Xiaolu Guo on love, art and how the Chinese psyche has changed
Rosie Blau, a former China correspondent for The Economist and a co-host of 'The Intelligence', our daily news podcast, visits Ms Guo at her home. They explore the author's formative years, her bewildering move to the West and her thoughts on Chinese art and society today.
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Roman Polanski ruined my hair
The Prom was Berlioz and Strauss, but the Albert Hall is always the star for me. It is a lover's gift from Queen to Consort which completes a circle of passion for a Queen who loved music and sex in equal measure. Strauss was a music president of Hitler's Reichsmusikkammer, but in a private letter to his Jewish lyricist, Stefan Zweig, he said the whole regime appalled him. His letter was intercepted and his job went down das Klosett. Afterwards I went for drinks with my friend Fraser, who was playing second clarinet. We were refused entry into the Polish Hearth Club, so we ended up shrieking over merlot and crisps in a nearby pub in front of the penalties which sealed the Lionesses' victory. Oh the glorious girls! I couldn't be happier. I have just been to Paris to see the Hockney show. It is the best exhibition I've ever seen. The journey on Eurostar, though, was lousy. We were herded like visitors to the Galapagos Islands into seats we had not booked. But Paris… what a city in which to be in love. Mind you, the last time I was here was to have all the pigment removed from my hair to appear grey-haired in the film The Pianist. After seven hours in the chair it emerged verdigris. I wept and made him put on a rinse. On the first day of shooting, Roman Polanski and his English producer came to my dressing-room and gave me a bollocking. I had ruined his film. I mentioned that his hairdresser had ruined my hair. A wig was ordered. To Monet's house in Giverny. The house was so much smaller and more informal than Interiors magazine intimated when I based my marital kitchen on his butter yellow and terracotta kitchen some 40 years ago. The gardens with those waterlilies and dense, febrile planting made me weep into my straw hat. Back in Paris, the Orangerie queue was too long to see actual Monets, so Aperol spritz and herrings won out. What a tragedy to lose both Cleo Laine and Tom Lehrer within 24 hours. In a Paris jazz bar we met a young trio – an American, a Swede and a Norwegian – who had never heard of Cleo, so we located 'It Was a Lover and His Lass' on Spotify and toasted her beauty, bravery and brilliance. The next morning, when David, my soon-to-be husband, and I found out about Lehrer, we toasted him with hot chocolate and sang 'Rickety tickety tin' with a mouthful of croissant. As it happens, I was present at the concert 15 years ago where Cleo and family came straight from the deathbed of her husband, Johnny Dankworth. Cleo insisted on not telling the audience until the end. Her rendition of 'He Was Beautiful' from The Deer Hunter will stay with me for ever. How she stayed still and composed during that evening's performance is beyond someone like me who cries at the sight of a bank of convolvulus. I did an average of 12,000 steps a day in Paris, so I limped back to Eurostar, my feet covered in Elastoplast. We had booked seats facing forward at a table, weeks before. Would it surprise you to learn our seats were facing backwards and had no table? Wretched, I retched quietly through France. I remember once popping my mother on Eurostar for a respite. 'Ooh, will I see the water?' she asked. 'I bloody hope not.' When we got back to London, David forced me into a shop called Da Luna which was filled with Chinese silk and leather and insisted on spending a packet on a jacket for me. The next day I went to speak to some elderly people (about my age, as it happens) – and they loved the Chinese jacket so I convinced myself it was an investment. I spoke about love and loss and Coronation Street and, of course, anti-Semitism, because I talk about that all the time. I recently had an email correspondence with another Jewish celebrity who spoke out with horror about the IDF killing babies and nasty Netanyahu. I mentioned hostages, rapes and beheadings and queried whether she was equally outraged about the killing of poor Ukrainian babies, which, try as you might, is hard to blame on Bibi. At least her opinion is thought-through, measured and civil. Miriam Margolyes, on the other hand, is a shock jock, a potty-mouthed controversialist and self-publicist, so I'm uninterested in her latest PR splash comparing Israelis to Nazis and the Gazan war to the Holocaust.
