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BBC News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Alan Yentob's last interview to be broadcast on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer
Alan Yentob's last interview, When Alan Yentob Met Jenny Saville, will be broadcast on Sunday 8 June on BBC Two and iPlayer. Jenny Saville is one of the most successful figurative painters working today, first coming to prominence as part of the YBA movement in the late 1980s and early 1990s. She has been reluctant to discuss her work for many years on television, until now. Alan Yentob was working with Jenny on a film for his imagine strand and earlier this year, they met in Vienna on the eve of two major exhibitions she is mounting. This was the last interview Alan Yentob conducted in a career spanning six decades at the BBC, bringing many of the world's leading artists and creatives to the screen. Alan also persuaded Jenny to allow cameras into her painting studio for the first time in almost three decades. Suzy Klein, Head of Arts and Classical Music TV says: 'Alan Yentob was a titan of arts broadcasting and a passionate supporter of so many of the leading creative artists of the last half century. His final interview, in conversation with Jenny Saville, is testament to his relentless curiosity and advocacy for the arts across many decades - part of a night dedicated to celebrating his work as a programme maker, channel controller and visionary television executive.' Jenny Saville says: 'Alan and I were beginning to work on a documentary about my paintings from across the years. It was an honour to know Alan, who I'd met in my early twenties and we reconnected to make this film.' When Alan Yentob Met Jenny Saville airs as part of a tribute night on Sunday on BBC Two and iPlayer alongside some of the legendary programme maker's best loved films, including imagine… Mel Brooks: Unwrapped, imagine… David Bowie: Cracked Actor, Salman Rushdie: Through a Glass Darkly, imagine… Diana Athill: Growing Old Disgracefully, imagine… Tom Stoppard: A Charmed Life, and Ella Fitzgerald at Ronnie Scott's, as well as Alan's iconic BBC Two idents, from 9.15pm. When Alan Yentob met Jenny Saville is a BBC Studios production for BBC Arts. The Producer / Director is John O'Rourke and the Executive Producer is Tanya Hudson. The commissioning editor for BBC Arts is Mark Bell. Watch When Alan Yentob met Jenny Saville on BBC iPlayer AM2
The Guardian
23-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Tate Modern at 25: ‘It utterly changed the face of London'
Opening night at Tate Modern, 25 years ago this May, was the kind of party that defines an era. Stars of the arts world and politics, including prime minister Tony Blair, attended. All of them were dwarfed by a giant spider – Louise Bourgeois's visiting sculpture – perched on the gangway over the vast, packed Turbine Hall. For Alex Beard, particular joyous moments still stand out, but not just from the evening: 'It was a remarkable night, but I most clearly remember the first morning, 12 May, when I walked around outside, really early doors, and saw people lining up right around the building. I talked to the first person in the queue, who told me this was something they'd been waiting for all their life,' recalls Beard, who was deputy director of Tate. 'The queen had officially opened the building with the words, 'I declare the Tate Modern open', adds Beard, remembering how Nicholas Serota, the director and the driving force behind the venture, discreetly winced at the monarch's use of the definite article. This was simply Tate Modern. 'The last gallery proposed for London was in 1936, so this one took a long time coming,' says Beard, who now runs the Royal Opera House. 'There were worries about funding, and a moment when we discovered some asbestos in the Turbine Hall, but our most spectacular inaccuracy was in the projection of business for the first year. 'We thought there might be two million visitors, and it was more than double that.' Last week, the gallery, built inside the brick hulk of a former power station on the south bank of the Thames in London, revealed plans to mark its anniversary with a 'birthday weekender' of events. It will host a free celebration of visual art, live music and performance, running from 9 to 12 May. Bourgeois's spider will be back, as it was in 2007, and in honour of an eventful quarter-century, a trail of 25 art works is being installed around the galleries, featuring modern art landmarks such as Andy Warhol's images of Marilyn Monroe and Salvador Dalí's Lobster Telephone. Art historian Tim Marlow, director and chief executive of the Design Museum, feels that another party is justified. 'Tate Modern has utterly changed the face of London's museums. We didn't have a separate museum for modern art and it pretty quickly gained status, up alongside Moma [the Museum of Modern Art in New York] and the Pompidou [in Paris], even if there are some questions about its collections.' It is, Marlow believes, everything Tate wanted it to be, although the original Tate Britain – on the other side of the river – may have suffered at its expense. 