L'Assedio de Calais | Opera review

Guildhall School of Music and Drama, London Donizetti's 1836 opera about the Siege of Calais in 1346-7 had only a brief outing during his lifetime, limping along in the Neapolitan repertoire for four years before vanishing completely until it was revived...

Related articles:

L'Assedio de Calais | Opera review

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, music

08.11.2009. 23:35h

Books of The Times: Agassi Basks in His Own Spotlight

It’s the haunting story of a disabled painter who lives in a lighthouse and the girl who brings him a wounded animal. The Snow Goose, by Paul Gallico, is the novel most deserving of rediscovery, according to a BBC poll.

Related articles:

The Snow Goose flies to top of BBC poll for novel most deserving of rediscovery

suggest

whole article timesonline.co.uk, culture

08.11.2009. 22:53h

Lynch as one of the chief villains. The unofficial "Queen of Paraguay", said the victors, was a gold-digging Irish prostitute who encouraged her adopted country to invade neighbours. The war ended in 1870 with Brazil battered and Paraguay destroyed: up to 90% of the adult male population were dead, including Francisco Solano López, the demented dictator who had fallen under Lynch's spell and built her a palace. She escaped execution but not infamy. Brazilian chronicles depicted her as a warmongering manipulator, and the reputation stuck. She featured alongside Lucrezia Borgia in a 1995 book called The World's Wickedest Women. Now, however, a revisionist history by Irish authors has turned the tables by portraying Lynch as a misunderstood hero and Brazil as a near-genocidal aggressor. The Lives of Eliza Lynch: Scandal and Courage, by Michael Lillis, a former diplomat, and Ronan Fanning, a historian, has brought indignation in Brazil and anger and acclaim in Paraguay. It depicts Lynch as a humane woman who stayed loyal to Paraguay and to her man, even after his reckless policies provoked savage revenge from Brazil. The book, published in English, Spanish and Portuguese, has prompted calls for Brazilian penitence. "There was no pity shown to Paraguay," Federico Franco, Paraguay's vice-president, said at its launch in Asuncíon last week. "Those women, children and elderly people who were raped and murdered deserve a demand for an apology." Paraguayan academics have called on Brazil's military to open its war archives. Lynch was an unlikely interloper into South American history. Born into modest means in Cork in 1833, aged 16, she married a French army surgeon, Xavier Quatrefages. The marriage failed and four years later in Paris she caught the eye of López, who was buying arms for his father, the dictator of Paraguay. He took her back to Asuncíon where she bore him seven children, though they never married. Local elites mimicked the arrival's Parisian style, but snubbed her as a courtesan. López inherited power in 1862 and two years later launched the so-called war of the triple alliance against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay. As the tide turned against him López, paranoid and possibly insane, purged followers in death tribunals known as altars of blood. Lynch remained steadfast and buried her lover with her bare hands in 1870 after Brazilian troops speared him to death. The country was annihilated. "Paraguay was blasted back to the stone age," said Fanning, emeritus professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. Lynch lapsed into obscurity and died in Buenos Aires in 1886, aged 52, her name besmirched. After years of research in five countries, Fanning and Lillis, an Irish diplomat-turned businessman, pieced together a more sympathetic portrait. French police files and Paris brothel records showed no evidence Lynch was a prostitute. Nor were there literary or journalistic references to her being a courtesan. The exculpation moved some of her descendants to tears at the Asuncíon book launch. However the book's harsh assessment of López prompted anonymous threats ? thought to be from Paraguayan extreme nationalists ? to the local publisher. "Our lives were threatened," said Fanning. "The messages said we shouldn't come or our lives would be in peril." The book has also upset Brazil by accusing Emperor Dom Pedro II of needlessly prolonging the war in a bloodsoaked hunt for López and his army's ragged remnants. "The last two years were close to genocidal," said Fanning. The authors have suggested Brazil apologise to its relatively tiny neighbour, just as Tony Blair said sorry to Ireland for the 1840s famine. Brazilian academics have bristled and pointed out that Paraguay started the war. However, Hugh O'Shaughnessy, a Latin America commentator and author of The Priest of Paraguay, said deep down the continent's superpower did recognise a historic debt: "The Brazilians do have a bad conscience about it. They pulled the insides out of Paraguay." Paraguay Brazil Ireland History Rory Carroll guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Eliza Lynch was depicted by Brazil as a warmongering manipulator after South America's bloodiest war. Irish authors present a more sympathetic account When Brazil won the bloodiest war in South America's history it cast itself as the victim and Eliza...

