Dark nights, big books

The clocks have gone back, winter begins, and so does my search of lost time. No more paddling, dipping in; Michaelmas is with Marcel.

Vermeer's Women

****(*)
It has been o too long since I last visited the Fitzwilliam but on this dank October day small lights shine bright. The Vermeer's Women : Secrets and Silence exhibition may only include four of Vermeer's thirty four paintings but these, accompanied by der Hooch, ter Borch and Vrel, act as jewells againt rich green museum walls. It would have been worth a visit to Paris just to see The Lacemaker but this exhibition also highlights Vermeer as the painterly painter. He may lack the fine detail of ter Borch but his depiction of light through dabs and gestures of paint is quite remarkable and, at times, can even make one think of Hals.

The disappointing Norwegian

** It may have received a foreign fiction award but Per Petterson's The Wake was tedious from start to end.

Marat/Sade; too comic to be cruel

***(*)
Yes the Peter Brook production stands like the Colossus, intimidating all who dare stage this Weiss wonder. But snobbish superiority (one critic wrote of seeing the original at sixteen - firstly there is no way you can remember in any detail and secondly, I just don't believe you anyway) gets all too tiresome at times.

Perhaps Anthony Neilson includes too many of those post 9-11 references, and seemingly throws every sexual depravity and theatrical device at this RSC production. But Lisa Hammod's herald dwarf is strong and the obsessive masturbating of Duperret left some audience members looking at their feet...I've never laughed so much. The sisters, Coulmier and De Sade are also well defined but Marat and Corday gave me nothing. More spectacle than substance and too comic to be cruel.

Poisoned by drink

**** A book of depair and hope. A book where ultimately the reader's hopes remain unfulfilled. Nonetheless, a wonderful book.



Brendan Neiland at 70

***
It has become all too formulaic. The enlargements and reflections did once engage but now they appear flat and dead. Perhaps, after Richter, I am too much drawn to the application of paint, and thus, in comparison the bright patterns of masked shapes mean little.

The Tempest, Haymarket

***

Gerhard Richter : Panorama

*****
Three rooms in, and the exhibition was having little impact. But I like Richter. Actually I really like him; it could be the National Portrait Gallery exhibition was too recent or perhaps it was the Serrota et al. curating (I've never been a fan). But then it hit...and on seeing those mult-layered abstractions the puzzle was complete. It is remarkable how such an eclectic body of work (the black & whites, the photorealism, the glass sculptures, the painted photographs and abstracts) can appear so coherent, even reliant on one another. The work has inspired me, I know that it has influenced despite that I am yet to take up a brush. Yes I too have been applying paint with a squeegee, but it is much more than this because it seems as if Richter has declassified the secrets and importance of surface. And before I forget...well done Nick. The exhibition is a triumph.

Waiting for a drink

Hans Fallada's The Drinker has finally arrived after what seems like weeks. The experience of Alone in Berlin and the recommendation of a man who penned Narcissus and Goldmund tick all the right boxes.

Some new work

I've started to work on a number of paintings which are evolving from a series of Royal Academy life room drawings, colour notes and memory.

****½ stars in a cruel world

Everything Flow is a five star book but with One day in the live of Ivan Denisovich, The House of the Dead and Darkness at Noon as my constant points of reference, I just cant. Forget your books of history, here Grossman speaks the powerful, all be it opinionated, truth of Russia's thousand year culture of non-freedom. Through the recollections of the recently released Ivan we hear how both Lenin and Stalin continued this tradition. They are both European Marxists and Asian despots.The peoples revolution may have began in February 1917 but any liberal and bourgeois ideas of freedom were dead long before Lenin's good friend Gorky proclaimed kulaks as the enemy. Ivan the Terrible may have had the oprichniki enforcing his will on black horses clad with a dog's head and broom (a reminder of their duty to bite the enemy and sweep away treason), but Stalin had the gulag, Stalin had the terror famine, purges and Chekin and Stalin had the State to command at a whim.

Good to be back in USSR

It's a few years since Life and Fate left that mark so few books manage. After 100 pages Everything Flows seems set to replicate the feat...O what a pleasant change from the twelve disappointments on the Booker long list (sorry but I couldn't bring myself to read a book called Derby Day).

What was all the fuss about...

***
...one might have thought after seeing Edward Bond's Saved at the Hammersmith Lyric. Yes it impressed, but only to a point. Len's dogged but dopey persona shone and there were true instances of both pathos and humour from mum and dad. Yet, Pam's anger was never quite enough and one needed Dali-like powers to imagine the pram was anything but empty.

Hell and damnation still reign

Wonderful John Martin exhibition at Tate Britain was well worth the visit, especially so the mezzotints and works inspired from Milton's Pandemonium. Perhaps less certain was the Victorian viewing experience of The Last Judgement triptych; but what other use is there for all those LCD projectors the Tate must have in store (when the Turner prize is not on show).
ps don't waste time on the early Barry Flanagan, it is truly awful