I find it hard to write about Mark Beech in the past tense. In my mind's eye, it's a Saturday afternoon in late summer, and I'm enjoying champagne and conversation with Mark and two other friends at the Arts Club, one of the many upscale London clubs that he's a member of (see picture). Mark is wearing a striped summer jacket and his famously boyish smile. He's doing what he likes: entertaining friends in style.

I first met Mark through his writing. We were both at Bloomberg, and he was beginning to contribute rock-music columns to Muse, the culture section. I was an arts correspondent but also a copy editor, so his pieces would come to me before publication. And they were really good: written in clear, sharp, tongue-in-cheek prose.

Before I knew it, Mark was an editor on the team, then my manager. For several years, I sat a few desks away from him.  Despite the pressures he was under and the ungodly hours he put in, Mark never raised his voice. He always stood up for his people, and stuck his neck out for them. I used to call him our 'nuclear umbrella.' 

Mark loved a little banter in the course of the day, and never hesitated to laugh at himself. "I have chips on both shoulders," he would say of his extensive collection of sports cars, which he drove on the weekend to Donnington, his vast farm in Herefordshire. He chuckled at the story of the British multimillionaire philanthropist I'd interviewed over lunch at a fancy restaurant, whose spotlessly shined shoe got stuck on an adhesive mousetrap. We laughed together at the wealthy wives turned philanthropists -- "the ladies who lunch" -- who were so desperate for the art world to take them seriously. 

And boy did he love his job. On a typical day, he'd come in early, his weighty leather briefcase slung over his shoulder, and settle into his office chair for the next 10 to 12 hours. From there, he would run the coverage, which might consist of a report on Nazi-looted art, an artist interview (from me),  an art review, a theater review, a food review. Then in the evening he'd rev up for a category of coverage he enjoyed immensely: contemporary-art auctions. The more stratospheric the prices, the juicier the story. Artworks often went for eight and nine digits, so there were plenty of headlines for Mark to send out, and much excitement to be had.

Mark was a man of many talents, and I wish he had nurtured some of them more. He could draw. I went up to his desk one day and asked him to sketch something. With a few strokes of the pencil, he drew the perfect armchair. I know he made drawings and paintings occasionally. It would be great to see them.

Mark never stopped his music writing, delivering his verdict on everything from Glastonbury to Gaga.
He developed a rock-star social-media following in the process: 1.2 million followers on his Twitter account (check it out). Here's a picture of him in rock-critic mode: 

Pictured on the left is the cover of his last book: "All You Need is Rock," published in 2014 (which I had the honor of proofreading, and for which he gave me an unforgettable mention in the acknowledgements). It's a compendium of his rock columns.

Leafing through it again, I find the chapter on Amy Winehouse particularly poignant.

Mark recalls dropping by a pub in Camden Town called the Hawley Arms, Amy's local, where she sometimes served drinks at the dawn of her fame. And she pours him a glass. "I suspect she wasn't sober," he writes. "But neither was I. She wasn't good with money, change or pouring the drinks -- the J20 went all over the place but the quantity of Gordons was extremely generous."

He then describes her rise and fall. "The tattoos multiplied, the Cleopatra kohl wings grew around her eyes. The heels became taller, the skirts shorter and her beehive hair piled higher. She was pictured everywhere, bruised, bloodied, intoxicated, dressed only in dirty bra and shorts."

In 2011, Mark covers her death. He then revisits Camden, reads the cards piled around her home, and revisits the Hawley Arms.

"I had a G&T for old times' sake, thought of her 5 million album sales and wrote up forecasts of that number doubling in fairly short order," he writes.

Nine years later, it's my turn to have a drink for old times' sake. And it'll have to be champagne, of course. Thinking of Mark.
​ 

​It's week 4 of the Coronavirus quarantine here in Paris. Like a few billion other people on the planet, I'm in confinement mode.

I step out once a day, to the supermarket, and am otherwise sealed off in a high-rise with views of a deserted Paris. When I stare down at the streets below, or take a stroll across the bridge (pictured), I see blue skies, trees in bloom, and all the promise of spring. Yet there are very few humans out on the streets.

The landscape feels lunar, as if we were living in another time and place, on another planet, or in a badly scripted dream. And all because of a lousy microscopic virus.

A paradox of a virus, I must say: completely innocuous to some, incapacitating and utterly deadly to others -- and at the same time, a bug that we're told we all have to catch before we can go back to normal. We live with that contradiction. We're terrified of catching the virus, observe its ravages, hear the gruesome statistics, grieve and mourn. Yet we also hope to catch it at some point, unwittingly, so we can be immunized and have the right to go out.

What happens next? Forecasting the future is a risky pursuit. With the exception of Bill Gates, who warned the world of a lethal pandemic five years ago, few can make predictions with accuracy. Still, the post-Corona world is likely to be be different from the pre-Corona world in a few respects. A number of pre-existing realities, beliefs, and behavior patterns are almost sure to go out the window. Here are a few:

• "Greed is good" -- That was the mantra of the main character in Oliver Stone’s movie “Wall Street”: Gordon Gekko (played by Michael Douglas). And it became the mantra of generations of men who turned into high-flying financiers, making millions if not billions in a single transaction, driving fast cars, buying expensive art, and collecting trophy girlfriends. Even after the 2008 financial crisis, the greed-is-good mentality prevailed among the world’s super-wealthy. Helped by ultra-low taxes and interest rates and a booming stock market, they accumulated assets -- property, cars, yachts, planes, artworks -- at a dizzying rate. Post-Corona, such flashy displays of greed and financial flamboyance will be less admired. The mood music, even among the world’s richest, will shift dramatically. Me-me-me individualism and markets-know-best capitalism will be overtaken by a concern for the common good and for the collective interest. And the shiny assets accumulated by the 1 percent and their copycats -- homes, cars, yachts, artworks -- will radically drop in value. Why? Just take a look at the U.S. unemployment figures: 10 percent of the U.S. workforce is out of a job. That's in the world's No. 1 economy. Imagine the outlook everywhere else.