Related articles:

Book depicting 'Queen of Paraguay' Eliza Lynch prompts calls for Brazilian penitence

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, culture

08.11.2009. 16:42h

The Box: Cash conundrum tale won't push your buttons

The Ontario Film Board rating for The Box is 14A to alert moviegoers to "disturbing content" within.

Related articles:

The Box: Cash conundrum tale won't push your buttons

suggest

whole article thestar.com, movies

08.11.2009. 09:30h

Relentless daily trivia, the shackles of conformity and the "clamour of the world" were, for Ted Hughes, foes of the creative spirit. And Hughes the writer is the focus of this magnificent collection, which captivatingly explores the relationship between...

Related articles:

Letters of Ted Hughes edited by Christopher Reid | Book review

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, culture

08.11.2009. 01:07h

In Alabama, little Tess has her quiet place, curled on the porch in the evening shadows with the family's creek-fed well keeping her company. But one night a woman appears, throws a swaddled – but living – infant into the water and then disappears. These...

Related articles:

The Well and the Mine by Gin Phillips | Book review

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, culture

08.11.2009. 01:07h

Court theatre, where his new play is about to open. "It isn't church. There's nothing innately good about it. Most theatre is still really bad." Ignoring his plate of pasta, the 29-year-old is on a roll. "It has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives. Theatre about theatre is the most awful, terminal nonsense." In 2007, the Royal Court reconfigured the theatre to resemble a tube carriage to stage his acclaimed My Child, about a divorced father fighting for access to his son. His new play, Cock, also features a man in crisis: Ben Whishaw plays John, a happily partnered gay man who falls in love with a woman. In Bartlett's writing speech tumbles from characters struggling to make themselves understood. "It's good to know what your audience have been watching the other four nights of the week," Bartlett says, explaining his rapid style: "If you're still going at theatre-in-the-1970s speed and your audience has been watching The Wire, then your play's going to seem pretty slow." Of TV he says: "It has the potential to change the culture in a much bigger, quicker way than theatre can." On homosexuality: "That discussion's totally moved forward and has gone from Anna Friel in Brookside to Dr Who on prime time." On the subject of his own sexuality, though, he's evasive. "The play is all about those categorisations. So watch the play and then make a conclusion. But by the end you'll hopefully go 'that's not the point'." Bartlett grew up in Abingdon, outside Oxford. His mother was a headmistress and his father a psychologist. After reading English and theatre studies at Leeds University, where he acted, directed and wrote plays, he moved to London and formed a group with five other friends called the Apathists ("I have to disown the name. The first rule is don't have an ironic name – nobody will get it"), meeting monthly to write and put on short plays at Battersea's Theatre503. "It had a slightly anarchic feel," he says. "There was one night when we found a full pint glass of vomit after the show, which we found amusing because it meant somebody had been sick really discreetly, perfectly and then just left it there. I suppose that was the worst review one of us would ever have." Since then, the reviews have been nicer. It was reported this week that Cock is the second play this year (Enron was the other) at the Royal Court to sell out before it opens. "We've got four of the best actors in the country and they're all in the same room, doing my play. It feels pretty good," he says. "If people are going to spend a night out at the theatre they don't just want "good" – we can watch box sets for that – they want it to be totally remarkable." Theatre Hermione Hoby guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