'Tate Modern was the result of a series of things happening, not just one key moment,' says Beard. 'There was the lottery money, of course, then all those 'YBA' graduates of Michael Craig-Martin's at Goldsmiths College, as well as Charles Saatchi collecting at Boundary Road, and then all the new technology, turning us into a more visually aware nation. All that came together to create a gallery that could further energise what was going on.' But the chill March wind also brings sobering news. Tate, the parent organisation, is now in serious survival discussions with the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. It is banking on central government coming to the rescue while it looks for a 'financially viable model'. The most recent annual report also reveals that trustees have approved a deficit budget for this financial year. So while Tate Modern may have held on to its high place in the annual popularity rankings for British visitor attractions, released on Friday, it does face a dilemma. The Tate's four galleries have jointly lost 2.7 million visitors in five years, according to Association of Leading Visitor Attractions (Alva) figures. Tate Modern is in fourth place with 4.6 million visitors, 3% fewer than last year and 25% down on 2019. Only Windsor and the Natural History Museum lie between it and the British Museum, in the top spot again. Its neighbour up the river, the Southbank Centre, also celebrating 25 years since it was significantly overhauled, lies just behind in fifth. As some other attractions return to pre-pandemic visitor levels, the original site, Tate Britain, is still down 32% on 2019, though up a bit on last year. The financial lifeline discussions and visitor figures come after recent reports outlining plans to cut staffing numbers by 7%. Alva's director, Bernard Donoghue, suspects that Tate 'has been heavily dependent on overseas visitors', and so is being hit by the comparative lack of Chinese tourists since the pandemic. Tate points out that 2019 was a record-breaking year as Tate Modern pushed the British Museum out of first place in Britain for the first time in nine years on the Art Newspaper's annual survey of international museums and galleries. The success was chiefly down to the appeal of its acclaimed 2018 Picasso exhibition. Alison Cole, a former editor of the Art Newspaper who now directs the Cultural Policy Unit, a new thinktank, believes that renewal – and money to carry it out – is now vital: 'Tate is not alone in facing these issues, and it has to manage many sites in terms of attracting visitors. 'It's hard to continually reinvigorate yourself; it is a question now of renewal. Many institutions are feeling their age since that big museum expansion at the turn of the millennium, not only in terms of deteriorating buildings but also flagging staff morale when finances are under strain.' Cole's thinktank would like to see a temporary switch in the way lottery funds are distributed, in an effort 'to help these great organisations put themselves on a sustainable footing'. The first Tate Gallery at Millbank was founded in 1897 by the sugar magnate Sir Henry Tate to champion British art. Away from the action in a residential area and with a limited collection of foreign and modern works, it wasn't until the 1980s that it became a prominent feature of the art world. Its creation of the Turner prize in 1984 brought it – and the modern art world – much needed publicity and controversy. Then the appointment of Serota as its director four years later changed its fortunes. 'Right from the beginning, on a crisp, two-sided application for the job, Serota laid out his vision,' says Beard. 'He has got the most fantastic 60,000ft view of the role art plays in society and also knows how to get things done, with incredible attention to detail.' Now in the hot seat as chair of Arts Council England, Serota is becoming accustomed to less enthusiastic praise, after criticism of the organisation's most recent round of cuts. Children and young adults were at the heart of the new Tate Modern gallery 'from the get-go', explains Beard. The idea was to avoid the atmosphere of a reverent temple to the arts. 'The entrance into the Turbine Hall was that liminal space between the city and the museum and part of the whole philosophy. It established what was so different about Tate Modern. 'It was genuinely groundbreaking in its relationship with the city. The bridge over to St Paul's was conceived really early on and it caused a great opening up of the river. It's ridiculous to think you couldn't walk along it easily then. It has helped London develop its confidence, to become one of the greatest cities in the world, rather than the dysfunctional capital of a lost power.' The two sides of the river have since reached a fairer balance, putting the Thames back at the centre of the city. 'I was recently on the Southbank and it was heaving,' says Marlow. 'Before, there was a sense that all the arts happened north of the river. Now it is a vibrant cultural corridor. And it seems incredible that a city with so much major art being produced in it didn't have a separate museum for modern art until 2000.'
