Tom Stoppard, Leopoldstadt (directed by Patrick Marber, Wyndhams Theatre)
The Stoppard play is a familiar unfamiliar beast: a pastiche of a known genre or text meshed with a philosophical idea or two, told in witty dialogue. Tosh a Beckettean Hamlet at probability theory or quantum mechanics at John Le Carré. The downside for some — I don’t agree — is characters as cyphers and an emotional shallowness.
Shrugs. Continue reading →
Klimt/Schiele: Drawings from the Albertina (Royal Academy of Arts, 4 November 2018-3 February 2019)
The Albertina Collection was founded in 1776 by Duke Albert of Saxe-Teschen and now has a million drawings and prints, which rarely see the light. Here, marking the joint centenary if their deaths we get a joint exhibition of, well, not quite Master and Pupil, but evidently of two of the leading Austrian artists of the first two decades of the twentieth century. As the medium is drawing, and the fame behind Klimt is for paintings such as The Kiss and we probably know Schiele through his drawings, the younger man will win this draw off.
Continue reading →
One of the most loved paintings in the world is Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss (1907-8), aka The Lovers. Sometimes I’m in agreement with this — Edvard Munich’s Scream and Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflowers. It was bought by the Austrian Gallery before it was completed, originally shown at the Lower Belvedere and in the Upper Belvedere since then.
This canvas is nice, but it doesn’t quite do it for me. I saw a load of Klimt drawings alongside works by Egon Schiele at the Royal Academy of Arts, but Schiele won. He was, however, key to a generation of Viennese artists before the end of the First World War.
Subject to Change 