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This Season: for our theatre highlight, Emily Bobrow picks the British premiere of "Red Light Winter", a love triangle that's set in Amsterdam...
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Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was several people in one. A political partisan and rebellious spirit, he was also a painter, illustrator, architect, draughtsman, costume designer and sculptor. His private life was a whirlwind: Frida Kahlo was wife No 3, and 4 (they married, divorced and remarried). But Rivera’s real love affair was with the wall. Bursting with colour, packed with detail and full of fantasy, his murals are mind-boggling. Like meaty scenes from an epic novel, they are magical storyboards that find their way deep into the imagination. 

Strongly influenced by the Mexican revolution, Rivera believed in art for all. He wanted his work to be accessible, on public walls, not just gallery ones. In 1931, the Museum of Modern Art in New York offered him a big solo show. Arriving six weeks early, he was given an empty gallery to create eight portable murals. Eighty years later, five of them are back where they began. 

They appear alongside a selection of drawings, watercolours and prints plus Rivera’s controversial designs for the Rockefeller Centre, begun while in residence at MoMA. “Frozen Assets” is the most surprising mural on show. It’s American, not Mexican, and shows New York’s jagged skyline, an unemployment shelter and a bank vault. It’s a gutsy statement to make mid-Depression. When Rivera arrived in New York, almost a quarter of all Americans were unemployed. His work asked big questions. During a global crisis, how could art tackle social and economic problems? If only we had the answer.

~ OLIVIA WEINBERG 

Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art  MoMA, New York, November 13th to May 14th 

Paul McCartney is one of the most important figures of 20th-century music. 

Therein lies the dilemma. 

Can the 69-year-old former Beatle pull off writing a ballet? Will he break new ground? How will this addition to his repertoire affect his standing in music history? 

Those were the questions looming in the air on September 22nd as Sir Paul debuted his most recent classical composition, "Ocean’s Kingdom", as part of New York City Ballet’s Fall Gala performance at Lincoln Centre. 

There was some excitement when the curtain lifted and Sara Mearns (“Princess Honorata”), a sumptuous NYCB principal, floated in front of a tourmaline-coloured backdrop wearing a gauzy seafoam creation courtesy of Sir Paul’s daughter Stella. The textures of the sheer fabrics, the undulating light from the video projections, the dancer’s eloquent arm extensions and the lush strings of the NYCB Orchestra spun the elder McCartney’s signature three-note melody into a fleeting moment of ballet-making magic. It wasn’t quite rapturous, but definitively hummable—and a great start. 

Glimpses of that synergy flashed intermittently over the next 50 minutes, but for the most part the elements of “Ocean’s Kingdom” were disjointed, yielding sighs of disappointment at what was expected to be a triumph in the worlds of music, fashion and dance.    read more »

St Pancras Station is a fitting place to encounter the work of Lavinia Greenlaw, a British poet and novelist. Artangel and the Manchester International Festival have commissioned Miss Greenlaw’s project “Audio Obscura”, a sound installation on the concourse adjacent to the Eurostar entrance, which opened in London on September 13th (having premiered in Manchester in July). Through individual headphones, up to 30 people can listen to a series of overlapping monologues and fragments, as if overhearing the thoughts of commuters walking by.
 
For a poet interested in fleeting moments and “the body’s memory of a stranger”, this immersive set-up is apt. Miss Greenlaw roots her poetry in the everyday, making the familiar suddenly strange. “Audio Obscura” is similarly an experience that juxtaposes artful sound with the daily hustle. As a participant, I found the effect of the first ten minutes startling. Moving about in the crowd, with the ordinary sounds of the station blocked out, I momentarily forgot that I was wearing cumbersome headphones and walking slower than everyone else, as the throngs rushed past to catch a train or meet someone. In the soundscape Miss Greenlaw has created, people seem to mutter their thoughts or observe others from afar. This world blends seamlessly with that of St Pancras, blurring seductively with the bystanders walking nearby. Like members of a Greek chorus, the inadvertent performers of the train station switch identities and take on different parts. Where before I may have wondered where my fellow commuters were headed, in “Audio Obscura” I began to wonder who could think these thoughts.
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When Robert Rauschenberg died in 2008 at the age of 82, he left behind one of the most diverse and respected bodies of artwork produced in the 20th century. Known largely for his painting and sculpture, he also dabbled in printmaking and performance art. Sometimes he went so far as to combine these media into a single unified work.  

Photography was one of Rauschenberg’s greatest passions and unsung talents. While studying at North Carolina’s Black Mountain College in the 1940s he seriously considered becoming a photographer rather than a painter. Although he ultimately favoured the brush—the established tool of serious artists—he never lost his love for photography, and often incorporated photographic images into his artworks. “I think a painting is more like the real world if it’s made out of the real world,” he once said.

Many of his early photographs have survived, but have been largely overlooked until recently. To celebrate their discovery, a new book called “Robert Rauschenberg: Photographs 1949-1962” will be released on October 31st. The collection includes rare portraits of contemporaries such as Cy Twombly—who is seen standing among Roman relics in 1952 (pictured top)—and Jasper Johns, as well as streetscapes and some startling images recorded while Rauschenberg was travelling as a young man.   read more »

"Degas and the Ballet”—now there’s an exhibition title to put a person off. It just screams of being an inevitable blockbuster, and who wants to feel like a lemming? I planned to skip the show, which opens at the Royal Academy of Arts on September 17th. I wanted to avoid any tooth and mind decay from sugar overload. All those soft, pretty colours and all those girls in their tutus—an all too apt illustration for the genre called, not very sweetly, chocolate box. On top of all this loomed the grim fact of Edgar Degas’s anti-Semitism.   

