Summer Exhibition 2015

Overheard in the Small Weston Room from a couple contemplating 'Remembering the Treason Trial' by South African artist William Kentridge HON RA:
'So what does it represent to you, in your mind?'
'The Tree of Life?'
'Right.' Pause. 'And…?'
'Well… there's the scale of it.'
'And there's dramatic stuff mixed up with everyday stuff, and a whole lot going on. I'm not trying to give you a hard time, I'm just trying to get you to tell me what you see…'

There is certainly 'a whole lot going on'. This year's Summer Exhibition is a riot of colour: the Wohl Central Hall has been daubed a 'rich turquoise', Gallery III a 'vivid magenta' and the Lecture Room 'sky blue'; and, as ever, there is an embarrassment of riches. It is not easy picking out three favourites from a strong field, but I would say my choices for this year (in reverse order) are:

3.  Daydreaming (Oil)
     Lucy du Sautoy

A smudge of landscape streaked with droplets of water in sharp focus, as if looking out of a train window after a shower. It is an unusual perspective for an oil painting, and the grey sky and damp-looking greens seem to lull you into a sort of rainy-day reverie.

2.  Looking South (Woodcut)
     Pine Feroda

Another landscape: this time of dark jagged peaks thrusting out of the sea against a misty pink and purple horizon. It is an intense, dramatic composition – but not brooding: I love the way the ripples and waves catch the shimmering light. The title is intriguing – looking south from where? From some Nordic fastness, or a Patagonian peak? I would later learn that Pine Feroda are a collective of five woodblock artists based in north Devon, so perhaps the work was inspired by the rugged Devon coast.

1.  Somerford Grove Adventure Playground in Tottenham (C-type print)
     Mark Neville

A boy with close-cropped fair hair leans against a counter and pulls a little moue. All around him is the chaos of a typical junior school, with kids waiting to be allowed out into the playground for break. The light that falls on him seems to accentuate his pallor; his other classmates appear to be of mixed heritage. An interesting social commentary? I would later learn that this was one of a series of portraits commissioned by the New York Times for a photo essay entitled 'Here is London', and that the scene depicted was of an after-school club!

Honourable mention to Paul Hosking for 'Mimic (Black)', a visually arresting work in and of itself, made all the more interesting by the reflection of the room within it; Sir Anish Kapoor RA for his untitled acrylic cube with mirrored sides and a row of bubbles suspended within, refreshing as an ice-cube on a summer's day; and Emily Allchurch for 'Babel London', an amusing, contemporary take on Breughel's Tower of Babel.

Taylor Wessing Photographic Portrait Prize 2014

I'm surprised I haven't paid more attention to the National Portrait Gallery's annual photographic portrait prize. The last time I went was five years ago; having some time to spare this evening, however, I decided to drop in to view the 2014 exhibition - and I am glad I did.

The 2014 exhibition marks the last one judged by Sandy Nairne as director of the National Portrait Gallery (Nairne has announced that he will step down later in the year).  Over 4,000 submissions were received, and whittling them down to the 60 on display must have been a daunting task.

The top three prizes awarded by the panel for 2014 went (in reverse order of merit) to:

3.  Braian and Ryan
     Birgit Püve
     (Third place)

Two ash-blond twins, nine year old Braian and Ryan, crouch in the garden at their great grandmother’s house in Saue, Estonia. Braian, the younger twin, stares moodily at the camera, his arms crossed over his knees; while Ryan, the elder, looks up less guardedly, holding a large hen between his legs.

2.  Skate Girl
     Jessica Fulford-Dobson
     (Second place)

A waif of a girl, dressed in a shimmering blue hijab, holds a skateboard almost as large as she is tall. Her little fingernails are painted orange, and her toes (which peek out of a pair of dusty sandals) are painted blue. The photograph was taken in Afghanistan. 'What I loved about this girl,' explained Jessica Fulford-Dobson,'was how immaculately dressed and composed she was. The skate hall is a dusty, noisy place filled with laughter and yelps of excitement as the girls skateboard freely up, down and around with their robes and scarves flying.' There is something in the little girl's expression that suggests a masked restlessness - I assumed this was an eagerness to get back to the fun of skateboarding, but I would later learn that she was in fact rushing for the school bus home.