• $500 million artworks -- Leonardo da Vinci’s “Salvator Mundi” sold at Christie’s for $450 million in 2017, reportedly to a Saudi royal. There have been plenty of other nine-digit painting sales at auction in recent years, including works by Picasso and Modigliani. The art market has been underpinned by greed (see above), one-upmanship, and bragging rights: the ability to say “My Picasso is bigger than yours” and be admired for it. Greed is not going away, and neither is one-upmanship. But in a world where millions are going to be out of work, and millions more impoverished -- not to mention the hundreds of thousands of virus deaths -- astronomical bidding wars over blue-chip art are unlikely. High-net-worth individuals with fancy collections will see their art holdings drop in value, and some will look to sell to limit their losses. So the market will quickly suffer from too much supply and too little demand. Paying nine figures for a painting will suddenly seem like folly. As for whether the buyer of “Salvator Mundi” got value for money…

• Mass tourism -- The world’s greatest museums and heritage sites have long been complaining of a phenomenon known as ‘overtourism’: too many travelers cramming into the Louvre to get a Mona Lisa selfie, and squeezing inside the Sistine Chapel to ogle the ceiling. They have posed a consistent threat to world heritage. Now, Coronavirus is slamming the brakes on overtourism. First, much of the world’s museums and heritage sites are currently closed. When they reopen, tourists from countries such as China, who accounted for so much of recent international travel, will stay home -- for economic reasons, yes, but also for fear of contamination and xenophobic attack. Inside museums, the numbers are going to drop dramatically, with a corresponding impact on revenue. The only beneficiaries are serious art lovers, who will finally be able to see artworks from up close.

• 300 art fairs a year -- Before Corona, the world was hosting some 300 art fairs annually, nearly one for every day of the year. Art had become a status symbol for the swelling numbers of new billionaires: a must-have, a luxury to accumulate alongside the homes, the cars, and the yachts. Now, with international travel seriously curtailed by the Coronavirus, stock markets tumbling, and so many companies threatened with extinction, the discretionary incomes of the high-net-worth will be seriously diminished. The biggest art fairs will survive this downturn. So will tiny, local, niche fairs catering to collectors who will be traveling less and still looking for nice items. But mid-sized fairs (like mid-sized galleries) will suffer, and some may well disappear.

Dale
Grant's 
photographs of flowers 
are exquisite: soothing and easy on the eye, particularly in these times of self-isolation, quarantine, and loss. They look like 17th-century Dutch paintings, still lifes executed in oil paint a few centuries ago. 



And yet they're contemporary creations. Dale has recently published a whole book of them, titled "Fading Beauty." Here are a few more of the images in the book:

s. 
Dale's fascination with flowers is no coincidence. He grew up in lush natural surroundings -- on the island of Nassau, in the Bahamas -- and enjoyed what he describes as a magical childhood, spent out of doors in year-round sunshine.

His first memory of flowers dates back to when he was 6 years old and staying at his grandparents' home, as often happened. "I remember my grandmother waking up early around 6 am each morning to pick the colorful hibiscus flowers that grew in her backyard before she went off to work. Together we would arrange the hibiscus flowers around the house. I treasure that memory," he recalls.

What undoubtedly also led Dale to photography was that his own mother was a studio portrait photographer, and in the late sixties, took a series of pictures of dahlias. "I remember looking at these photos every now and then throughout the years, and finding it odd that she photographed flowers, because it was so outside of her genre," he says. "It was not until I was producing my book that I had a lightbulb moment, and saw how my mother's only flower series somehow influenced my photography."

Dale came to photography in a roundabout way. He was studying International Relations at the American University of Paris when  he was introduced by friends to a fashion photographer and began assisting him on photo shoots. He realized that he had found his calling, and became a fashion, still life and portrait photographer, working internationally for a number of magazines and fashion houses.

As a photographer, Dale (pictured below) is known for his unique lighting style, which he puts to use in the flower series. What makes the series so delicate and poetic is that the flowers have bloomed and are beginning to wilt. "Flowers all begin life looking rather similar," he explains. "But it is at the moment when they begin to wither and eventually die that we witness their true individual beauty."

Dale's book can be ordered here: https://dale-grant.format.com/

Those are opening lines from a new novel by the Iranian-born author Maryam Diener (nee Banihashem). Educated at the Sorbonne and at Columbia University, she is the author of two other books (published under her previous name, Maryam Sachs). Her focus, this time, is Forough Farrokhzad -- the pioneering Iranian poet, who was the first woman to evoke female sexuality in Persian verse,  and who died tragically in a car accident at the age of 32 in 1967. Farrokhzad is considered one of most important figures in modern Iranian literature. 