And yet I went. My change of heart had a very unlofty trigger: I was invited to the preview party. As Bank NY Mellon sponsored the show, this reception promised more than the RA’s typical spread of cheese-flavoured bread sticks. I am glad I was seduced. The party was fine, but the show is terrific. Not all of it, but plenty. And despite what has sometimes felt like over-exposure to Degas, there are welcome surprises, too.  

In addition to some 90 examples of the artist’s drawings, pastels, paintings and sculpture, there are photographs, sculptures and films by his contemporaries, as well as three photographs he took. The lead curators of the show, Richard Kendall and his wife Jill DeVonyar (an ex-ballet teacher), have researched the relationship between Degas and those experimenting with still and moving images. The show's forays into these parallel developments are sometimes engaging, but without question it is the art of Degas that makes this a show worth seeing.      read more »

“It is a phoenix that rose out of the ashes of Grosvenor House,” says Geoffrey Munn, managing director of Wartski, a London jeweller. He is talking about the Masterpiece fair, which has just finished its second year alongside the river Thames. When Grosvenor, the grande dame of London’s annual art and antiques fairs, shut down in 2009, Masterpiece was one of two new fairs to have emerged, along with Brian and Anna Haughton’s Art Antiques London, which took place in Kensington Gardens in early June. After maiden voyages last year, both improved in 2011.

Art Antiques London is pitched to mid-range collectors with an emphasis on exceptional ceramics. Masterpiece is a bigger and glitzier bird, which aims to exhibit the best of the best. A visitor to this more ambitious fair, which closed on July 5th, could have taken home some 18th-century scenic wallpaper (at Carolle Thibaut-Pomerantz); a sleekly sensual, modern white sofa (Ciancimino); a series of four Commedia dell’Arte paintings by Giandomenico Tiepolo (Dickinson); a sapphire blue Rolls-Royce (pictured); or a Spitfire plane. The stands are generously proportioned, the colours soothingly neutral and the aisles thickly carpeted. For the peckish, there were outposts of the fashionable Le Caprice and Harry’s Bar.

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It is quite an experience to walk into the Museum of Modern Art on a carefree summer’s day and be confronted with Boris Mikhailov's photographs. Nineteen larger-than-life pictures surround the viewer. A man lies sleeping, possibly passed out, a striking figure in a black coat against the white snow. Another man faces away from the lens, his bare back revealing blood gathering in the sores. A thin young girl with sallow, translucent skin, shorn hair and a pink shirt, is captured in an odd, distant gaze.

Born in Ukraine, Mr Mikhailov shot these photographs in Kharkov in 1997 and 1998. He visited this industrial Ukrainian city after the fall of the Soviet Union and found that many people, including those who were previously middle class, had been displaced and were now homeless. Mr Mikhailov was disturbed that despite the “shiny wrapper” of Western modernity, people were starving, suffering from disease and resorting to prostitution. He spent a year taking the pictures that would eventually become “Case History", a 400-photograph series and book. The MoMA show is the first time these pictures have been exhibited in the America. Some of the series, shown at a much smaller size, are also on view at the Tate Modern in the show  “Photography: New Documentary Forms” until March 2012.  read more »

Frustrated Wagner fans may see some good cheer approaching from a strange quarter. It is notoriously difficult to get tickets for the annual Bayreuth Festival in Germany, which runs through the entire canon of Richard Wagner’s operas: the average waiting time for a seat is nine years, if you stick out persistent disappointment in the yearly ballot.

But things may change. On June 15th bean-counters at the Bundesrechnungshof, the federal audit office, recommended to parliament that the festival, which gets more than €5m ($7.2m) a year of public money, should change the way it allocates tickets. Only 40% are sold directly to the public; a mere 16% if it is a premiere. Ill-explained “quotas” take care of the rest: the Society of Friends of Bayreuth gets 23% for its members. Around 30% go to travel agents, who wrap them into hugely expensive tours, or to corporate sponsors, for entertaining those they want to impress. The Federation of German Trades Unions has one closed performance for its own big night out (at a reduced rate); until 2009 it had two. The city of Bayreuth gets an allocation to lavish on regional and other guests. Chancellor Angela Merkel and spouse are regular visitors, though their tickets may not be free.

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At the back of the Art Healing Ministry, there was a woman offering refreshments: “Would you like art-infused water or vodka? Botticelli or Lichtenstein flavour?”

With a dash of liquid Botticelli burning in my throat I explored the health-giving wares. The Art Healing Ministry is a pop-up store on Thompson Street in New York City’s SoHo, run by Alexander Melamid, a Russian conceptual artist. His previous projects include teaching elephants how to paint and creating work based on polling people on what they wanted to see in a painting (both of these with his former partner Vitaly Komar). On opening night the space was full of girls with red lipstick and nice shoes. The party spilled onto the sidewalk, where Mr Melamid held court, gesturing wildly, his frizzy grey hair in constant motion.

Mr Melamid has created an environment where art, commerce, medicine, irony and earnestness intersect. Suffering from prostatic hyperplasia? Try the art anal infuser (an enema bulb stuck to a VHS tape recorder, put behind glass). In need of something less invasive? Book a seat in the art therapy chair (pictured). There you may enjoy a private session with the artist, and have works of art projected on to your face.  read more »