1.  Konrad Lars Hastings Titlow
     David Titlow
     (First place)

The top prize for 2014 went to David Titlow for his portrait of his infant son. The child, aged nine months, stretches out his stubby fingers to touch the nose of a little black and white dog. I love the look of wonder on the child's face and the dog's slightly perplexed expression at the encounter. The shot was taken in Rataryd, Sweden, the morning after a midsummer's party: a hazy Nordic light bathes the scene, and a couple of empty cans of beer are still visible in the foreground. 'The composition and backlight was so perfect that I had to capture the moment,' commented Titlow.

My personal favourites also included:

• a portrait of  Freyja Haraldsdóttir, MP and disabled rights activist, outside Parliament in Reykjavik, Iceland, by Gabrielle Motola;
• Felix, a portrait of a tousled-haired boy being nuzzled affectionately by his pony, by Tracy Howl; and
• Ann-Christine Woehrl's powerful portrait of Christine and Moses (pictured below), from a series on the lives of women who have survived acid attacks.

Summer Exhibition 2014

'I never used to like still lifes, but increasingly I find them quite pleasing.'
'Yes… nice colours. Shall we move on?'
'Shall we?'
'Let's.'

For me, this year's Summer Exhibition is not so much about still lifes as it is about landscape and portraiture – and the various techniques of printmaking. It is immediately apparent, gushes the Exhibition guide, why the Print Rooms of the Summer Exhibition are so popular. More than any of the galleries, they exemplify the Exhibition's democracy by presenting a rich survey of contemporary printmaking in all its forms. This year, Galleries I and II have been hung by artist-printmakers Professor Chris Orr MBE RA and Emma Stibbon RA. Orr observes that the Summer Exhibition offers excellent insight into emerging trends in printmaking, while Stibbons points out that prints, being generally more affordable than unique works of art, offer great opportunities for building up a wide collection.

My top three picks for this year are all prints. They are, in reverse order:

3.  Winter Hedge (Archival pigment transfer print)
     Boyd & Evans

A tree surges out of the mist in the middle of a hedge. In this muted landscape, drear and grey, I like how the bare branches seem to explode into the frosty air, lending a strange sense of dynamism to the piece – a distant promise of spring in its simple, sturdy form. As it turns out, its pendant piece 'Spring Hedge' hangs nearby, depicting the same tree triumphant in the luminous green of new foliage under a bright blue sky.

2.  Leicestershire (C-type print)
     Mitra Tabrizian

A half-demolished factory stands in the middle of a concrete courtyard wet from recent rain, its brick and tile interior exposed to the elements. Beside it stands a tall and weathered chimney stack. The colours seem faded: worn reds and smudged whites squeezed between grey ground and grey-blue sky; and the still and sullen emptiness reinforces the overall impression of desolate urban decay.

1.  O Jogo Bonito (Photograph)
     Hermès

My favourite work in this year's Exhibition is of the 'beautiful game'. Here, against a backdrop of dramatic peaks and drab apartment blocks (barely visible through the mix of sea spray and smog), is a beach full of bronzed bodies of all shapes and sizes engrossed in the game. Above their heads, as if suspended, are a flight of footballs – like a host of hovering planets, each one catching a glint of sun. I love the way the picture encapsulates what I imagine to be the crazy, creative chaos of Brazil!

Honourable mention to Ben Johnson for 'Sala de Dos Hermanas', a quietly beautiful black-and-white study of Moorish arches; Gavin Turk for 'Totem', a mesmerising image of a puff of smoke rising against a dark background (or possibly ejaculate in water, thought one wag who must have been spending too much time in the bath); and to Peter Abrahams for 'Approximate Precision – Scourers 4', with its used scourers stacked two-deep on a white surface (I thought they looked vaguely edible, but this was clearly not a sentiment shared by the lady next to me who shuddered and said, 'Ugh – I hate them, they always look "grot"!').

Some parting words of wisdom from Tom Phillips RA: 'Waste not the remains of the day'!

Summer Exhibition 2012

In this year's Summer Exhibition, some of the smaller works have been collected and hung in a 'wave' to give them 'rhythm' and 'energy'. Visitors are encouraged to follow the 'flow', and I do – although I eventually drift off on a slipstream to explore some of the larger works as well. Here are my top three picks for this year, in reverse order:

3.  TQ 31949 05471 (charcoal on Bristol board)
     Peter Marsh

Marsh's charcoal drawing depicts a street half obscured in darkness. Its houses, brooding and silent, seem derelict; yet in the centre of the piece is what appears to be a spreading tree. The curious sense of foreboding evoked by the work is reinforced by its enigmatic title – a Torquay postcode followed by an incomplete OS reference? Unlikely...

