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Telegraph
28-05-2025
- Business
- Telegraph
75 years on, Club Med is going after the luxury market
Europe's equivalent of Butlins was founded in 1950 by Belgian entrepreneur Gérard Blitz as a low-priced summer colony of tents on the Spanish island of Majorca. Blitz's idea, which he dubbed 'an antidote to civilisation', was to create a utopia where everything – food, sports, and lodging – was included, ensuring that everyone holidayed on equal terms. The world's first all-inclusive was born. Club Med's utopian ethos also extended to other areas: shells were used instead of money to pay for extras; resorts were known as villages; guests ate at communal tables and doors were never locked. 'Club Med believes that the purpose of life is to be happy,' Nicolas Bresch, managing director for the UK, Ireland and Nordics told me over the phone. 'The idea was to foster a sense of community.' The real genius behind the brand, however, was maverick businessman and former journalist Gilbert Trigano, who joined the company in 1954 and launched the transition from tents to thatch-roofed huts. In post-war Europe, the dream of leaving behind grey skies and even greyer scenery for a hedonistic holiday in the sun was an easy sell. During the 1960s the company expanded rapidly, opening properties in Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, prompting avant-garde group Situationist International to coin the expression 'Club Med – a cheap holiday in other people's misery'. Trigano's aggressive expansion strategy soon led the group into financial difficulties, however: Baron Rothschild – who'd stayed in one of the resorts and liked the formula – eventually saved the company from bankruptcy. Despite the countless financial ups and downs that have marked the company's history over the years, Club Med is still going strong 75 years later. Now run by Chinese conglomerate Fosun, the group rebranded in 2023 and has invested some $1.5 billion in renovation projects in a bid to move upmarket and attract affluent millennial families. Keen to see what the new luxury look was all about, I visited Club Med Seychelles, one of the company's Exclusive Collection resorts, which opened earlier this year. Having seen French Fried Vacation (Les Bronzes), Patrice Leconte's 1970s cult Club Med satire, I was expecting regimented bathing and canteen food. I was serenaded instead by the wind pattering in the leaves of royal palm and perfumed frangipani as I sipped champagne in an airy and elegant pitched-roof lobby while waiting for check-in. Although it's only a 15-minute boat ride from Mahé, this resort set on its own 540-acre island overlooking the glass-clear waters of a nature reserve certainly felt exclusive; less so the yellow all-inclusive band that was strapped to my wrist on arrival. When I realised that it did everything from opening my room door to paying my bar tab, however, I was more enthusiastic. 'With this system you don't have to worry about taking keys or credit cards with you everywhere. Club Med is all about de-stressing,' Bresch told me. A total of €70 million was invested in refurbishing Club Med Seychelles, which was designed, according to the architect Gauthier Guillaume, 'to tell an extraordinary story, using tropical-chic elements'. The 294 rooms are linked by palm tree-shaded paths and feature spacious, light-filled bedrooms, blonde parquet floors, pops of colour in knotted rope basket chairs and high ceilings painted with vivid leaf murals. My suite in the Cape area received a deluge of 'wows!' when I posted pictures of it on social media, as did the bathroom with its standalone tub looking out over my private plunge pool to an idyllic white-sand beach beyond. With three swimming pools, five tennis courts, four padel courts, a water sports centre and a dedicated kids' club, there's plenty to keep younger family members occupied. Adults-only spaces scattered across the property, ranging from a Zen zone to a stylish Cinq Mondes spa, ensure that parents feel pampered, too. True to the group's ethos, there are also plenty of activities designed to get guests to meet and mingle – although most seemed reluctant to leave their own family or friendship groups when I stayed. During one of the nightly cocktail soirées I met teacher Sophie and her doctor husband Arnaud from Lyon. 'We've been doing Club Med for years. This is our 16th stay,' she enthused. 'It's more luxurious now and maybe less friendly, but we both love the fact that everything's easy and we can safely visit exotic places.' The French outnumbered other guests by far during my stay, although Bresch told me that Britons are cottoning onto the formula. 'The UK counts for about 10 per cent of the market in warm destinations, but they are one of Club Med's main markets for winter resorts,' he said. The resort also places an emphasis on sustainability, with no single-use plastic, a coral reef restoration programme and activities ranging from botanical hikes around the island's seven-kilometre coastline to adrenaline-pumping sallies into the surrounding jungle. The brand's bid to compete with the luxury market is marred, however, by erratic service and lingering traces of the old Club Med mentality: after a hard day's work, staff – still called GOs (Gracious Organisers) – don costumes to perform shows that are well meant, but decidedly amateur. Food is not always top-notch. 