“The catalyst was my trip to Tehran nine years ago, during which I became aware of how Forough’s voice resonated in the life of young Iranians,” Diener recalled. “Her grave -- a secret place of encounters for lovers, covered with messages and flowers -- is a testimony to the natural respect shown to Forough decades after her tragic death.”

What seemed clear was that the situation of Iranian women today was “not far from where she was 60 years ago,” said Diener, and that women today “need her courage to find a place” in their family lives, in the workplace, and in society at large.

Farrokhzad was a scandalous figure in her lifetime, and after the 1978-79 Revolution, her poetry was banned for at least a decade. 

Diener’s novel -- Beyond Black There Is No Color: The Story of Forough Farrokhzad -- is written in the first person, as if narrated by Forough herself, in a loose diary style. It depicts real-life episodes in Forough's life: her marriage as a teenager to a much older man, her early experience of motherhood and divorce, her affair with the married film director Ebrahim Golestan, and her 12-day stay in a leper colony, which became the subject of her award-winning documentary.

For those unfamiliar with the poet, the book is an introduction to her life and legacy. For those who know her well,  it is a reminder of the powerful voice that she was and is. 

In its "Overlooked No More" series devoted to deserving women who did not get obituaries at the time of their death, the New York Times quoted Farrokhzad as saying: "Perhaps because no woman before me took steps toward breaking the shackles binding women's hands and feet, and because I am the first to do so, they made such a controversy out of me."
 
For more information: http://www.quartetbooks.co.uk 

‭If you’ve never seen Akram Khan dance, hurry up and do something about it: he’s taking his last-ever full-length solo show “Xenos” around Europe, following its weeklong run at Sadler’s Wells in London. You have until February.

Khan is one of the most bewitching dancers alive - someone you could watch for hours on end without his movements ever looking dull or repetitive. British of Bangladeshi origin, he was trained as a kathak dancer, but has basically invented his own genre. His cupped hands can evoke a bird, or a fly, or a flower. They go slicing and coiling through the air at superhuman speed. He is nimble in the way few are.

“Xenos” is his homage to the untold thousands of soldiers from the Indian subcontinent who fought for Britain during World War I yet went unrecognised. He starts out performing a fairly classic kathak dance with two traditional musicians on stage, then puts shackles around his ankles and slithers and slides up and down a gravelly, muddy slope that represents the landscape of that brutal conflict. There’s not much narrative to it, and the musical accompaniment is fairly monotonous (except for a brief burst of Mozart’s Requiem). But Khan’s dancing makes up for it all.

Here’s where you can see him next: http://www.akramkhancompany.net/productions/xenos/.

Every year, the flamenco festival at the Sadler's Wells Theatre in London puts on a gala night with a mix of artists who take turns performing. Usually there are high points and low points. This year's gala was high-intensity from start to finish (and it continues tonight and tomorrow night). 

The evening was a tribute to La Chana: an extraordinary dancer, born into a gypsy family in Barcelona, who first performed at Sadler's wells 30 years ago. (My friend Margery Taylor saw her then, and had the program to prove it!)

Now an elderly lady seated center stage, she gave a powerful demonstration of  artistry -- from her chair. Accompanied by outstanding guitarists and singers, La Chana was a one-woman tornado. Her incredible feet beat on the stage like a pair of drumsticks, stunning the audience into silence - and a standing ovation.

The evening's other performers were led by the star dancer Antonio Canales, who performed what looked like an improvised solea with his signature charisma and   elegance, launching into a gripping zapateado at the end.

The younger generation was represented by El Farru, brother of the Sevillan superstar Farruquito, whose fiery footwork was at least as fast as his brother's. At the end of  an exhausting and frankly extraordinary zapateado, he grabbed a guitar and demonstrated his mastery at that too. A dancer and a musician!

The evening's other  female dancer was the rising star Gema Moneo, from the Moneo clan in Jerez de la Frontera. She exuded strength, confidence, and an ageless femininity, her style a carryover from earlier times, and her feet regularly reaching fever pitch.

The show is on tonight and tomorrow night, so if you're in London, go! 
www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/2018/flamenco-festival-london/

There are plenty of husband-and-wife teams in the exhilarating world of flamenco. Most of them are dancer-guitarist tandems. Bailaor and bailaora couples are rare, especially at the very top of the art form.

That's one reason why Angel Munoz and Charo Espina are special. Another reason is their extraordinary artistry  -- abundantly demonstrated as they made their triumphant return to Sadler's Wells last week with the Paco Pena Flamenco Dance Company.


Paco Pena played beautiful guitar, as effortlessly as he always does, and there was fine music and dancing for most of the night (as well as some a capella soul singing by an American vocalist that was a little jarring for my taste). But my two peak moments were the solos by Charo and Angel. And the audience seemed to agree.

Let's start with Charo first. As my (flamenco) friend Yumi Whyte points out, Charo does moves nobody else can do. She has one of the most pliable bodies I have ever seen in a dancer. Her back bends are superhuman, and her slender arms have incredible elasticity. At Sadler's Wells, she performed an alegria that fit her like a glove. Dressed in a charcoal-and-mustard outfit (pictured on the poster above), she was grace itself. She ended the dance in a piece of thunderous footwork, performed with the same lightness and grace. Here she is at curtain call: 

Then came Angel's solo: a solea that quickly accelerated into a buleria and that showed why he's one of the top male dancers in flamenco -- dexterity, an incredible sense of rhythm, a suave and gentle style, and a signature flick of the shoulder. He made his exhausting finale look like a walk in the park. Here he is at curtain call, cheering the audience, and applauding the rest of the cast. 