2.  Andvord Bay, Antarctica (oil on wood panel)
     Frances Walker

Walker's triptych is visually arresting, its size conveying something of the sheer scale and elemental expanse of Antarctica. In the background broods the base of a snowy mountain, its peaks reflected in the occluded surface of the icy waters in the foreground. Although the peaks disappear into cloud in part of the triptych, in another is a dazzling patch of sky.

1.  Flood (blue pencil with black and white aquacry and aluminium)
     Shirazeh Houshiary

Blue seems to be the theme this year, as I move from Walker's frozen blue-and-white landscape to Houshiary's mesmerising blue-and-grey canvas, its patterned surface lined as if with ripples. Towards the top of the work, a black inky spot appears to be dissolving – or perhaps it is meant to be a vortex appearing out of the deep. The work carries a hefty price tag of £300,000, making it perhaps the most expensive work on sale at the Exhibition.

Honourable mention to Matthew Darbyshire for his tongue-in-cheek 'Untitled Homeware No. 13', a slightly kitsch yellow flock Buddha draped in a blue Union Jack; and to Lucy Glendinning for 'Feather Child I', a fascinating (and slightly disturbing) work of lifelike sleeping child fledged in down.

London 2012 Olympics

Mandeville and Wenlock outside St Paul's this morning.

It's been a great Games so far, London - go Team GB!

Lucian Freud Portraits

'What do I ask of a painting?' Freud once mused.  'I ask it to astonish, disturb, seduce, convince.'

Freud's portraits bear testimony to all of these qualities. 

The exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery is not a memorial exhibition, as Sandy Nairne, director of the gallery, is at pains to point out. It had been planned with the artist as far back as 2006, before Freud's death aged 88 last year. Gathered together are 130 of Freud's works, from his early portraits in the 1940s and 50s through to his final canvas. The shift in styles in the late 1950s and 60s, towards his distinctive impasto realism, is particularly noticeable.

There is something about Freud's nudes that I find unsettling. 'Naked Girl Asleep II', for example, presents us with a recumbent figure in seemingly innocent slumber, but for the perspective which has us staring up her crotch; while in 'Naked Man with Rat' we find a pensive, reclining man, whose legs are splayed to bare his genitals. 

One of the best-known works in the exhibition, however, has to be 'Benefits Supervisor Sleeping' (pictured above), which fetched £17.2 million when it was sold in 2008 – then the highest price paid for a work by a living artist. The portrait is one of several that Freud painted of Sue Tilley ('Big Sue'), and Freud had this to say of her: 'She is, in her way, very feminine and, as she says, luckily she's got a sensible gene. Initially, being aware of all kinds of spectacular things to do with her size, like amazing craters and things one's never seen before, my eye was naturally drawn round to the sores and chafes made by weight and heat....'

Freud's last work, 'Portrait of the Hound', is a large unfinished canvas of David Dawson (Freud's assistant, model and friend) and his whippet Eli. Dawson, propped up on one elbow and cradling his knee with the other, gazes up at us; while a half-painted, sleek, fawn-and-white whippet lies next to him, staring mutely ahead.

Borough Market 2011

'If there's anything you want, it's probably best to set it aside,' says the chap behind the counter at Laithwaites. I look around at the deserted aisles and raise an eyebrow.
'A bit quiet, isn't it?' says the lady. 'I wonder where everyone is….'  And then, perhaps in solidarity with her colleague, she adds, 'I'm going to ring the other half to see if he wants anything setting aside as well.'
I dither over a couple of bottles of bubbly, end up paying for both, and promise to come back for them before four.

This year, I am at least a bit more organized with the cheese shopping.
There's a crowd in Neal's Yard, but it soon parts for a determined shopper.
'I need three interesting cheeses for a cheese board – one hard, one soft, and one smoked!' I say.
'We don't have any smoked cheeses,' mulls the young man in the apron, 'but, here, try this…'
'Mmm – a bit mild. How about something bolder on the palate?'
The Devon Blue is just the ticket, so I eventually leave with one hard, one soft and one blue.

For a moment, I contemplate popping into Brindisa for a bottle of Valdespino ('Christmas pudding in a glass!'), but decide otherwise.  I have enough to share at the party this evening, and the diet and detox start tomorrow!

