s, a portrait at Studio Harcourt Paris meant [...]
Ash London’s Amanda Ibgui and Sharon Elalouf bring the French interior design Touch to the City October 30, 2014 Imagine how Sharon Elalouf and Amanda Ibgui felt arriving in London from their native Paris on a rainy day in 2006. Not only did they have to contend with English food and English weather, the pair also came up against English interior design. Enthusiastic devotees of modern French style (which for them means clean [...]
Pop idol: British artist Allen Jones receives an overdue Royal Academy retrospective October 28, 2014 While Andy Warhol was throwing wild parties in The Factory on East 47th Street, another of pop art’s leading lights was plying his trade in an altogether less glamorous corner of the world. In 1961, Southampton-born Allen Jones took up a teaching position at Croydon College of Art after being expelled from the Royal [...]
Sohei Nishino’s dazzling Diorama Maps return to the Michael Hoppen Gallery October 28, 2014 The ancient art of map-making is hardly an art at all; minute precision and scientific attention to detail are the sacred virtues of the cartographer. But imagine a map of a different kind, one that reveals not the brute fact of a city’s physical landscape but the energy of its bustling streets. These are [...]
The art of theft: Why do thieves steal famous paintings when they’re so hard to sell? October 28, 2014 On a freezing Stockholm evening just before Christmas 2000, a group of six to eight Middle Eastern men put into action a plan they’d been working on for months. The group parked cars in the middle of the three central roads leading to the Swedish National Museum and set them ablaze. As fire engines [...]