I look forward to seeing flamenco's golden couple back on the London stage soon.

The David Hockney retrospective that recently closed at Tate Britain was one of the highlights of my art year -- and not because I'd interviewed the artist months earlier. There were so many visual treats, despite the hodge-podge nature of the presentation, and the inclusion of a few dud paintings. I was sure I'd never again see that incredible room of double portraits.

Well, I saw it again yesterday - in Paris, and in the Pompidou's version of the retrospective, which turns out to be even better than the Tate version. To start with, the spaces are wider and airier, making the room of double portraits even more of a knock-out. Beyond that, curator Didier Ottinger -- one of the Pompidou's big names -- has done what he's supposed to do: curate, choose, select, weed out. The resulting assortment is more coherent, more thought through, and more beautiful.

There is one huge room of pool paintings, a symphony in blue. There's a much larger quantity of drawings, showcasing Hockney's incredible draugtsmanship. And there is that mammoth wonder from the Tate's own collections: 'Bigger Trees on Warter' (2006), a massive grid of juxtaposed canvases representing the woods of Yorkshire. (Why wasn't that at Tate Britain, I wonder?)

The other strong point of the Pompidou show are the wall texts. Ottinger actually makes you see correlations between Hockney and past masters such as Piero Della Francesca, or Vermeer, or Dubuffet, or Balthus. He gets you to look beyond the surface explosions of color and notice how art history is referenced by Hockney every step of the way. That's what exhibitions are supposed to do.

The weakest parts of the show are the Polaroids - the images look yellow in the dimmed room - and the iPhone and iPad paintings, which are few and far between. No doubt Ottinger thought they weren't masterpieces, and he's right. But technology influenced Hockney hugely, and should have been represented more.

That's a small gripe compared to the overall joy of the Pompidou show. I will go back, and back again, until it closes in October. Meanwhile, Hockney turns 80 this weekend, so wishing him a Happy 80th.

Flamenco has a wide range of musical forms: happy, sad, in between. The noblest is the solea. Melancholy, soulful and slow, it is fiendishly difficult to dance. And no living dancer performs it like Eva Yerbabuena.

Eva is so famous for her solea that, no matter how avant-garde a show she puts together, she feels duty-bound to perform it at the end. It's what the aficionados pay for. And at her four sold-out Sadler's Wells performances in London last week, they got their money's worth.

Apariencias, her new show, veered a little off course, initially. There was a Guinean-born vocalist, Alana Sinkey; there were bossa nova harmonies mixed into guitarist Paco Jarana's sophisticated musical arrangements; there were masks and skulls and men in skirts; and there was a bald female dancer wearing long patterned robes who struck statuesque poses and did little dancing. The overall theme was not entirely clear -- and the Sadler's Wells program notes failed to dispel the mystery.

Fortunately, a quartet of fine male dancers - including the talented Cristian Lozano - came to the rescue, performing together and solo, and delivering footwork pyrotechnics to the excited audience.

The piece de resistance, of course, was Eva herself and her solea, accompanied by the exceptional vocals of Jose Valencia and Alfredo Tejada. Appearing in a dark layered dress with two flowers perched in her hair, Eva emoted with every verse, sometimes delivering nothing more than a shrug of the shoulder or a flick of the wrist. The picture above gives a pretty good sense of her intensity. For flamenco devotees (including this one), the tears were hard to hold back. Here was expression at its absolute peak.

Eva Yerbabuena may be turning 47 this year, but she is at the very top of her game. She seems to get more poetic and expressive with time. Thankfully, flamenco is less ruthless than ballet when it comes to dancers' retirement age. So the world can hope to see Eva and her signature solea for many more years to come.

At 26, most artists are still busy searching for a style, a signature, a vocabulary that's uniquely theirs, as opposed to a derivative of what came before.

Not Tschabalala Self. The American artist has the inventiveness and confidence that artists habitually display in mid-career. Self has invented a genre all her own: drawings that are colored in with paint and pigment, yes, but also with snippets of fabric or fur, and with fragments of other, unfinished, canvases.


She stitches the whole thing together to form the finished work. A sensitive survey of her work is currently on at Parasol Unit in London, curated by Ziba Ardalan. It's one of the exhibitions I've most enjoyed in the last year.  

​The figures in Self's paintings are open references to the African-American visual heritage. Yet she offers her own deeply personal interpretation of that heritage: her monumental bodies are improbably contorted, in positions that no acrobat could manage, and sometimes strike sexualized poses.

Where does this unique imagery come from? "My mother could sew very well, she could make an entire dress or outfit. She collected lots of fabrics for patches, clothing, curtains and pillow covers," Self tells Ardalan in an interview published in the exhibition catalogue. "My mother's sense of style has shaped mine. I enjoy bold colors and complicated patterns. Her ingenuity with limited materials and her ability to transform the old into new has influenced the way I approach creative projects."

The exhibition ends on March 12. For more information:
http://www.parasol-unit.org 

Photo credit: Tschabalala Self, Sapphire (2015) - Oil, pigment and fabric on canvas
213.3 x 152.4 cm (84 x 60 in)
Courtesy of Wassim Rasamny
​Photograph by Thomas Nelford

Akram Khan is, by all accounts, one of the greatest dancer-choreographers alive. His movements - which masterfully blend kathak with contemporary dance - are riveting, especially when he's the one executing them.