Maritime Greenwich

Perhaps it is not unsurprising that I, a mariner's son, should love old Maritime Greenwich – and never more so than on a bright, crisp autumn day.  Pictured above is the painted hall of the Old Royal Naval College, looking resplendent as usual!

Tower 42 Moment

Having missed the London Open House weekend, I am somewhat pleased to find myself in Tower 42 for the first time today.

The view from the twenty-third floor is mesmerising.  It is a glorious day – one of those clear, bright September days, all burnished blue and gleaming gold.  You can almost see all of London from up here, shimmering like a new city.  In the distance the Shard, coming along apace, pierces the skyline in triumph.

Flare Path

It would be quite inexcusable not to catch a Rattigan play in this the centenary year of his birth.

Flare Path, directed by Sir Trevor Nunn at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket, is an interesting choice for a revival.  A semi-autobiographical work based on Rattigan’s own experience as wireless operator/air gunner, the first act was completed in Gibraltar (as Rattigan’s Sunderland was being repaired after a skirmish with a Heinkel), while the second was written in Bathurst in Gambia (on the verandah of the officer’s mess ‘with monkeys clambering about and everybody drinking gin and tonics going spectacularly to pieces […] – all of them looking over my shoulder while I wrote the thing’, according to Rattigan).

The play is set during the Second World War in a small Lincolnshire hotel near an RAF airbase, and takes place during the course of a single night. 'Glamour girl' Patricia Graham (Sienna Miller) must decide between her bluff, good-natured husband, Flight Lieutenant Teddy Graham (Harry Hadden-Paton), who she married in a 'whirlwind wartime romance' and knows so little, and her old flame Peter Kyle (James Purefoy), a suave, ageing matinée idol who was once her great love. Who will she choose?

Teddy is unexpectedly recalled for a secret night-time raid which turns out to be a ‘shaky do’. One of the lucky ones, he returns – more than half of all those who flew with Bomber Command never did – but with his confidence in tatters. Harry Hadden-Paton delivers a magnificent performance in a memorable scene where Teddy breaks down and confesses his fears to Patricia. She chooses to stay – a triumph of duty over passion. At the back of your mind, though, you wonder if their marriage survives the end of the War. I would have liked to have sensed more of Patricia's inner conflict. Does she stay with Teddy because this is a man she could learn to love, or because she feels it is the right thing to do? Does she regret letting Peter leave her life forever?

Other notable members of the cast include the Count Skriczevinsky (Mark Dexter), a Polish aristocrat who has lost everything to the Nazis, and Doris (Sheridan Smith), the barmaid he marries. The Count's poor English provides a vein of light relief throughout the play, but is also a barrier to Doris getting to know the man she has come to love. Sheridan Smith puts in a strong and endearing performance as the simple, good-natured Doris, whose quiet uncertainty about the Count's affections is eventually dispelled in a poignant and eloquent letter he writes to her (in French), affirming his love.

On the night the play opened at the Apollo in August 1942, Rattigan remembers 'standing rigidly to attention, while Air Marshal after Air Marshal approached the humble Flying Officer to tell him how his play should really have been written!' Churchill, who attended one of the performances, told the cast: 'I was very moved by this play. It is a masterpiece of understatement. But we are rather good at that, aren't we?'

Afghanistan: Crossroads of the Ancient World

The artefacts displayed in the exhibition at the British Museum are from four sites in northern Afghanistan:

• Tepe Fullol, a Bronze Age settlement;
• Ai Khanum, a Hellenistic city founded by one Alexander’s generals;
• Begram, summer capital of the Kushan Empire; and
• Tillya Tepe, a nomadic burial mound.

It is strange to think that these are a legacy from two thousand years ago: what the vagaries of fate and chance and – latterly, the courage of a small group of curators – have preserved for us. The exhibition guide aptly refers to them as 'surviving treasures' from the National Museum of Afghanistan. Treasures that have escaped the clumsy, clutching grasp of looters, and the destructive zeal of cultural vandals, and that speak so eloquently of an antique land that was once so very different to what it is now.

Amongst the many delightful objects on display are a set of buxom ivory maidens; miniature bronzes; glassware from the Mediterranean; and ornate gold jewellery.

A parting thought, from the inscribed fragments of a Greco-Bactrian funerary monument:

         'As a child, learn good manners.
          As a young man, learn to control your passions.
          In middle age, be just.
          In old age, give good advice.
          Then die, without regret.'

