This week’s cultural pleasure, amounting to euphoria, was a visit to the David Hockney retrospective at London’s Tate Britain. I bounced around in a sugar rush at the blocks of colour and light. Hockney’s A Bigger Splash, Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Swimming Pool Library and Jacques Deray’s film La Piscine are surely the three great celebrations of swimming pool sexiness. (The latter was remade by Luca Guadagnino as A Bigger Splash.) My colleague Adrian Searle has delivered his complex, nuanced verdict on the Hockney show.
It may be vulgar of me, but I love the multi-screen videos of a country road Hockney achieved with nine cameras attached to a slow-moving Range Rover – pieces that Adrian compares unfavourably with Hockney’s drawings of the same subject. I also enjoy Hockney’s Polaroid collages, intended to challenge perspective. The catalogue says they were prompted by Picasso and by Hockney’s visit to the 1980 Picasso retrospective at the New York Museum Of Modern Art.
Well, maybe. But might not Hockney have been a Talking Heads fan? My favourite photocollage is the famous album cover created by New York artist Jimmy De Sana for the Talking Heads record More Songs About Buildings and Food, in 1978. It shows the four band members – David Byrne, Tina Weymouth, Jerry Harrison and Chris Frantz – against a backing of red squares that seems to flicker or scintillate. The album and its cover art incidentally feature in the new Annette Bening film, 20th Century Women. Should Tate Modern put on a Jimmy De Sana exhibition?
The ice-cold truth
The Berlin film festival starts this week. Critics know to bring their woolly jumpers and thermal underwear. The city is always cold at this time of year, and there are reports of a cold front from Russia bringing the temperature down to a bracing -10C. Last year in Berlin, I went wild swimming in the Weissensee with city resident Jessica J Lee, who in May is bringing out her memoir entitled Turning, about swimming in 52 Berlin lakes in one year. When we swam last time, the ambient temperature was a tasty zero. Last week Jessica asked if I was up for another swim. Sure, I replied, full of bravado. Now the icy moment of truth has rolled around again. Apparently our swimming bag will contain towels, vacuum flask, chocolate biscuits and a hammer. For the ice. I wonder whether this self-invented Berlin swim tradition really is a good idea.
Upstairs, upstairs?
Connoisseurs of English family and social class will have savoured a piece in the Sunday Times about top City executive Helena Morrissey, chief executive of Newton Investment Management, who has nine children – and a househusband, Richard, a former financial journalist who is content to stay at home. There was a family team photo. According to the headline, she “banks on him indoors”. Great. But … erm … is he the only one she “banks” on? Halfway through the piece there was a telling throwaway remark: “… having the same nanny since their eldest child was born must have helped considerably. The nanny has, however, just gone travelling round the world.”
Well, kudos for not coyly rebranding the nanny as a “childminder” or “au pair”, obviously, but is that really their only staff? Really and truly? Even if we set aside the question of cleaners, I suspect that this family – like so many others in their income bracket – actually employs rather more help. At the moment, reading about the Morrissey family is like watching only the upstairs bits of Downton Abbey.
