Review: The Real Van Gogh, Royal Academy

ART
The Real Van Gogh: The Artist And His Letters
Royal Academy Of Arts
5/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Van Gogh gets to explain himself and his paintings via his prodigious correspondence.

REVIEW
The lighting is low as you enter the main galleries of Burlington House. They will say it is to protect the pigment in the paintings and the raw, sepia ink on the revealing personal letters of Vincent Van Gogh.

But, for me, it is as if low lighting keeps the wild and fidgety colours in their frames; as though, without the restraint of gloom, they would leap from the canvas and spill across floors in an infectious rainbow gush.

For somehow (and this exhibition explores the "somehow" in detail) Van Gogh, through diligence and application, burrowed deep into the unexplored ruffles and folds of the spectrum and emerged with a new colour or a dazzling tone which he would then apply to his canvas with the whirligig exuberance of a successful prospector.

That is one of the themes of the exhibition and the purpose of the letters - to dispel the myth of the ear-slashing lunatic driven solely by passion and torment.

We see the application of a man learning his craft with diligence and humility - indeed some of the sketches are exercises in perspective with the markings still visible.

He writes, mostly to brother Theo, with eloquence and thoughtfulness about his discoveries and how they will apply to his next work (often seen next to the letters).

And on squared paper accompanying his neat, italic hand, he sketches "croquis" - outlines of the piece in preparation which are, in themselves, miniature masterclasses in draughtsmanship.

And, because Theo can't see the colours in these reed pen sketches, Van Gogh tells him, coming alive as he tries to capture the richness and audacity of the palette he has planned.

Of Portrait of A Peasant Girl In Straw Hat (1890) he says: "Big yellow hat with a knot of sky blue ribbons, very red face. Coarse blue blouse with orange spots." Or of L'Arlesienne (1888): "The face grey, the clothing dark, dark, dark just unmixed Prussian blue." Or Cypresses (1899): "The green has such a quality. It's the dark patch in a sun-drenched landscape."

Sometimes his croquis are more prosaic - a sketch of a brush he wants his patron to supply or an easel he is constructing - but all the time he maintains an academic commentary on his prodigious output.

Often his letters attain the status of literature as he roves across his subjects - nature, friendship, religion - creating a self-portrait as compelling as the Self Portrait As An Artist (1888) which watches over this exhibition.

In another he writes: "These canvases will tell you what I can't say in words." It is almost an apology, his message struggling to find an outlet until he finds his stride and then magically there is an explosion of landscapes and portraits and studies. He applies paint like isobars, capturing the storm of energy now his quest has found its true course.

Spontaneity in execution, focus in preparation. This exhibition (sponsored by Wharf bank BNY Mellon) shows both sides of the man and the Royal Academy has worked wonders to bring together 65 paintings, 30 drawings and 35 rarely exhibited letters as evidence.

Curator Ann Dumas has wisely featured letters that contain sketches (as Van Gogh writes in French or Dutch) and has secured some wonderful loans - The Yellow House, Van Gogh's Chair - to tell a tale of a man whose heart may have been darkened with grimy torment but whose soul was bathed in sun-drenched colour.

Mostly this exhibition is an exercise in contrasts. And the contrasts between the perceptions of Van Gogh and his sober reality are as skewed and revealing as his brushstrokes.

- The Real Van Gogh: The Artist And His Letters continues at the Royal Academy Of Arts until April 18. Go to royalacademy.org.uk

Review: The Still Point

BOOK
The Still Point, by Amy Sackville
Portobello Books
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Julia picks over the diaries of her illustrious ancestor while examining the state of her marriage.

REVIEW
This book marks the debut of author Amy Sackville and she handles her task with confidence and a warmly engaging brand of poetical insight.

Her story features two distinct panoramas, yet there are links between them that the author examines with tender forensics.

Julia is intent on sorting out the mad tangle of inherited belongings in her old family house that once belonged to an illustrious ancestor.

A century before, Arctic explorer Edward Mackley set out to reach the North Pole... but he vanished without a trace, leaving his young wife to wait for decades for news, her fitful devotion chilling as the years of emptiness accrued.

As Julia reads the diaries that paint a picture of a promising but unfulfilled partnership, she has cause to reflect on her own marriage to Simon, measuring their solid but uneventful romance against the grand glory of a tragic passion.

But as the day passes, Julia begins to see cracks in the picture of Emily and Edward's romance - the story she had treasured since childhood - while her own relationship faces its own abrupt crisis.

The author meditates richly on the forms and measures of distance that can form between two people.