Borough Market 2010

Mid-afternoon on New Year's Eve, and the crowd at the Wright Brothers oyster and porter house is in a maudlin mood. The middle-aged couple to my right are holding hands and talking in hushed tones, while the middle-aged couple to my left, who had been discussing ski trips just a moment ago, are suddenly locked in a teary embrace. Everyone is on their next bottle of wine – everyone, that is, but me. Feeling a pang of loneliness and melancholy, I finish up my pint and leave.

I have an urgent need for cheese.
'I'm sorry, we're closed,' says the young chap in an apron at Neal's Yard.
'Closing,' I correct, hopefully. 'Please. I'll be in trouble if I don't get some stilton for tonight....'
I am an artful liar when I need to be, but the young man doesn't require much arm-twisting to relent.
As I leave with my contributions to the cheeseboard safely packaged under my arm, I find myself overcome by a strange sense of smugness at having been their last customer for the year.

Sometimes it's the small victories that count!

City of London Open House 2010: Bank of England

'Dare I ask how long you've been waiting to get in?' queries our guide, when at last we get past the chaps in Houblon pink and clear security. Two hours was the answer – although it was an unexpectedly good-natured queue. ('We're English, we can take it,' chirped a chap.)

As the first purpose-built central bank and the second oldest in the world, there's no denying the old lady of Threadneedle Street is looking good for her age. Behind the august façade of Portland stone, built by Soane around the 'island site', is a ten-storey edifice with 3.5 miles of corridors that provides more office space than all of Tower 42. (Three of those ten storeys lie underground including, presumably, the gold vaults – now much depleted thanks to Mr Brown.) There is also a garden court dotted with mulberry trees, which the Governor's office opens into (although Mervyn King, the Bank's 119th Governor, apparently doesn't tend to sit outside to have his sandwiches; he does, however, have a signed Aston Villa football on a sideboard).

'How many people work here?' asks someone in the group, as we are shepherded through the Bank's parlours.
'The comedy answer is "About half",' replies our guide, '...but the real answer is around 1,700.'

Upstairs, we are given a quick tour of the Committee Room where the MPC meet once a month.
'Don't ask me how rates are likely to move, because I don't know,' confesses our guide.
'Can we take a decision now?' queries a wag.
'Let's have a show of hands, shall we,' responds our guide gamely, 'and I'll take it up with the Governor!'

Summer Exhibition 2010

'Fifteen grand, that pink one up there,' said the lady, pursing her lips.
'We've seen better,' said her male companion.

As ever, this year's Summer Exhibition is exhilaratingly eclectic, with something to cater for all comers and all tastes. Picking three favourites out of the thousands of entries is never easy, but here nevertheless are my choices for this year, in reverse order:

3.  Departure (archival digital print)
     Güler Ates

A veiled woman in a striking blue dress ascends a flight of white stairs, bent forward in an attitude of haste. Ates's composition is dynamic and enigmatic. Why the urgency? Where is she going? Why is she headed upstairs if she is leaving? The picture is devoid of clues, and all that we have is a glimpse of a pregnant moment, of bustle reduced to an eerie stillness.

2.  Last Snow Sixhills (etching)
     Melvyn Petterson

Petterson's monochrome etching is of a hill silhouetted in the slicing rain, with a wide muddy lane dominating much of the foreground. There is something bleak but beautiful in the wet, windswept landscape, and the tyre tracks in the mud seem to emphasise the lonely desolation of the scene.

1.  Acceptance (video installation)
     Bill Viola

It's been a while since I've encountered Viola's work but 'Acceptance', his submission for this year's Summer Exhibition, reminded me of how quietly compelling it can be. The short film, shot in black and white, depicts a naked, middle-aged woman with cropped hair stepping out of the darkness into a light space where water starts to pour over her. It is clear from her frown and silent gasps that the experience is not pleasurable. For a few moments the flow ceases, and a fleeting smile of relief spreads across her face, but the flow soon starts again and her distress returns. 'It's drenching her,' comments Ann Christopher on the piece, 'and she doesn't have much choice. But there are religious undertones: it's a kind of filmed late baptism.' There were also more sinister parallels, I thought, of shaven-headed women being sent to 'showers' against their will.

