Opening of the week The new Royal Academy
Burlington House and Burlington Gardens, London W1 (020-7300 8090, www.royalacademy.org.uk)
“Of all cultural institutions in Britain, the Royal Academy is one of the strangest,” said Jonathan Morrison in The Times. Founded in 1768 as an organisation dedicated to promoting the arts through education and exhibition, it now exists as a “bizarre” hybrid that is “part private members’ club, part museum, part school”. Indeed, the two adjacent buildings that form the academy – Burlington House and 6 Burlington Gardens – were until recently entirely separate, unconnected structures. But now, just in time for its 250th birthday, the institution has completed a £56m programme of renovations that has transformed it into “a beautiful unitary palace of the arts”. Masterminded by the architect David Chipperfield, the makeover has for the first time joined the two halves of the RA into “an articulate whole”, while also adding an “elegant” lecture theatre, educational facilities and a number of “airy” new galleries; it has expanded the institution’s exhibition space by an astonishing 70%. Overall, the revamp is an unqualified success – “one of the century’s finest restorations”.
Among the more “eye-catching” features of the refurbishment is a bridge that connects the RA’S two buildings, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. This is the “keystone” of a “thorough- fare” that stretches through the academy, passing small galleries, “atmospheric” (and previously inaccessible) subterranean vaults and the studios of the institution’s art school. The new design includes a gallery devoted to showing the academy’s rarely seen permanent collection, said Sarah Kent on The Arts Desk. There are many “delights” in the gallery, not least some “wonderful” Constable cloud studies, Turner’s Dolbadarn Castle (1800) and the Taddei Tondo (c.1504-05), the only Michelangelo sculpture in Britain. Yet overall, it is a “dispiriting” display dominated by “lifeless” 19th century copies of Roman and Greek sculptures.
Another new gallery will be devoted to current academicians, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. It’s a pity that the opening show is a landscape exhibition by the “tedious” Tacita Dean. Yet this is a small complaint given the scale of what the Royal Academy has achieved with its “ambitious” refurbishment. Chipperfield’s makeover feels like more than a mere “enlargement”; it has given the academy a “whole new purpose”. Where once it seemed like a reactionary institution run by “cravatted blimps with a passion for port”, the new RA presents itself as a forward-looking place dedicated to “art and the pursuit of knowledge”.
The novelist Esther Freud picks her five favourite books. Her play Stitchers, about the prison charity Fine Cell Work, opens at the Jermyn Street Theatre, London SW1 on 30 May (www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk)
Falconer by John Cheever, 1977 (Vintage £9.99). I’ve been in a book club for 22 years and when I think of all the novels we’ve read, this is the one that stands out most vividly. It tells the story of a college professor in prison for killing his brother and, not surprisingly for this Pulitzer Prize-winning author, it is as brutal as it is elegant.
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh, 1934 (Penguin £9.99). This may be my favourite of Waugh’s novels. The light touch and hilarity of the first chapters seamlessly descend into seriousness when reality intrudes. The dialogue is exquisite, and the scene of the accident involving Brenda and
Tony Last’s small stoical son, and its aftermath, is genius.
State of Wonder by Ann Patchett, 2011 (Bloomsbury £8.99). This is a literary thriller set in the Brazilian rainforest, where an enigmatic scientist is developing a drug that could grant women lifelong fertility. When her investors attempt to track her progress, it results in a tale of terror, love and unexpected wonder.
A Strange Eventful History
by Michael Holroyd, 2008 (Vintage £10.99). Holroyd is the master of biography, and this is the most ambitious and mesmerising of his many books. He brings to life two great 19th century actors, Ellen
Terry and Henry Irving, and recreates the passion, chaos and inventiveness of their lives. Marriages, scandal, bankruptcy, children – cherished and abandoned – and always another theatrical production involving leaps of faith, trains full of props, dreams and transformations.
Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford, 1989 (Eland £12.99). Set in the south of France in the 1920s, this is a novel that made me want to write. It’s semi-autobiographical: the childhood Bedford describes is so astonishing as to be beyond invention. At its core are both the young and the old Sybille – an exercise in memory that is as effective as it is inspiring.