Sherlock Holmes and the case of the icon decrypted

Author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle provided the key element of the Sherlock Holmes myth - the character himself - with his scientific approach to crime, his bohemian lifestyle and his restless curiosity.

Art: How Turner squared up to the oblong tendency

Late Turner: Painting Set Free
Tate Britain

For the longest time pictures were brick-shaped. Photographs in an album and portraits on the wall were often pre-figured to the Golden Ratio, that pleasing aspect that had mathematical as well as aesthetic qualities.

Exhibition: Nelson, Navy, Nation at National Maritime Museum, Greenwich

From this distance, Britain's unrivalled national hero Horatio Nelson appears to embody the entire span of glittering age of naval dominance such is his pre-eminence in our cultural consciousness.

And yet, definitive though his actions were, they spanned only a few years at the tail-end of the 1700s through to his victory - and celebrated death - at Trafalgar in 1805.

Technology: The shape of the future - in 3D

"We have an incredibly strong science base in the UK, second only to America. We have a very strong technology base - manufacturing is not dead - and we have a strong design base but they don't work together as much as they can."

Exhibition: Line of Kings, Tower of London

The mid-1600s was a precarious time to be king. The species was threatened. The reign of Charles I had been brought to a bloody end and the country's failed dalliance with republicanism had seen a fragile rapprochement with the concept of monarchy.

Exhibition: Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life, Tate Britain

Laurence S Lowry painted football matches. He painted evictions, and men at work and magnetised huddles around a suicide in the street.

Little wonder then that his work was popular and that popularity - as usual - was a double-edged sword, bringing him affection among "his" people and a derision and dismissal among the critics.

Exhibition: Visions Of The Universe, Greenwich

At the entrance to this new exhibition are four images of the Orion nebula. They represent all that this awe-inspiring collection aims to encompass - science, technology, history, beauty.

Exhibition: Alien Revolution, Greenwich

"No-one would have believed," writes HG Wells in his famous opening for The War Of The Worlds, "in the last years of the 19th century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's."

No-one would have believed! Wells clearly wasn't browsing the internet.

Someone somewhere is believing most things and the existence of life beyond our planet appears to be the receptacle of choice in which to decant the latest extreme thinking, providing a warm embrace for a spectrum of theories from the sinister to the scientific.

This new exhibition - with accompanying planetarium shows and talks - explores the history of ideas surrounding our search for extra-terrestrials.

What becomes apparent is that imposed upon ET are the beliefs, fears and hopes of the time he is sought, from the fantastical realms of life before the enlightenment, through the wrestling and wrangling with the anthropic principle on to the paranoia of the Cold War.

Although we are taking the whole business more seriously these days, the fact we are in thrall to Mars Curiosity's distant digging shows that romanticism is still rampant.

Carl Sagan said: "I am often asked, 'Do you believe in UFOs?' I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, 'How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?'"

Although right about extra-terrestrials, Sagan misses the point about the humans posing the question.
In response to the Big Question about whether there is or isn't either answer is so mind-blowing that religiosity has the best vocabulary.

Until Sept 8, go to rmg.co.uk.

Image: Lunar Life by Leopoldo Galluzo, 1836 © Smithsonian

Exhibition: Ansel Adams, NMM

EXHIBITION
Ansel Adams: Photography From The Mountains To The Sea
National Maritime Museum
★★★★✩

IN A NUTSHELL
America's photographic pioneer receives a rare British outing focussing on his studies of water.

REVIEW
So that's one big US question sorted. (A. Barack Obama.) But there are plenty more that remain unresolved - about the changing character of America and whether global decline should be managed or rejected in the face of economic uncertainty and China's dominance.

The traditionalist Republicans are licking their wounds, wondering how the "white establishment" - products of the founders and the pioneers - will fare against the growing coalition of minorities who are increasing vocal in their demands and less attached to the nation's Euro-centric backstory.

Little wonder then, in a nation where the journey is still a significant metaphor, that the chronicling and conquering of the landscape has an extra resonance, suggesting permanence and progress at a time when there is little evidence of either.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was a pioneer in the field of photography and, to a lesser extent, in conservation. He was just such a maker of icons.