There's just one thing. Well, actually, more than one. He's not great with words (the texts he wrote for his duo with Juliette Binoche and for his autobiographical "Desh" were banal). And his musical tastes are pretty basic, as he demonstrates with his revisiting of the ballet "Giselle" with English National Ballet.

There's been a lot of expectation around Akram's first full-length ballet - and he lives up to it on the whole. The choreography is gripping to watch and an unquestionable breath of fresh air. And he has powerful stars to perform it. Tamara Rojo is supremely moving in the role of the spurned working class girl. Her acting and artistry are, as usual, at a peak, and the technique is, well, not bad either - for someone whose day job is running English National Ballet. There's also a Cuban-Canadian revelation playing Hilarion: his name is Cesar Corrales. A star is born.

But the music - oh, the music. Akram has basically commissioned the Italian composer Vincenzo Lamagna to take short segments of the original Giselle score -- "sometimes we are talking about only four bars," admits Lamagna in the program -- and create new music around it. The result is painfully repetitious. I realize that it's supposed to send you into some kind of trance. But all I heard were the same four notes played over and over again, in industrial-electronic arrangements that involved deafening bass hums, foghorn-like noises, crackling and clanging.

The reason why classical ballets are so beautiful is that they have extraordinary composers creating dramatic music for them. You feel for the protagonists because Tchaikovsky or Adolphe Adam (the composer of Giselle) or whoever makes your heart beat faster with sweeping bars of lyrical music. All of that is sorely lacking in Akram's "Giselle." Maybe next time he'll seek the advice of a more seasoned ear.

Revolutions are a treacherous business. They topple governments and shake up societies, of course. But they also have a dramatic effect on culture and heritage. One of the many aftereffects of the Russian Revolution was the confiscation of the extraordinary modern art collection of the Moscow textile magnate Sergei Shchukin. The collection was nationalized, scattered (part of it ending up in Siberia), and long hidden from view. Most of the showpieces were then split between two museums -- the Hermitage, the Pushkin -- and never again seen under the same roof.

Until now, that is. A French billionaire (Bernard Arnault of LVMH) and his private museum (the Fondation Louis Vuitton) have brought 127 pieces of the collection together in Paris, where they were originally purchased. The result is what the exhibition's curator Anne Baldassari describes as "possibly the greatest collection of modern art ever."

As the world's foremost Picasso specialist, Baldassari would know. She was the director of the Musee Picasso in Paris until 2014, and previously staged such modern-art blockbuster exhibitions as "Matisse-Picasso" and "Picasso et les Maitres."
 
The Shchukin exhibition's tally of masterpieces is dizzying. In the first few galleries, representing Shchukin's early collecting, there are gems by Andre Derain, Douanier Rousseau (including the monumental portrait of Apollinaire and Marie Laurencin) and Monet (including one of his misty Houses of Parliament, this one unusually featuring seagulls flapping across the middle).

Then you get to the pieces de resistance: three gigantic rooms dedicated to the collection's superstars -- Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso, followed by a smattering of Russian artworks that took direct inspiration from the Iberian master's Cubist creations. Any of these three sections alone would be worth the visit.

Arnault, meanwhile, is looking pleased. He's scored a major coup in his long-running competition with fellow billionaire Francois Pinault. Pinault has two museums in Venice and is soon to open another one at the Bourse du Commerce in Paris. But he's going to have an excruciatingly hard time matching this. 

The exhibition runs until Feb. 26, so book fast.

                                                                                                          (Photograph by Johan Persson)

The Young Vic's adaptation of Federico Garcia Lorca's "Yerma" has a lot going for it. To start with, it has Billie Piper -- seen above in chirpy flirtation with her partner. The play is staged in a glass box (with two barely noticeable side openings), so it feels as if you're observing the characters in a fish bowl. Set changes are like magic tricks: one minute you're looking at a plushly carpeted and furnished interior; seconds later (after a brief moment of darkness), the stage becomes one  long patch of grass.

"Yerma" focuses on a woman's desperate quest for motherhood. It's not a play you see performed often on Europe's stages. Lorca has spiced up the original with a couple of surprise plot twists.

The Young Vic brings the whole thing up to date. From early-20th-century Spain, we fast-forward to early-21st-century London and the trappings of middle-class London life: the properly ladder, Uber, Deliveroo, and IVF. Billie Piper acts her guts out on stage, sparing nothing in her portrayal of the barren woman. And her performance rings absolutely true. No female audience member emerges unmoved from it. In fact, the ones I saw on the way out were invariably teary.

The trouble is the play itself. It's grimly one-dimensional; the only way is down. The few dramatic surprises that Lorca introduced in the original have been excised. What we're left with is the tedium of watching a London bohemian bourgeoise descend into emotional meltdown.

Piper will definitely nab trophies for her performance in this, and so, no doubt, will the director Simon Stone. But I wouldn't give the play itself too many rewards -- especially not in its Young Vic modernization.

To describe Daniel Barenboim as one of the world's greatest conductors is a statement of the blindingly obvious. He's up there with Simon Rattle and maybe one or two others in the pantheon of outstanding maestros. But when it comes to the piano, no one comes close. On Monday evening at the Proms, he demonstrated his gift at both disciplines, playing and conducting Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 24 with the Staatskapelle Berlin.




