Modernism
Don’t read Ulysses; listen to it
Don’t read James Joyce’s Ulysses, says John Phipps. Listen to it
A play for bureaucrats: David Hare's Straight Line Crazy reviewed
It’s good of Nicholas Hytner to let Londoners see David Hare’s new play before it travels to Broadway where it…
The genius of Iannis Xenakis
This year is the centenary of the birth of Iannis Xenakis, the Greek composer-architect who called himself an ancient Greek…
Abstract and concrete: the beauty of brutalism
Nothing divides the British like modernist architecture. Traditionalists are suspicious of its utopian ambitions and dismiss it as ugly; proponents…
Ralph Vaughan Williams: modernist master
He is caricatured as a populist and purveyor of ‘folky-wolky’ melodies, says Richard Bratby, but Vaughan Williams was a modernist master of uncompromising originality
Disappointingly conventional and linear: BBC radio's modernism season reviewed
This week marks the beginning of modernism season on BBC Radio 3 and 4, which means it’s time for some…
When did postmodernism begin?
There’s a scene in Martin Amis’s 1990s revenge comedy The Information in which a book reviewer, who’s crushed by his…
The Sunday Feature is one of the most consistently interesting things on Radio 3
The story is likely apocryphal — and so disgraceful I almost hesitate to tell it — but it goes like…
Deserves to be much better known: Sophie Taeuber-Arp at Tate Modern reviewed
Great Swiss artists, like famous Belgians, might seem to be an amusingly underpopulated category. Actually, as with celebrated Flemings and…
Welcome to the Impasse Ronsin – the artists’ colony to beat them all
Rosie Millard is transported to the Impasse Ronsin, a tiny, squalid cul de sac in Paris’s 15th arrondissement that was once the centre of the modern-art world
The magnificent fiasco of Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House
John Ruskin believed the most beautiful things are also the most useless, citing lilies and peacocks. Had he known about…
Why did David Bomberg disappear?
David Bomberg was only 23 when his first solo exhibition opened in July 1914 at the Chenil Gallery in Chelsea.…
The man who built Britain’s first skyscraper
In 2011 Britain’s first skyscraper was finally given Grade I listing. The citation for 55 Broadway — the Gotham City-ish…
How Camilla’s grandfather helped popularise the architecture Prince Charles detests
Was the Bauhaus the most inspired art school of all time or the malignant source of an uglifying industrial culture…
Notre Dame is an architectural nullity
Notre Dame is only important from a Shakespeare’s-birthplace point of view. Architecturally it is a nullity beside the cathedrals of…
Merce Cunningham’s work was magical, intangible, Einsteinian – revival is futile
On Tuesday, thousands of miles apart, in three great cities, London, New York and Los Angeles, 75 dancers will dance…
Powerful elegy for a world that is slipping away: Tate Britain’s The Asset Strippers reviewed
There was a moment more than 20 years ago when Bankside Power Station was derelict but its transformation into Tate…
Here’s what I want from modern architecture, explains housing tsar Roger Scruton
The creation of a commission to examine beauty in new building created a stir in the media, with the chairman…
Is modernist architecture unhealthy?
Architects and politicians have a lot in common. Each seeks to influence the way we live, and on account of…
Modernist architecture isn’t barbarous – but the blinkered rejection of it is
When I was younger, one of my favourite books was James Stevens Curl’s The Victorian Celebration of Death. His latest…
Modernist architecture only worked for the wealthy
It was Le Corbusier who famously wrote that ‘A house is a machine for living in’ (‘Une maison est une…
This adaptation of Miss Julie is a textbook lesson in how to kill a classic
Polly Stenham starts her overhaul of Strindberg’s Miss Julie with the title. She gives the ‘Miss’ a miss and calls…
Embarrassing – but electrifying: Bernstein 100 reviewed
‘There is something enviable about the utter lack of inhibition with which Leonard Bernstein carries on,’ wrote the critic of…
The old ways
I’m sitting across a café table from a young man with a sheaf of drawings that have an archive look…
The shimmering, restless, groovy fabrics of John Piper
A story John Piper liked to tell — and the one most told about him — is of a morning…