His name stays in the pantheon because he comfortably reflects the best of America back to the Americans.

Adams captured the contrasts - the unyielding rock against the ephemeral spring - and, in doing so, impressed upon the unruly landscape a sense of conquest, pattern and purpose.

Adams is not so much known in Britain but that may change with a rare compilation of 100 original prints on display in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich.

He is best known for his rugged landscapes but the "maritime" theme is evoked with the movement of water, the capturing of moments beyond the reach of the painter.

Waterfalls, geysers, rapids, ponds, seascapes - he pointed his camera wherever water worked, perhaps inspired by the view of the San Francisco bay from his childhood home.

Something of a misfit, the precocious Adams found school impossible and he was sent with an open pass to the year-long 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco which was a hotbed of new cultural thinking. Cubism, Picasso and the possibilities of a new century percolated in his young mind.

Guest curator Phillip Prodger said: "One of the things I wanted to do was get at some of the radicalism and the experimentalism of Ansel Adams when he came on the scene.

That he wasn't just a maker of pretty pictures but he also contributed philosophically to the advancement of photography as an artform."

Adams' first picture - found by Prodger in the archives - was taken when he was 13 and was of the world's fair itself. Although made in the classic Victorian "pictorial style" - soft and sentimental - he labelled it Portals Of The Past suggesting he, too, was hungry to embrace radical concepts and progressive interpretations.

His journey, through his life and captured in this exhibition, showed he was in the forefront of the Modernist movement - taking photos that were hard, uncompromised, sharp and uncontrived.

This austerity of style encompassed the Group f/64 movement (named after a lens aperture that tightens depth of field) whose manifesto rejected any ideological notion of art and aesthetics.

However, he was restless, artistically and geographically. He became a perennial retoucher in the darkroom.

He would say the negative was the equivalent of a music score and the print, the conductor's performance.

In fact, he was, in his later years, as much a print maker as a photographer and the vast American Trust murals of the '50s, on show in the exhibition, demanded innovative thinking and precise execution, revealing a craftsman and perfectionist at the height of his powers.

He said: "A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels in the deepest sense about what is being photographed."

This exhibition is the fullest expression of Ansel Adams - a restless life in search of moments, of beauty and order in a reckless landscape.

■ Ansel Adams: Photography From The Mountains To The Sea, until April 28, £7, rmg.co.uk.

Image: Clearing Winter Storm, Yosemite National Park, California, about 1937 Photograph by Ansel Adams. Collection Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Exhibition: Alan Turing out of the shadows

Mathematician and genius Alan Turing burnt bright and brilliant and briefly yet, for all that he was, he was never appreciated in his lifetime beyond the confines of his peers.

The conspiracies and circumstance set in place to ensure he remained obscure appear formidable.

Firstly, he operated in great secrecy in the (now) legendary Bletchley Park, helping to decipher the Nazi Enigma code.

There was an unbreakable bond of silence among Bletchley veterans that kept their work secret long after it needed to be so. War time leader Winston Churchill called his codebreakers "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled".

So effective was this secrecy that Bletchley's (and Turing's) remarkable advances only began to emerge in the '80s and 90s. By that time, the notion that the US was the pioneer of the computer age was firmly entrenched and Turing long dead.

Secondly, he was gay at a time when to be so was illegal and, in society's eyes, shameful.

An inquest ruled he committed suicide at the age of just 41 after swallowing a bottle of cyanide - although the verdict has been called into question.

It was 1952 and he had been convicted for committing a homosexual act and, in doing so, lost his security clearance and access to his computers.

David Rooney, curator on the Science Museum's new Code Breaker exhibition, said "Turing, who had undoubted eccentricities, was regarded with affection by colleagues. His treatment at the end of his life is a source of national shame.

"The exhibition is an opportunity to present the remarkable work of a man whose influence reaches into perhaps the most widespread pastime of the 21st century, the use of the personal computing device, yet whose name is probably unfamiliar."