'Premium brand drinks are very limited and you only have one choice of wine with meals, so it definitely doesn't feel luxurious. There are also lots of extra charges, including £24 for room service, which is far too much,' Vinay from Jaipur commented. With bombast worthy of Trigano, Club Med plans to become 'the world's most desirable all-inclusive brand'. Upcoming projects include a beach and safari resort to open next year in South Africa, and new-build properties are on the cards in Borneo and Oman. If the brand plans to really compete in an increasingly crowded luxury market, it will have a challenge on its hands.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Those Passions by TJ Clark review – a timely study of the connection between art and politics
Politics runs through the history of art like a protester in a museum with a tin of soup. From emperors' heads on coins to Picasso's anti-war masterpiece, Guernica, and Banksy's street art, power and visual culture have been closely and sometimes combustibly associated. This relationship is explored in essays by the distinguished art historian TJ Clark, professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley. Many of them first appeared in the London Review of Books, where the academic is given room to dilate in its rather airless pages. He brings a wide scholarship and unflagging scrutiny to his task. That said, his introduction includes the discouraging spoiler: 'art-and-politics [is] hell to do'. From time to time, the reader finds themselves recalling this damning admission. Clark writes from a 'political position on the left'. He reflects on epoch-making events such as the Russian revolution, which spawned socialist realist art. He says the Dresden-born artist Gerhard Richter, 93, maker of abstract and photorealist works, is 'haunted by his past' in the former East Germany. But there are also dustier subjects, including the Situationist International, a group of avant-garde artists and theorists who were active from the 1950s to the 1970s. Clark's take on art and power is timely, though. Donald Trump's friends the tech bros are a new class of fabulously rich patrons with political clout to match. They are sponsoring a revolution in image-making through AI and social media. Clark writes about widely shared and often manipulated photographs of rioting in England in 2011 (and calls the typical subject of these visuals 'the un-elated looter'). But his pieces, the oldest of which dates back 25 years, have been overtaken by leapfrogging developments in the digital sphere. His definition of what constitutes political art is broad; or better, say, elastic. One chapter examines a crucifixion done in grisaille, or shades of grey, by a northern Renaissance master. Is this political art? According to Clark, the painting expresses 'a Christian nihilism… lacking the consoling vehemence of the isms to come'. In fact, the picture was made in the immediate aftermath of a pretty vehement ism: a monk called Savonarola was responsible for the fanaticism of tossing books and paintings on to the Bonfire of the Vanities in Florence. Clark examines faces painted by Rembrandt. These are 'political' in the sense that the artist became the society portraitist of a new class in Dutch society, the bourgeoisie; but then the entire golden age of art in the Netherlands was paid for by their wealth. Confronted in a gallery by the alchemy that transforms pigment, canvas and mark-making into a canonical work, some of us are content to attribute this to genius or serendipity. We imagine a silken thread connecting the artist's eye, hand and the picture. But to an art historian such as Clark, it's more of a Gordian tangle, and untying it is correspondingly knotty. He worries away at the inscrutable expression on the face of Mars by Diego Velázquez, with the god of war seen in what looks like a French firefighter's helmet and very little else, like an exhausted strippergram. Clark finds a similar look on a rifleman in The Surrender of Breda, also by Velázquez, who was painter to Philip IV of Spain. 'Mars's expression still eludes us,' Clark concedes, though one reading he offers of this poker face is that it was the default look at Philip's court, and that went for his tame artist and his portraits, too: 'Keeping things superficial, and therefore not subject to malicious misinterpretation, may be a virtue, not to say a survival skill.' Clark doesn't indulge himself or the reader with the felicities of a stylist such as the critic Robert Hughes (who beautifully draws our attention in The Surrender of Breda to Velázquez's 'palisade of lances' and makes Clark's point about the artist with effortless succinctness, calling him 'the greatest impersonal painter who ever lived'). There are moments when Clark's inquiries are beneath his considerable dignity. Art historians have something in common with mediums and spiritualists: they attempt to get in touch with the other side. While there's a certain amount of empirical data about an artwork – its age, the materials it was made from, its provenance and so on – some commentators like to round out their appreciation with a kind of seance involving the artist. What was he thinking as he