Review: The Secret History Of Georgian London

BOOK
The Secret History Of Georgian London
by Dan Cruickshank
Random House, £25

IN A NUTSHELL
The TV historian assesses how the wages of sin percolated through the London economy

REVIEW
TV's Dan Cruickshank is best known for his velvet-voiced appreciations of our urban landscapes and he ropes in his architectural know-how to help form the foundation of this major work.

But the subject of the book, subtitled How The Wages Of Sin Shaped The Capital, has all the hallmarks of a bedevilling lovely who caught his eye and lured him down an unexpected sidetrack.

It is as though, on a tea break, Cruickshank peered behind the elegant facades of Georgian London he so admires and alighted upon a world of immorality, duplicity and hypocrisy with all the down and dirty intrigue of a Hogarth etching.

Once there, behind the curtain, he finds that the sex industry, with all its brazen incontinence, tawdry hues and colourful characters, was a considerable economic and political force in the 18th century, with its influence spreading, like syphilis, to every echelon of society and every aspect of the culture - art, theatre, literature, architecture.

Cruickshank does not shirk from the seamier aspect of his challenge. He picks through the dirty laundry to pluck out tales of the moralists, the victims, the rakes and the harlots who peopled this wheeling, vivid capital of carnality.

Down wretched lanes of unspeakable deprivation he finds the artless lasses who came to London in search of work only to be betrayed by soulless crones and their predatory clientele. In the drawing rooms and bath houses, he alights upon flint-eyed ladies, who could turn a man's head and twitch his purse to elicit a fortune of their own.

Cruickshank paints a portrait of a capital ambivalent to the sexual tumult played out on its streets.

On one hand, high morality condemned the sin but saved the sinner, with homes for penitent prostitutes and help for their unfortunate offspring. On the other hand, the great and the good often saw women as little more than slaves to casual lust and attended Hell-Fire parties to express their libido in its full majesty.

Cruickshank explores all these aspects exhaustively and clinically but also with an eye to the amateur. For the nature of the subject and the manner of its study make this handsome book a welcome intersection between the very different circles of dry academia and wet-lipped soap opera prurience.

Review: Up In The Air (15)

FILM
Up In The Air (15)
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Jason Reitman directs George Clooney in a story about a corporate hatchet man whose jetset lifestyle is destabilised by two women.

REVIEW
Loneliness gets a bad rap. Look at Eleanor Rigby. For decades, we've been mistaking that spunky scouse lass as a victim in need of a little help from some friends.

What's that about? So she picks up the rice at a church where a wedding has been. Maybe she's a member of Keep Britain Tidy, or the RSPB, or maybe she has the biggest collection of edible grass seeds in the Liverpool area and she just needs a handful more to win an Uncle Ben Platinum Card.

So she leaves her face in the jar by the door. I have a bowl on the bookshelf where I put spare change and no-one composes a haunting lament finger-pointing my solitude.

Or take Ryan Bingham. A transition executive. A downsizer. A hatchet man. Goes from city to city telling people their working lives with the firm are over. Not a pleasant task. But he's happy enough because he can do it with a degree of panache and professionalism and, besides, it means he spends his life on the move and never has to stay for too long in his drab flat in Omaha.

Who has a problem with that?

Hollywood Romcom, she has a problem with that. What a glowering picture of contrasts that broad presents (bossy and swanky and over made-up but also with a soft centre and a penchant for ribbon-tied endings). Holly has a problem with the singular in her movies. Holly has a problem with Ryan, who she sees as a binary star system without a partner to pluck at his gravity. Holly sees an absence, an imbalance, a lop-sided equation that needs another integer.

Holly sets about trying to fix him by grounding him, by introducing preppie newcomer Natalie Keener (keener by name...) who thinks that video-conferencing is the way to go, threatening Ryan's freebird life choices and making him think about things. About life and stuff.

But Ryan's happy enough. He lives in the air, lives on the move "like a shark", with his neat zip-up tie case and check-in choreography and his eye for a gap in the line. He likes little packs of nuts and clean sheets and the fetishistic routines of travel.

He's happy. He's doing OK. Let him alone. Baggage with no baggage. He doesn't need Holly to send in Alex Goran (Vera Farmiga) with her matching ships-in-the-night outlook and her come-hither pencil skirts and her poker fan of rental car Gold Cards.

Director Jason Reitman tells a story for the age of austerity. Of redundancy, of sterile corporate affairs and wholesale disconnect.

He does it with some style - swish and witty - and most of all he makes it very grown-up. OK, so Holly hangs around (she's a spinster), interferes, presses her nose against the edit suite window, rapping frantically on the pane to get a look-in and Reitman, because he can't get on with his job for all this hullabaloo, makes noises to indicate that he understands the story arc Holly is shaping with her finger.