There are lots of reasons why Barenboim is a superstar.  The biggest is the Divan Orchestra -- that extraordinary ensemble of young Arab and Israeli players that he and the late Edward Said founded to make music a bridge between warring peoples. He is a tireless campaigner for musical education, eloquently defending the importance and meaning of music in a world where it is increasingly being dropped from school curricula.

But beyond that, there is his extraordinary musicianship. Heir to the Romantic tradition, he plays piano the way it used to be played and taught -- making every note sing and tell a story. That's easier said than done: Expression is the hardest part of any art form. And Barenboim is an absolute master of it.

​Hear him in concert, buy his recordings, sign up to his Facebook page, tune into his lectures.  And hear the Monday evening performance right here on Radio 3:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07sxsd4.

Which flamenco artist sells out Sadler's Wells every year for nearly a week? Paco Pena of course. The genius guitarist and onetime Londoner returns every summer with a new show. This year, he has chosen to pay homage to the late Spanish poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca on the 80th anniversary of his execution.

What makes Pena's appearances so precious is his extraordinary playing. From the moment the diminutive guitarist walks discreetly on stage and starts strumming his instrument, the audience listens in awe. To those of us who are accustomed to hearing flamenco guitar, Pena's sound is something else -- exquisitely nuanced, technically flawless, effortlessly beautiful.

And Pena invites gifted dancers onstage, too. As in previous years, superstar Angel Munoz -- one of Spain's greatest male dancers -- took to the stage, often in duets with Mayte Bajo. But he also performed a mind-blowing farruca solo to a powerful instrumental by Paco Pena. Munoz sensitively wove his choreography around Pena's delicate guitar riffs, and performed powerful crescendo foot work at the end. My dance highlight of the evening.

All I can say is, I look forward to next year's show. Ole Paco!

​

Abstract painting and sculpture are not the most fashionable disciplines in the art world today. Many young artists feel it's been done, and choose a different path. Not Rana Begum.

The British-Bangladeshi artist, 39, has just opened an exhibition at the Parasol Unit in London, finely curated by Ziba Ardalan. You have until September 18th to see it. I caught up with her at the opening this week; here's what she had to say: 

RANA BEGUM:
​
​I've been told quite a lot that abstraction has been done. People say, ''Why are you making art like this? You’re not going to be successful at all.’
     But there are a lot of things that I grew up with that really connected me to artists like Donald Judd and Agnes Martin -- artists that I felt brought out the simplicity of living my life in Bangladesh and coming here, and this repetition in our daily life. It all comes through. I can see it in their work. 

The raucous group known as the Young British Artists burst to fame in the nineties by challenging accepted definitions of art. Their ringleader, Damien Hirst, displayed chopped-up calves in formaldehyde and placed a severed cow's head in a fly-infested vitrine. The story of that generation was amusingly told in 2009 by an insider, Gregor Muir, in 'Lucky Kunst.'

Now comes a book from an outsider. Elizabeth Fullerton -- a longtime Reuters correspondent -- brings journalistic rigor and accuracy to her account, 'Artrage,' prizing objectivity and reported speech over opinion and conjecture.

Fullerton describes the YBAs as 'the most significant group to emerge in Britain since the Pre-Raphaelites' (someone else's words, not hers). Yet she also concedes that, as a group, they fell out of fashion, and that some of their art was 'without doubt superficial, sensationalist and over-reliant on irony.' 

Still, this generation of artist-provocateurs deserves to be examined, Fullerton writes. And her account of the rise and rise of the now not-so-young British artists is a well-written as well as a necessary book. Students, researchers and curators looking back in years to come will be grateful for a publication that goes beyond cheering and sneering to document that period of British art history, and document it well.

Writing about Zaha Hadid in the past tense is an excruciatingly difficult enterprise. Yet she has left us, suddenly and abruptly -- and impossibly soon. So I feel a duty to pay homage to her in my modest way, as a journalist who came to know and like her, and, I daresay, to consider her a friend.

My first interview with Zaha took a few years to negotiate. Two key people made it happen: Roger Howie, her trusted media advisor, and Erica Bolton, the influential arts publicist who also advised Zaha. One afternoon in August 2007, after a tour of her London office, I was finally taken by the wonderful Roger to her home -- a luminous top-floor loft also in Clerkenwell.

Zaha seemed fairly relaxed around me. It probably helped that I originated from Iran, next door to her native Iraq. Perhaps she knew that I would avoid the xenophobic stereotyping and misogyny that so many British journalists reverted to when they wrote about her.

Zaha sat at a swerving dining table of her own design, with one of her magnificent Malevich-inspired paintings hanging behind her. I couldn't help but pull out my mobile phone to take her picture. I could see the color fade from Roger's face, fearing her reaction to this impromptu photography. But Zaha was cool about it;  the image is published above.

The interview she gave me (below) is among the most unforgettable conversations I have ever had, and the first of seven or eight interviews. Every time she opened a building in the U.K., I was there to bear witness: the school in Brixton, the 2012 Olympic pool, the Serpentine Sackler building, etc. 

What became clear to me was that, beneath her tough and occasionally temperamental exterior, Zaha was a deeply sensitive and timid person who had a big heart yet trusted few people. She was also one of the most brilliant minds of our time, a sharp pulse taker of our ever-shifting world, and a keen analyst of the transformation of cities. She saw things the rest of us didn't, which made interviewing her so much fun. She was frank; if you didn't attack her with your questioning, you could ask her just about anything, and she would answer. 