made his masterpiece? (See the art historians pitch up at the National Gallery in their gaudy headscarves and Romany caravans!) Clark divines the intentions of Hieronymus Bosch (who died in 1516) from the tiniest lick of paint on the face of a small figure on one of four panels now in Venice: 'I'm very sure that Bosch had an idea from the start how the man's mouth might serve his purposes.' This communing with long-dead artists to channel what was going through their heads made me think of a British film star who once played a badly wounded war hero. He nailed a heartbreaking scene in which he woke up in hospital to find his leg had been amputated, and his co-stars begged him to reveal how he did it. He said: 'I just thought: 'I hope they've still got some beef sandwiches in the trailer.'' Is it bathetic, or simply an acknowledgment of human nature, to imagine that Velázquez, Bosch and the rest sometimes thought of beef sandwiches, so to speak? After all, the old masters were hired hands, working to commission. They were fulfilling the wishes of a client – often a demanding one – rather than expressing themselves or chasing a muse. The sign of a good painting, it used to be said, was that the eyes follow you around the room. For Clark, indefatigable scrutiniser of facial features, the hallmark is that he follows the eyes around the room instead. Those Passions: On Art and Politics by TJ Clark is published by Thames & Hudson (£40). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
Telegraph
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
‘Britain is just a lapdog of the American Empire'
TJ Clark, the Marxist art historian, is showing me a picture: a view of Stratford-upon-Avon by the French artist Lucien Pissarro (1863-1944), which he picked up in an antiques shop in Norfolk, where he has a second home, and put above the fireplace in his townhouse in south London. 'It's a wonderful painting,' says the bearded 81-year-old Bristolian (and occasional poet), who, prior to his retirement in 2010, taught for more than two decades at the University of California, Berkeley, 'and very much a homage to his father [the Impressionist Camille], one of my heroes.' Isn't, though, collecting art a little bourgeois for someone who later describes 'dear old Jeremy Corbyn' as a 'moderate'? Ah, Clark tells me, 'Marxism is many things, and many of them' – he sighs – 'are appalling, dreary, doctrinaire, and worse.' Yet, says this delightful veteran of the protests of '68, and former member of the Situationist International (an 'ultra-Left' organisation of social revolutionaries that, he explains, 'wanted to bring down capitalist society' during the 1960s), 'I certainly consider myself a Marxist.' It seems that politics – like art, if it's any good – can be rather complicated. Addressing complexity is a hallmark of Those Passions, a new collection of essays about art and politics written by Clark over the past 25 years. With high-minded pieces about, say, the German philosopher Hegel, it's unlikely to become a bestseller; throughout, Clark's references are exacting and lofty, for which he makes no apology: 'Dumbing down always comes across as completely fatuous and phoney,' he tells me. 'You've got to try and write as you think.' For those, though, who relish brilliant analysis of painting – as well as former students of art history, like me, for whom, at university, Clark was a sort of god – Those Passions will be essential reading. Its finest essays engage in depth with painting's subtle minutiae, observing and explaining how tiny touches can contribute to powerful overall effects. A bravura study of Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905) is a case in point. (Clark agrees: 'It's one of the best essays in the book!') Likewise, his scintillating exposition of The Lion Hunt (1855) by Eugène Delacroix – a detail from which, reproduced on a French poster which he bought in 1966, dominates his study. For a scholar often characterised as a ringleader of the so-called 'New Art History' – which, around 1970, shifted the discipline away from, as he puts it, 'an exhausted formalism' (i.e., an old-school, connoisseurial preoccupation with style and iconography) to an engagement with wider social issues – Clark seems surprisingly obsessed with art's ravishing material properties. The title of his new book comes from Percy Shelley's sonnet 'Ozymandias', an unforgettable vision of a once-great civilisation half-sunk beneath the desert. It sets the tone, as Clark excoriates Western civilisation today, especially aspects of internet culture such as our reliance on smartphones and social media, and the veneration of 'influencers'. 'Yes, I hate it,' he tells me, simply. 'We live in a world where more and more of our everyday life is invaded by imagery that is produced and paid for and patronised by the powers-that-be.' So, we're victims of propaganda? 'I think we are. And even more,' he adds, invoking the Greek economist Yanis Varoufakis's concept of 'techno-feudalism', 'we're colluding.' Is he a pessimist? 'Who couldn't be pessimistic about the state of the world?' replies Clark, who won't be drawn on Keir Starmer. ('My politics is still American politics,' he explains, although, he adds, 'I do think of Britain as just a lapdog of the American empire.') 