And he shows Holly the rushes - and we see Clooney and Farmiga in clinches, getting warm and fuzzy at his sister's wedding and doing the athletic coupling thing in hotel rooms - but, when Holly's back is turned, Reitman veers his own way. Just enough to show that he understands that life's more complicated than that and when the move turns to schmaltz it loses track of its dark, funny purpose.

Besides, leading man - George Clooney, effortlessly swave with his throat warbling baritone and his immaculate Windsor knots - has enough about him to make Ryan more than a two-dimensional sap, marching to the syncopated rhythm of the romcom drum.

Clooney brings to Ryan a tremble, a sense of melancholy far, far in the background that hesitantly edges forward, like a kid playing blind man's buff, strong enough to make its presence felt but timid enough to know its place.

So the film gets to pose questions - about the joys of home and family and barking dogs leaping up at returning masters - but the answer are not necessarily the ones Holly can sell on a one-sheet to the Mills and Booners back home.

This is a good, slight film with excellent performances throughout. Clooney wears his corporate exec like an Italian made three-piece. Farmiga is charming and warm and sophisticated and you can see why Clooney's bambi romancer would want to fetch up at the Marriott in Des Moines for another meddle in her minibar.

Anna Kendrick plays Natalie Keener with brio and heart. As the ramrod straight up-and-comer sent out on the road with Ryan for some experience, she dreams of carving a Natalie-shaped hole in the glass ceiling with the diamond on her ring finger. So her unravelling is broad and funny in a piece that tends, like an executive waiting room, to be tight, airless and understated.

I liked this movie a lot. I had a good time. There was me, Eleanor Rigby a couple of rows back, Akon by the fire escape and Bruce Banner knocking back the popcorn upfront. That was it. Loneliness frees up the neighbouring seat so you can set down your coat and there's no-one blabbing in your ear the whole time. About life and stuff.

Review: Retromancer

BOOK
Retromancer, by Robert Rankin
Gollancz, £14.99
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
More far fetched fiction from the prodigious inventor of curious anomalies and their bonkers consequences.

REVIEW
I imagine Robert Rankin to be that oddly-attired real ale fan at the end of the bar, content in his own company, occasionally laughing at a private joke of his own making.

But if you buy him a pint he'll tell you a fanciful, wicked and amusing tale of magic and mayhem.

He'll tell you another tale the next night, fuelled by another pint, and the tale might be similar to the first and there'll be something vaguely reassuring in the tics and repetitions and something irritating too because you wish he'd just get on with it.

But he's telling the tale not for you, although you are his patron, but for his own pleasure because he likes to take his inventions on manoeuvres and keep his linguistic musculature tip-top and circumnavigate his most peculiar and abundant imaginings, like a gardener tending his blooms.

The latest in Rankin's output of "Far-Fetched Fiction" is Retromancer, in which young hero Rizla finds himself in a Brentford overrun by the Nazis.

He must go back in time in the company of genius, magician and oddball Hugo Rune to pit his wits against dark foes in a series of Tarot-related challenges to restore a more obliging timeline.

If you like this sort of silliness, you'll like this because this, well, this is that sort of silliness. There really is no point asking Rankin to grow up. It's way too late.

Review: Life Ascending

BOOK
Life Ascending, by Nick Lane
Profile, £9.99
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
A series of eye-opening essays details the majesty and complexity of the 10 great inventions of evolution.

REVIEW
If one of your New Year resolutions is to bolster your brainpower, it would not be amiss to make your first action the purchase of this book.

For it holds two great steps towards that course. Firstly, it is pitched satisfyingly a notch higher than average popular science publications - which tend to be two notches below what's necessary to keep your mental faculties at a comfortable stretch.

This book will explain without patronising, with some big words but also without needless complication what you need to know - but you have to stay sharp to keep up. Which is a good thing.

Secondly, this book will guarantee to dislodge the last remnants of lobe-clinging cranium crud by dint of a neat non-biological process.

It will blow your bloody mind.

Accomplished science writer Nick Lane puts together a series of lucid and logical explanations of the sublime intricacies and mechanics of biological evolution that, surely, will inspire the awe of the most jaded January earth dweller.

We casually fling phrases like photosynthesis about - but the bio-chemical beauty of the process that oxygenated the planet (and could, if harnessed by man, end our climate crisis at a stroke) is beyond the realms of our meagre sense of wonderment.

The intelligent design fraternity may have lost the argument (don't tell them, they get agitated) but their base-level incredulity that the world can be so bafflingly splendid in its every aspect and in every scale is a sensation shared by evolutionists too.

Remember how disorientated you felt when you understood that time was relative? Einstein had to be kidding, right? Because if time is relative... wow, what the hell just happened?

Well, reading this series of explanations of DNA and sight and sex and death and photosynthesis and movement and the other "great inventions of evolution" offers the same blissful epiphanies on every page.