With Zaha gone, I know I will never look at architecture in the same way.

Meanwhile, as a farewell, here is that first interview, which I did for Bloomberg News in August 2007: 

Zaha Hadid Recalls Life in Baghdad, Revs Up for China, Russia
2007-08-06 05:40:49.680 GMT

Interview by Farah Nayeri
      Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Zaha Hadid squirms at the sound of
the blender roaring in her kitchen, loud as a motorcycle. The
housekeeper is making fruit juice.
      ``It's going to make a lot of sound,'' warns the 56-year-
old Iraqi-born architect. She sits regally at a silicon-topped
table of her design, eyelids heavy with fatigue. Scarlet lipstick
and the bronze streaks in her dark hair suit the architectural
painting, also hers, on the wall behind.
      Noise is the last thing Hadid needs on a Friday night. When
her trusted press aide tries to send a BlackBerry message, she
asks him to stop. We are at Hadid's home in Clerkenwell, north of
the City of London. It's a luminous, loft-like space with
skylights that tastefully frame the clouds and a table full of
tall, colorful vases designed by others.
      Hadid in 2004 became the first woman to win architecture's
top distinction, the Pritzker Prize. ``They decided to give it to
someone who was in mid-career, and not as a life achievement
award,'' she says, sipping juice through a straw, ``because it
has an incredible influence on your career: There's no question
about it.''
      After years of being more feted abroad than in the U.K.,
her adopted country, Hadid is making her British breakthrough. An
exhibition at London's Design Museum, ending Nov. 25, plots her
career. For 10 days last month, mushroom-like parasols, rush-
designed by Hadid for the Serpentine Gallery's summer party,
stood in for a delayed summer pavilion. Hadid is building the
aquatic center for the 2012 London Olympic Games. In 2009, the
Architecture Foundation in London is scheduled to open and, in
2010, the Riverside Museum of Transport in Glasgow is also set to
be completed.

                        Waiting for Zaha

      Not that Hadid needs the validation, or the work. The
studio that she and partner Patrik Schumacher run in Clerkenwell
-- a former school with signs that still read ``Boys' Entrance''
-- is a beehive, with a staff of some 200. ``I'm here for Zaha
Hadid,'' I announce earlier that day to young men chatting by the
red iron gate. ``We all are,'' one of them deadpans, showing me a
brick compound marked ``Unit 2 -- Zaha Hadid Architects.''
      Inside, room after computer-lined room teems with young
architects designing, here, a bridge in Spain, there, a
skyscraper in Marseille. Hadid's desk is in the middle of one
crowded office, and marked with three fuchsia-colored chairs.
      Hadid is used to standing out. She grew up in Baghdad,
daughter of a Sunni industrialist educated at the London School
of Economics who briefly served as minister of finance and
industry before managing a series of household-goods factories.

                        Baghdad's Wounds

      Little Zaha, youngest of three and the only girl, attended
a French nuns' school with Shiite Muslims, Christians and Jews
whose faith she was long unaware of. She is baffled by the
intercommunal battles raging now. ``The Baghdad I knew was very
nice, liberal, open,'' she recalls. ``When I see it on
television, I don't recognize it.''
      She last visited Iraq in 1980, and never experienced life
under the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. ``I think Iraq is
not going to recover in my lifetime,'' she says. ``I hope it
does, but these things leave very deep scars.''
      Young Zaha found her calling aged 11 after an architect
visited her home and left intriguing models of her aunt's future
house. Hadid later asked her parents the word for one who makes
buildings, and began proclaiming ``I want to be an architect.''
      She started her own practice in 1980, and by 1982, won the
contest for the Peak Club apartment complex and leisure club in
Hong Kong, which was never built. Her first major finished
project came a decade later: the angular Vitra fire station,
opened next to a furniture factory in Weil am Rhein, Germany.
      That year, Hadid also won the race for the Cardiff Bay
Opera House in Wales. It, too, was never built; a model at the
Design Museum shows what might have been. ``I think the Cardiff
thing remains a stigma,'' she says of her slim U.K. portfolio.

                          Pritzker Win

      In 1997, she was hired to design the Rosenthal Center for
Contemporary Art in Cincinnati, completed in 2003. The following
year came the call that she had won the Pritzker.
      It was a chilly winter morning in London, and Hadid was
just back from standing in line for a U.S. visa. ``Hi, Zaha. Are
you sitting down?'' the caller asked. Incredulous, Hadid made
another call to confirm, and told no one for three months, until
the St. Petersburg ceremony.
      Were there no other women deserving of the award? ``I'm
sure there were,'' she replies. ``It's not because of lack of
talent: When I teach, the best students are women.''
      Rather, ``everything that has to do with this profession is
male,'' she explains. The job requires ``continuity'' and round-
the-clock work, she says, and is tough to combine with
motherhood. In the trade, ``people don't treat women well,''
Hadid says; she has only just ``graduated from that prejudice.''

                        Curves and Waves

      Her work, too, has evolved -- from sharp, jagged edges, or
``fragmented pieces,'' to organic forms ``influenced by
topography and landscape.'' Hadid's aim is that there be ``no
demarcating line between interior and exterior.'' Her shapes are
curved, amoebic, fluid, wave-like -- and hard to define.
      Next year, the MAXXI contemporary-art museum opens in Rome
after a decade of work, as does the Guangzhou Opera House in
China. After that come three dozen other big projects including a
performing-arts center in Abu Dhabi and the Moscow Expo Center.
      What is it about architecture that so enthralls her? ``I
think it's an incredible thing to be able to make space,'' she
says without a moment's hesitation. ``It's really the next thing
to nature.''