If the secrecy was a constant guard against recognition, there was a third obstacle: the field in which he chose to excel - maths and computational science is fiendishly complex.

Indeed, if there is a weakness in the excellent and moving exhibition marking the centenary of his birth, it is in the nature of the exhibits.

While they are authentically dented, scraped, dusty and aged, their metal carapaces, occasional flick-switches and lack of recognisable function promote the idea they are the pointless products of abstract mind games.

In fact, these were the machines that took mechanical calculating devices - the sort that Victorian Charles Babbage would recognise - and pushed them on to the utilitarianism of the computer.

Key to that journey was the philosophical and conceptual framework of the computing device - Turing wrote the rulebook. He outlined what a computer was, how it would function, what it would do.

One of his legacies is a hypothetical device called a Turing machine - a device that simulates the cold logic of a computer algorithm.

But the exhibition demonstrates that Turing was far from such a machine himself.
On show are personal letters that soften the hard reproach of his familiar dark-eyed portrait to reveal a very human soul.

He lost a friend to TB when they were very young and his letters to the boys' mother are sensitive, supportive and insightful.

Rooney said: "We are able to show a more complete portrait of the man who, far from being the lone genius of popular belief, can be seen as a character with many endearing qualities."

Such was the extraordinary and devastating impact of Christopher Morcom's death, that it incubated in Turing the thought - or maybe the wish - that the mind could survive the body, a philosophical question that took him to psychic and paranormal investigation and on to the first stirrings of artificial intelligence.

Who knows where he would have ended up had he lived to yoke the extraordinary power of modern computers to his unfettered imagination and precise humanity?

In 2009 Prime Minister Gordon Brown apologised on behalf of the nation for the "appalling way" Alan Turing was treated simply for being gay.

Fittingly, pressure for an apology arose from an online petition to No.10 - an army of binary digits rallying to redeem their first champion, perhaps?

■ Code Breaker: Alan Turing's Life And Legacy, FREE, Science Museum, until June 2013, sciencemuseum.org.uk.

Science Museum conservator Bryony Finn inspects the Pilot ACE computer - formerly the fastest computer in the world in the 1950s and fundamentally designed by Alan Turing

Exhibition: Royal River, National Maritime Museum

This Jubilee year will see the greatest flotilla of ships to sail down the Thames for more than 350 years.

It will reprise the great heritage of the Thames as the capital's "grandest street" and bring to life the 500 years of enterprises and ambitions that a new exhibition aims to depict.

In a year of landmark cultural events, Royal River at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, takes its place on the podium - although "watermark" would be a more suitably aqueous adjective.

From the grand Canaletto at the entrance, through to the gilded figureheads, chalices, trumpets, uniforms and miniatures, this is an authentic and opulent experience of the Thames as royal and political canvas.

Among the artefacts are the oldest known copy of Handel's Water Music, Anne Boleyn's personal music book, and stern carvings from royal yachts.

Ahead of the opening by the Queen, on Wednesday, guest curator David Starkey toured a preview.

He said: "This exhibition is a feast for the eyes and the senses. It evokes the sights, sounds and even the smells of half a millennium of royal river pageantry and popular celebration. Royal River also shows how the grandest river pageants have been used to celebrate. the coronation of Tudor and Stuart Queens.

"What more appropriate way of celebrating the Diamond Jubilee of the Queen, who will herself lead another grand royal river pageant?"

Using the establishment of the Woolwich Royal Dockyards 500 years ago as its starting point, the exhibition thematically and chronologically depicts the river's popular fortunes.

For much of the 500 years, the Thames was the focus of city's celebrations but, as the river became an open sewer, London turned up its nose.

The construction of the Embankment was the high water mark of this rejection although the Palace of Westminster, without water gates, indicated the general displeasure.

The Lord Mayor's procession, as captured by Canaletto, moved from water to land in 1857 but this grand exhibition, and the Thames Jubilee Pageant in June, may finally signal a return to royal favour.

- Until Sept 9, Royal River: Power Pageantry And The Thames, National Maritime museum, rmg.co.uk

Image © National Maritime Museum