always worked. "Sometimes, particularly in summers in New York," he once confided to the readers of the London Review of Books, "I have tried to write in shorts or with no shirt on and found myself unable to do so, the reason being, I take it, that writing, even of the most impersonal sort, is for me a divestment, a striptease even, so that if I start off undressed I have nowhere to go." For a man who once observed that he required a police cordon before he could unknot his tie, this process of self-exposure must always have been an awkward one; in recent years, however, close readers could be forgiven for thinking that Bennett has been casting aside – in his writing at least – overcoat and scarf and jacket and sweater with something approaching abandon. This tendency began after Bennett developed bowel cancer in 1997, and was told he had a 50/50 chance of recovery. His chemotherapy regime and the apparent imminence of death had the side effect of him wanting to publish the things that up until then he'd been filing as private: "I had no objection to it being read," he'd always thought, "I just didn't want to be in the room at the same time." Such restraint now seemed pointless. Thus came Untold Stories, his indelible family memoir – including a frank account of his mother's depressive illness that shadowed much of his life; and unexpected candidness about his halting homosexuality and his cancer. This confessional spirit was given added momentum with the publication of a biography, by Alexander Games, in 2001. Bennett did not cooperate with the book and neither did most of his friends (Games described the process to me at the time as like "conducting keyhole surgery"). But though it turned out to be more celebratory than revelatory in tone, Bennett appears to have been shaken by its implications. Few writers have managed to exercise the kind of control that Bennett has exerted over his public image. He discovered early on that one way to protect yourself from a gossip-loving culture is to hide in plain view, to become a character. Bennett, always a wonderful performer, created, in his own image, the eternal provincial scholarship boy, face pressed against the window of metropolitan life, and passed it off as himself. He never enjoyed being questioned about this character, always "feeling less afterwards", and stopped giving interviews in 1993, after the New Yorker had printed his unguarded thoughts about his curious love affair with his former cleaning lady, Anne Davies, whom he had installed in the Dales village where he had a home. For a while the tabloids were parked outside his house in Camden Town, shouting questions about his love life through his letterbox. Under reluctant house arrest, Bennett confided to his diary: "All you need to do if you want the nation's press camped out on your doorstep is to say you once had a wank in 1947." His strategy, in response to these intrusions, has been to get his revelations in early and in his own inimitable voice – perhaps the most trusted cadence in British public life – presumably in the hope that there might not be much for the more salacious biographers to bother with after he has gone. For a man so careful about his own comportment, Bennett is pretty unbelted with the private lives of others. As well as unpacking the intimacies of his pathologically reserved parents and wider family in his work, he exploited for all it was worth his bizarre relationship with Miss Shepherd, the Lady in the Van, who parked herself in his front garden for more than a decade. Bennett has always been keenly aware of the dubious ethics of the writer, whose first loyalty is to the story; he has used a line from Borges to describe his own feelings in mining his family's life for "material": "All the books he ever published filled him with a complex feeling of repentance." In the stage version of The Lady in the Van he divided his own character into two competing forces – the private individual and the competitive author – in order to dramatise this split. The writer held sway. When the twin Alan Bennetts fear that Miss Shepherd has died in her van, Bennett the man hangs back: "Give over. This could be really sad." Bennett the writer meanwhile elbows him out of the way: "I know. I can't wait!" Bennett has often parodied the claims to seriousness of literary biography – famously in Kafka's Dick in which Sydney, an insurance salesman, advertises his preference for judging the man, not the work: "I'd rather read about writers than read what they write," Sydney suggests; he'd rather know that "Mr Right for EM Forster was an Egyptian tramdriver" than get stuck into A Room With a View, for example. "This is England," he argues, by way of explanation. "In England facts like that pass for culture. Gossip is the acceptable face of intellect." Part of Bennett himself winces at a culture that wants to know more about the philandering than the work – but, like the high-minded broadsheet editor reporting the latest tabloid outrage, he still generally gives his audience the philandering along the way. He returns to these themes in his new play The Habit of Art, which I saw in its first preview at the National on Thursday. The play opens with an actor playing the late literary biographer Humphrey Carpenter, setting out the philosophy of his calling: "I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men…" he says. What follows is a subtle and often hilarious traversing of the lines between the public and private lives of two great artists – WH Auden and Benjamin Britten – territory that has long fascinated Bennett, not least because it goes to the heart of the contradictory ways he thinks of himself as a writer. You don't have to read far into Bennett's work to see that it snags in particular places, and threads of obsession emerge. He has worked at these threads over the years like a schoolboy worrying at a sleeve. There's the Kafka thread and the spying thread, the family thread and the royalty thread, all part of the fine knitted