Honourable mention to David Mach for 'Silver Streak', his sculpture of a chest-thumping gorilla made from metal coat hangers, which drew appreciative cries from the younger public ('Wow cool - look at his face!'); Ruth Dupre for her glass and wood entry, 'Butchery', with its four vitreous slabs of meat oozing off the sides of a table into black, bulbous drops of putrefaction; and Chris Coekin's giclée print 'The Altogether #2' depicting four workmen in dark overalls, right hands extended in cross-handshakes while their left hands clutch their tools of trade.

RHS Chelsea Flower Show 2010

Somewhere on our quest for Pimm's, we stumble upon Bunny Guinness and Andy Sturgeon in conversation in Sturgeon's prize-winning garden for the Daily Telegraph.

The garden – voted best in show – was inspired by travel, and (according to the catalogue) brings together 'flavours of the fynbos of the Southern Cape, the maquis shrubland of the Mediterrannean, the chaparral of California and Mexico and the matorral of central Chile'. Corten steel screens 'slice through the design, fusing architectural and sculptural qualities to define spaces and control views'. There is no chance of wandering through the garden on an ordinary public ticket, so it is good to be told that, 'navigating the linear natural stone paths, the views are ever-changing, with controlled vistas and glimpses of the garden beyond. Open clearings of sparsely planted gravel provide places to pause on a journey that culminates in a courtyard at the rear, where the shade of a stately cork oak and the sound of running water combine to create a contemporary retreat'.

Later in the afternoon, we bump into a sprightly man resplendent in a scarlet coat. 'Welcome to my home,' he says, gesturing in the direction of the Royal Hospital. And, as it is not often one meets a Chelsea pensioner in full regalia, we stop for a chat.

FA Cup Semi-Final: Villa v Chelsea

'Club Wembley fans are advised that the national anthem will be sung in five minutes,' came the announcement, as I polished off the last of my burger and beer. 'You are kindly advised to take your seats.' I fish out my ticket and find myself in seat 13 of row 13 - just as well I'm not superstitious and have nothing riding on the match! Aston Villa versus the current cup holders Chelsea. Eight previous FA cup matches head-to-head, with five wins to Villa, two to Chelsea and one draw. This could be an interesting afternoon!

The first half, as it turned out, was somewhat uneventful, apart from the cup of Coke which someone spilt several seats to my left. The score at half time was 0-0 – but football, as they say, is a game of two halves. The Blues manage to pull their socks up (to the cries of 'G'waaan Chelsea! Celery, celery!' from the chap behind me) and win the match 3-0 at the final whistle. Drogba (described in the programme as a 'superb all-round striker'), Malouda (who's had 'an excellent season') and Lampard ('at the heart of the club') each scored a goal. There was much celebrating and flag-waving in the blue corner, while the claret corner emptied silently.

On the train on the way back, I overhear a dejected Villa supporter extemporise a lesson in loyalty. 'It's all about sticking with your club, that's all that matters,' said the man to his son, and the two rode on in sullen silence.

Ghost Forest

En route to Euston this morning, I find myself wandering among the uprooted stumps of Angela Palmer's Ghost Forest in Trafalgar Square. At over 50m, Nelson perched atop his column (pictured through the tangle of roots above) is of a height at which most of these deracinated trees would once have stood.

I'd read about the project in the FT about a month ago, and am delighted to see it come to fruition (insofar as dead trees can be said to come to fruition). The roots and stumps have different hues and grains and textures, and the trees themselves bear delightful names: denya, wawa, anokye... There is also a mahogany, and three species of celtis.

The White Ribbon

'Als ihr Klein wart, hat eure Mutter euch bisweilen ein Band ins Haar oder um den Arm gebunden. Seine weiße Farbe sollte euch an Unschuld und Reinheit erinnern...'

There is little in the way of innocence and purity, however, in Haneke's latest film, the White Ribbon (Das weiße Band), which took the Palme d'Or at Cannes earlier this year.

Shot beautifully in black and white, the White Ribbon explores the dark, septic heart of a north German village on the eve of the Great War. Growing up here, in its stultifying atmosphere of hypocrisy and repression, are the children who - along with the others of their generation - will witness and experience the privations of the First World War and play their part in the atrocities of the Second. Not for nothing has Haneke subtitled the film 'Eine deutsche Kindergeschichte' - a German children's story.