For her latest exhibition in London,
Azadeh Ghotbi has drawn inspiration from what others might find banal: the dead and sometimes decaying leaves strewn all over the garden squares near the British Museum. Last autumn, she started stooping to collect these pieces of foliage. Her exhibition now contains thirty-six varieties of them, exquisitely photographed in close-up and in high resolution.

The photographs are startling in their fragile beauty. Some of them stand out as if they were 3-D visuals. They are Azadeh's touching reflection on the transience of life -- and form an ensemble that is definitely worth seeing.

Visits are by appointment until the end of May at the Karavil Contemporary Gallery, 91 Mortimer Street off Regent Street -- just drop an email to giulia@karavilcontemporary.com or call +44 7447 011427.

Sara Baras is one of the few living flamenco dancers who can sell out London's Sadler's Wells Theatre for several consecutive performances. Baras is from Cadiz, the flamenco heartland. Yet she looks nothing like the typical flamenco dancer; she has a slender figure with long arms and thin legs, and her wardrobe looks like it came out of an haute couture atelier.


Her Sadler's Wells show is, to my mind, the best she's ever put on; I've seen many over the years. It's a tribute to flamenco masters who have passed, beginning with the superstar guitarist Paco de Lucia. With her flash turns and machine-gun feet, she pays homage to these masters one by one. The peak moment is her extraordinary farruca, a masculine dance which she performs in a black tunic and trousers. It's a tour de force of technique and emotion, as she punctuates the moans of a very young singer with the pitter-patter of her feet.


Sadler's Wells has plenty of other great dancers to see during this year's festival: Farruquito, Marco Flores and Olga Pericet are on my wish list. Ole!

Most of us never come close to owning a Picasso, a Matisse, or a Chagall. One man came into possession of a museum's worth -- more than 1,200 works by those and innumerable other artists -- and kept it quiet for decades. His name was Cornelius Gurlitt. His father had been Hitler's chief art buyer in occupied Paris, so Gurlitt inherited a hoard of artworks that he jealously and secretly guarded until 2012 -- when they were finally seized by German customs authorities.

The paintings, drawings, lithographs and prints were "all found among jam jars, fruit-juice cartons, boxes of pasta and tins of food, some of which had a best-before date in the last century," writes Catherine Hickley in a new book: The Munich Art Hoard: Hitler's Dealer and His Secret Legacy. Well documented and absorbing, it reveals the ins and outs of a story that baffled the world when it broke in 2013 and has, as yet, never been fully told.

When I first heard that Carsten Holler (pictured, left) was having a solo show at the Hayward Gallery, I was more than a little sceptical. The slides he put up at the Turbine Hall in 2006-7 turned the place into a fair ground, and I found them very silly. When I recently saw similar slides crawling up the facade of the Hayward, I cringed. 



Yet I was pleasantly surprised by "Carsten Holler: Decision" (as the show is called). True, Holler has turned the Hayward into an amusement park. But why should art and fun be mutually exclusive, as Hayward's director Ralph Rugoff (pictured, right) points out? 

The show is full of experiential installations: a dark tunnel by which you enter; flying machines on the terrace, that you get strapped into; goggles that make you see the world upside down. My personal favorite (and not just because the title sounds like my name): "Fara Fara," a cool dual-screen video on the music scene in Kinshasa. As you meander through the exhibition, you start feeling light-headed and a little disoriented.

Holler told journalists that his aim was to entertain. And as an artist, he's got that particular niche all to himself. He hopes to take entertainment out of the grip of the entertainment industry ("the enemy") and bring it into the museum. Whether the result is art is a question that still dangles in the air. But the exhibition is fun -- and sure to be a blockbuster. You have until September 6 to see it.

 

What do contemporary artists Mona Hatoum, Yinka Shonibare and Adel Abdessemed have in common? 

They've all shown at Parasol Unit, one of London's finer contemporary-art galleries. Housed in a former furniture factory in Islington (next to Victoria Miro's space), Parasol was founded 11 years ago by the Iranian-born curator Ziba Ardalan (pictured).

Ziba is unusual in more ways than one. For one thing, she has kept her name off the gallery that she funds and runs. Secondly, Parasol is a not-for-profit; artists show without worrying about whether they sell or not. Thirdly, the works are subtly chosen and displayed. For those of us overdosing on bad art, Parasol is a breath of fresh air. 

Ending soon at Ziba's gallery is a fun show by Los Carpinteros, the Cuban artist collective, who riff playfully on their island's recent history. In  '17m' (below), more than 200 men's suit jackets hang on a 17-meter-long clothing rail. All have a star cut out at chest level, shaped like the star of the Cuban flag. If you look into the aperture in the first suit, you can see all the way through the other end.

(Installation view at Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art, 2015. Photographer: Jack Hems. Courtesy of Parasol unit)

Next up at Parasol: the first major U.K. show devoted to the Icelandic artist Katrin Sigurdardottir, whose work has been exhibited at the Met and the Venice Biennale. Her exhibition basically consists of a grotto-like sculpture so tall and bulky, it will cut through a gallery ceiling.

Parasol unit foundation for contemporary art is at:
14 Wharf Road / London / N1 7RW
020 7490 7373 / info@parasol-unit.org