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Violet Hour by James Cahill review – art, secrets and lies
James Cahill's first novel, Tiepolo Blue, charted the sexual liberation and psychic disintegration of an uptight Cambridge art historian. It was a bravura performance that more than lived up to its extravagant pre-publication praise. But can his second, The Violet Hour, live up to his first? Cahill himself is more than aware of the reputational tightrope walk that is a creative career. The Violet Hour features a fictional contemporary artist, Thomas Haller, whose own eminence, from the 1990s onwards, is contrasted with the downbeat experience of perhaps equally talented female artists who are hitting their heads against glass ceilings and brick walls. Despite his success as an abstract painter who has defined himself against the YBA aesthetic, Haller has been on the receiving end of one devastatingly negative review, brilliantly and wittily ventriloquised by Cahill. The motives for it turn out to be complicatedly personal. After the dusty parochialism of Cambridge, the canvas here is broader, more global, more glamorous, cutting between New York, London, Hong Kong, Montreux. But the same theme – art and lies – endures. While Tiepolo Blue featured a Mephistophelean mentor, here we have a svengali in the shape of a European international art dealer, Claude, whose sinister will to power emerges as we turn the pages at increasingly anxious speed. The novel begins with a set-piece scene in London's Vauxhall in which a young man falls, like Bruegel's Icarus, from a balcony to his death. Who he is, and what his connection is to Haller, unfolds through complex plotting with calculated dead ends to trip the reader up. Antonioni's Blow-Up, the classic 1966 film that famously fails to give closure, is name-checked. Another crucial cinematic reference is Douglas Sirk's Technicolor 1959 melodrama Imitation of Life, stills from which are ultimately revealed as Haller's inspiration. His seemingly abstract intellectual canvases turn out to be 'kitsch': slavish copies, massively blown up, of minute visual details from the movie. But does that make his art less 'real'? As with Tiepolo Blue, erudite allusions abound, yet there's a thriller element that keeps you reading. This is a novel about art and its moral compromises, and The Violet Hour's tutelary spirit is that of Henry James, creator of the villainous aesthete Gilbert Osmond and a writer whose work is peculiarly conflicted on the topic of art. James's comments on his own 'fidget of composition' and finding 'the next happy twist of my subject' are quoted here by one of the characters, making Cahill as self-consciously implicated a literary artist as the Master himself. Like James, Cahill is brave when it comes to empathising with female characters as a gay man. His portrayal of the unravelling of the lesbian relationship between Haller's New York gallerist Lorna and her younger lover Justine, through jealousy and professional rivalry, rings true. Prior to meeting Justine, Lorna had been close to the now fabled Thomas Haller at art school in London in the 1990s before later becoming his New York dealer. They had even had a brief, odd sexual encounter, resulting in a pregnancy. Lorna is haunted by the baby boy she gave up for adoption. The plot plays on her desire both to know and not know what has happened to him. Meanwhile she and rival dealer Claude fight it out over the soul of Haller. This is an enthrallingly intricate novel, with a large cast of characters whose stories and psychological hinterlands are successfully interlinked through the mesh of art, money and desire. Lorna and Claude are the dealers, while the buyer on the other side of the equation is Leo Goffman: a billionaire New York real estate mogul and owner of the best collection of modernist art in private hands. He's a monster. But his cupidity for Picassos, Brâncușis – and Hallers – turns out to be a reaction to trauma, denial and the loss of a child that parallels Lorna's experience. This novel, which plays so much on ideas of memory and illusion, can perhaps only be fully grasped on rereading. Haller's career was made by a 'retrospective' in New York, and his behaviour in the earlier parts of the story only makes full sense in retrospect. This is a text that demands – and repays – the reader's attention. Sign up to Inside Saturday The only way to get a look behind the scenes of the Saturday magazine. Sign up to get the inside story from our top writers as well as all the must-read articles and columns, delivered to your inbox every weekend. after newsletter promotion Cahill's talent for combining clean, hard prose with pit-of-the-stomach emotional chaos was evidenced in his first novel. Here, even the most throwaway descriptive writing – a New York skyline, say, resembling a tray of proffered bottles – is edgily on point. The dialogue at times reads like an accomplished screenplay, to the extent that it seems to be pitching to be simplified for adaptation. Good luck to Cahill if so. But the more subtle Jamesian nuances of this impressive novel, which outstrips its idiosyncratic predecessor in ambition, will be lost in the process. The Violet Hour by James Cahill is published by Sceptre (£18.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