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The chef does not understand sandwiches: Raffles London at the OWO reviewed
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Give Eric Ravilious a rest
How do artists sustain a reputation? We'd like to think it's on the basis of their work. In the case of visual artists, it would be nice to think they make it because their art is beautiful, original or absorbing. It shouldn't be a matter of what the art is about, or Benjamin West's epic historical tableaux would be better paintings than Jean Siméon Chardin's still lives. It shouldn't be about the artist's personality or history, or we would rate Benjamin Haydon (tragic suicide) over John Constable (domestically inclined Tory). On the other hand, it doesn't always work like that. Because the visual arts depend a great deal on public patronage – the promotion of individual artists by institutions – an artist can be continually pushed without any real reference to their quality. Other quite irrelevant factors can be enough to forge a career. The ongoing reputation of the English artist Eric Ravilious is a mysterious example. He was a commercial artist before the second world war, designing mugs for Wedgwood, including the coronation mugs for Edward VIII, repurposed for George VI and Elizabeth II. There are some popular book illustrations (the woodcut on the front of Wisden is his). On the side he painted watercolours of landscapes, often including chalk figures and downlands, very suitable for the sort of travel posters he produced. When the second world war broke out, he was made an official war artist, specialising in images of barrage balloons, ships in harbour and so on. He was killed on a trip to Iceland in 1942 to observe a sea rescue mission, the first war artist to be killed in service during the conflict. The art is perfectly OK in an interwar commercial style. Any kind of movement defeats Ravilious, and the massive industrial objects of the war are reduced to perky little bibelots. The colours are dismally mimsy. There is nothing much to him at all. And yet Ravilious is a favourite of curators, his work thrust on us by one exhibition after another. Why Ravilious? If you bought a ticket for an exhibition of many of his contemporaries – John Piper, Paul Nash, Stanley Spencer – you know you'd find a bigger talent; if it's a question of an artist with a commercial practice, you'd have a better time with Edward Ardizzone, Ronald Searle, Edmund Dulac. Ardizzone exhibitions are thin on the ground; those of Dulac as rare as hen's teeth. But Ravilious thunders on in his depressing way. The basis of the reputation goes back to the circumstances of Ravilious's career. From the beginning of the 1930s, it was taken for granted that the creative arts ought to be about something important. The publisher Victor Gollancz, the most influential of his time, wrote to an author at the beginning of the decade to say that his books were 'designed to convert people on a big scale to socialism and pacifism… in the case of books that are not directly on this subject… I have to look very carefully at the question as to whether or not it is likely to involve a loss…' During the second world war, novels were only permitted paper allocation within the 13.1 per cent assigned to 'general' publications; as a result, the printer of Henry Green's sublime Caught warned the publisher that the ministry was inquiring about the 'kind of work' being printed. (In the end, the adulterous affair in Caught had to be dropped.) Art in general had to be Important, and About Something. Whether it was any good came a long way behind the point that it was a depiction of barrage balloons, submarines being cleaned, or banal but inspiring images of English national pride like chalk figures. On top of that, Ravilious scored extra points by being married to another artist, Tirzah Garwood, with obvious biographical interest, and by being killed in nobly inspiring circumstances. If it were just a matter of the wartime circumstances in which the art was produced, it would hardly matter – posterity would move on, the market and taste would prefer what it always does, skilled, interesting and varied work, whether it's about something important or not. In the auction room, Ravilious's work sometimes appeals, but doesn't come near the levels of his more alluring contemporaries. And he's now everywhere – on tea towels, biscuit tins and posters in every southern English seaside town, and imitated by designers for all sorts of cutesy purposes. (The cover of the fake du jour, The Salt Path, has a definite fake-woodcut-fake-Ravilious thing going on.) But it's not just commercial applications. What keeps Ravilious going is a culture of value among curators that has come to prize particular biographical facts, significant subject matter, and in some cases – not Ravilious's – the identity of the artist. We've grown used as gallery-goers to truly terrible art which, it is explained, deplores a few particular historical crimes. Sometimes the art is terrible because it is nothing more than a plonking explanation; sometimes, on top of the explanation, it is terrible because the artist is incompetent. And the curatorial tendency reaches back into history. So let's give Ravilious a rest. Let's agree that most of the art of the past survives because, even though it's about nothing much, it is clever and entrancing to look at. Manet's white asparagus isn't a denunciation of luxury foodstuffs and the capitalist system that only feeds the rich – and it wouldn't be a better painting if it were. Picasso is supposed to have lost his temper over Matisse's career: 'Matisse! What is a Matisse?! A balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it!' What we are slightly missing is a delight in artists with nothing more to them than a balcony with a big red flowerpot falling all over it. Instead, what we have to put up with are explanations of art and the promotion of artists who, if their art can't make you feel anything much, can always be relied upon to supply quite a sad little story from their life.