It is not, however, through the sullen eyes of the children that the tale is told, but through those of a moon-faced school-teacher who witnesses the slow unravelling of the fabric of the village through various acts of malice: the village doctor felled from his horse by a trip-wire laid by unseen hands, an arson, a chillingly brutal attack on a mentally handicapped child... There are more petty cruelties of which the teacher is unaware, but which we the viewers are allowed to glimpse: the heavy-handed discipline meted out to the children at home, an abusive adulterous affair, incest... All of which point to a rottenness at the core not just of the lives of the children, but at every level of village life. The suffocating strictures of society - the pre-War vestiges of feudalism and an austere and empty Protestantism - chafe the grown-ups as much as the children.

The pervasive sense of dysfunctionality is relieved only by a few moments of genuine tenderness: a child's gesture of filial love, and the tentative courtship between the teacher and a young nanny.

As with Haneke's earlier films, there is no pat ending and no sense of resolution when the credits begin to roll.

'It's not the job of art to answer questions,' explains Haneke in a subsequent video interview on the BFI website, 'but to pose them in such a way that anyone who is prepared to engage with them can do so properly.' As to his choice of gritty subjects, 'the fact that the things I show aren't always a bundle of laughs isn't because I'm cold, but because my gaze is that of a realist.'

Hendrick's Horseless Carriage of Curiosities

'Drink irresponsibly,' said the chap to me solemnly, as he handed me a copy of the Unusual Times. And then he was off again, working his way through the crowd with his outlandish moustache. 'Read all about it - punters poisoned in Hendrick's queue!' he cried (hang on a minute... I'm in the Hendrick's queue!), but that was the last I was to see or hear of him, as I find myself ushered into the Carriage of Curiosities.

Hendrick's Horseless Carriage of Curiosities describes itself as an 'evolving collection of oddities... housed in a painstakingly restored train carriage from 1890'. It could have been a prototype for the Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, and was fortuitously parked in Manchester Square when I stumbled out of the Wallace Collection. The price of admission was a contribution to the collection (of oddities, that is, not the Wallace) – in my case a slightly worn sleeping mask which I claimed to be a war trophy from the somnabulant soldiery of Samarkand (of course).

Having collected my gin from the counter and notched up a point on my 'tipple tally', I gather round another chap with another outlandish moustache.
'And this, ladies and gentlemen,' he says, picking up an item from among the Carriage's many curiosities, 'is a perfectly petrified pterodactyl penis.' I find myself intrigued by his erudition. To the untrained eye it looked suspiciously like an antelope's antler.
'What if she had an incompatible thread?' asks a member of the audience.
'Well, sir, it will not have escaped your notice that pterodactyls are now extinct.'

Emerging again from the Carriage, I find a pretty young thing with a feather fascinator and a voluminous velvet dress singing along to the strains of a ukelele. In the distance, someone has tumbled off a penny-farthing.

Drink irreshponshibably *hic!*.

J. W. Waterhouse: The Modern Pre-Raphaelite

You can't miss her ripe, pubescent pout. Here, in her manifold guises, is the Waterhouse woman. Or, rather, the Waterhouse girl – for it was the promise of womanhood that really intrigued Waterhouse. In all my years of admiring his art and aesthetic, it never occurred to me that there might be something borderline transgressive about his obsession with beautiful young women, but then I suppose I never had the benefit of various Waterhouse experts to instruct my eye.

Among the first expressions of Waterhouse's interest in adolescent females is the Martyrdom of St Eulalia, which depicts (in the words of the audioguide) 'an adolescent, semi-naked girl' who 'lies before us at a dramatically foreshortened angle'. As Peter Trippi, art historian and Waterhouse biographer, explains, St Eulalia was Waterhouse's 'breakthrough picture'. It was not only large and much noticed at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition (resulting in Waterhouse being elected as an associate of the Royal Academy - although presumably not for presenting us with 'what might be considered an eroticised body for our viewing pleasure'), but it also 'summarised in many ways his desire to take an obscure subject and make it absolutely unforgettable'.

It is, however, in St Cecelia (pictured above) that, according to Robert Upstone, curator of modern British art at the Tate, we get the 'full fulfilment' of the Waterhouse girl. 'There is a subtle eroticism to the way in which we look at this very beautiful woman who is sleeping. We are allowed to gaze upon her because she cannot see us looking at her, but there is also something unattainable about her. She is other-worldly, she is in a strange dreaming state, but she also hovers in this ambiguous state between childhood and adolescence and full adulthood.'

In terms of popularity, however, both are trumped by the Lady of Shalott – who is neither semi-naked nor somnolent - and the Tate apparently sells more postcards of this than of any other painting in its collection.