'The world is a miserable place, and becoming, in my view, more miserable fast.' Still, he continues, while 'there's plenty of doom, that doesn't mean there's despair' – and he urges 'young people' to 'go into this social-media world of spectacle and endless, exorbitant information and communication, which is out of control, and fight within it, against it. It's vulnerable.' When it comes to art, rather than politics, Clark is similarly trigger-happy with condemnation. One of the best, and most provocative, essays in Those Passions, 'Picasso and the English', is a peppy takedown of this country's genteel contribution to Modernism. 'The Bloomsbury Group was never able to escape from its refined upper-class fastidiousness,' explains Clark, who also has little time for 'performative' 20th-century British artists such as Wyndham Lewis and Francis Bacon. Even Henry Moore, in a memorably magisterial aside in his new book, gets it in the neck as only 'an artist of the middle range'. Yet, Clark is a fan of the work of the 'disgraceful' British sculptor Eric Gill: 'You know, the one who had sex with his daughter? I mean, an abominable character, but, my God, he did some good sculpture.' So, he's no advocate for cancel culture? 'No, I'm not,' Clark replies. 'It's hard. There is cancel culture in the academy. It's not as bad as the Republicans pretend, but it's definitely there.' Often, he points out, 'the most poignant and useful depictions of revolution have come from reactionaries like Delacroix.' According to Clark, 'There are no rules in art. If you're good enough, you can get away with anything.' What does he make of the recent, radical shift within art history towards identity politics? 'All good Marxists are supposed to disapprove of identity politics, just as much as the Right does, actually,' Clark says, 'because it puts the accent on individual and group identity, rather than social position, and displaces the story from class struggle to racial and ethnic struggle.' When I bring up Katy Hessel's bestselling feminist history The Story of Art without Men, Clark says: 'I have time for it, but it's interesting to think, 'How about a history of art without the upper classes, without the bourgeoisie?'' For Clark, 'the history of art is a history of art produced within power structures. That doesn't mean that all art produced within those structures merely parroted the assumptions of those in charge. Or that all male artists produced a male view of women.' Even a seemingly misogynistic painting such as Delacroix's orientalist, quasi-pornographic extravaganza The Death of Sardanapalus (1827) – which Clark describes as a kind of 'ludicrous and disgusting fantasy of male power and murder of sex slaves' – conveys, he suggests, an ugly truth: 'It does, unfortunately, put on show, in a kind of hyperbolic, grotesque way, one side of male fantasy. We live in a world where it's all around us every day.' Still, Clark admires the 'persuasiveness', as he puts it, of 'sophisticated' writers and thinkers on identity politics such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Frank B Wilderson III: 'They're cantankerous and rebarbative, and I don't agree with them, but they have the same kind of passion that drove the great writers and thinkers of the Left in its heyday, who I go on very much admiring.' He mentions Rosa Luxemburg, Georges Sorel, and Frantz Fanon. The trouble with today's Leftist intellectuals, he suggests, is that 'I don't think they've ever faced up properly to the arrival of consumer society.' What about the charge, often asserted by the Right, that they're humourless? Clark guffaws. 'Who could refute it? They are humourless, of course they are! Or most of them. But, partly, it's not their fault. The world is not conducive to humour if you look at it from the point of view of a commitment to the weak, the oppressed, the poor.' As a former activist, what does he make of the recent attacks inside museums by climate-change protesters? 'I understand the impulse,' he replies, cautiously, 'but I don't think it's directed rightly.' Regarding restitution (another intractable issue for museums today), he has this to say: 'It's a mess. There's so much, right? We were a world empire, and we grabbed things from everywhere. Can everything go home? Obviously not. Nor should it. People don't want the world to be re-segregated.' He does, though, believe that the Parthenon Sculptures should be returned – 'because it's the right thing to do.' Why? 'In the end, it just makes such good sense for this particular object to be reconstituted in or very near the place it once was.' Clark's wife, Anne Wagner, the 19th-century sculpture specialist and self-confessed 'motor-mouth' (who also taught at Berkeley), pops her head around the door. 'Don't interrupt, dear,' her husband says. 'He's making me think like hell!' I sense our time is up. Last question. What advice would Clark give to young gallery-goers who want to learn how to look properly at art? He reflects for a moment. 'That it's still possible to stop in front of a picture you don't understand, and ask the question, 'What is this about? And why do I find it puzzling?' Art exists to arrest something in the world, and to make it strange again, and put us back in the position of not knowing exactly what we're confronting. That's a deeply human activity.'