weave from which he unravels "Alan Bennett". In among these yarns, he has returned often to Auden, the principal subject of The Habit of Art. In the habits of Bennett's own art, Auden figures as one of two early examples of "Literature with a capital L" against whom Bennett as a young man – bookish but never, in his own estimation, well read – stumbled in search of his vocation. (The other is TS Eliot, whose wife Valerie was the daughter of a woman who bought her sausages from Bennett's father, a butcher in Leeds. "There was a time when I thought my only connection with the literary world was that I had once delivered meat to TS Eliot's mother-in-law.") Auden was the first poet Bennett saw in the flesh, though – in the dining room of Exeter College Oxford in 1955, "quacking" at the dons, when Bennett was still young enough not quite to believe that authors were of the same world as secondary schoolboys from Leeds. He subsequently went to watch the great man lecture – Auden had just become Oxford professor of poetry – and heard exactly how far he was from the life he imagined for himself. "At that time I still harboured thoughts of becoming a Writer," Bennett recalled recently, as he has noted a couple of times in a near identical passage over the years, "(and I thought of it in capital letters), so when Auden outlined what he took to be the prerequisites of a literary life, or at any rate a life devoted to poetry, I was properly dismayed. Besides favourite books, essential seemed to be a literary landscape (Leeds?), a knowledge of metre and scansion and (this was the clincher) a passion for the Icelandic sagas. If writing meant passing this kind of kit inspection, I'd better forget it." Bennett didn't forget it, of course. But having observed Auden at close quarters, he determined to make his career not in Literature but as a writer with an insistently small 'w'; the volumes of his own work that now line his shelves, the plays and their awards, the 50 years of brilliant craft and wit, have done nothing, in his public persona at least, to persuade him otherwise. It is his modesty – even if some of it is calculated – that has most endeared Bennett to his loyal readership: he's the outsider never invited to top table, the amateur among self-styled pros. As Bennett well knows, the English prize most of all a man who never forgets where he came from, who doesn't get above himself, who is not quite sure of the sound of his own voice. (His father had a good word for affectation – "splother" – and Bennett has always been watchful for signs of it.) Auden, in the form of Richard Griffiths in Bennett's play, could be accused of none of these discreet virtues, and he challenges their conceit. We find him adrift in his own mythology, in rooms of his Oxford college in 1972, the year before he died, no longer required to write but still indulged as a writer. It's a complicated scenario: Griffiths is playing an actor who is playing Auden in a play within Bennett's play that focuses on the seedier detail of the poet's biography – rent boys and squalor and peeing in the sink. The distancing ironies allow Bennett to unpick the impulses behind his portrait: "We keep focusing on the frailties – he has no nobility, no grandeur…" Griffiths complains of his Auden at one point. "All he does is talk about dicks." Bennett, in his life and in his work, has often been drawn to such unlicensed figures as Auden, to people who run out of control: Miss Shepherd, the mad King George, Mr Toad, as well as friends such as Russell Harty and Peter Cook. Their ability to be rather than to act has often served as a counterpoint to the social awkwardness that Bennett has made his comic trademark, the inheritance of those emblematic childhood afternoons in teashops and department stores marked by the "dread of imminent exposure", the knowledge that he and his family didn't quite belong. In his notes to The Habit of Art Bennett suggests that he identifies himself in the play not with Auden but with Benjamin Britten, the poet's estranged friend and one-time collaborator. In their fictitious meeting in the play Britten is repressed and tongue-tied, next to Auden, who is anything but. Writing those scenes, Bennett says he drew on his own formative experiences in the theatre, which marked his subsequent character. "Thinking of Beyond the Fringe, now nearly half a century ago," he observes, "makes me realise how I have projected on to Britten particularly some of the feelings I had when I was a young man, not much older than he was and thrust into collaboration (which was also competition) with colleagues every bit as daunting as Auden." In the company of Peter Cook and Jonathan Miller in particular, Bennett always felt himself wholly inadequate (who wouldn't?). All the awkwardnesses and doubt of his adolescence were magnified in their company, that sense of "I haven't got anything to say anyway, and if I did I wouldn't be able to say it as well as they do". His competitive desire to engage on equal terms with these intensely glamorous figures, and his inability to do so, was a heightened version of his parents' ever-unfulfilled need "to mix" – the poignancy of the unused cocktail sticks discovered in his mother's kitchen cupboard after her death. In his recent harder-edged memoirs, Bennett has given the impression that his "cosy" public persona, that brilliant defence mechanism against the world, has become something of a trap for him, a barrier against self-expression, and that in deceiving the world, slightly, he has also been deceiving himself. His mother – who was so self-conscious that she arranged her wedding for eight o'clock on a weekday morning so as not to draw attention to herself – transferred her shyness to her son: "'Our Alan's like us,' Mam would say, 'Shy.'" Bennett went along with this, in part because it was a description that allowed him and his parents to overlook the fact of his homosexuality. It was easier to be thought of as shy than gay – "shy is useful to someone shy of saying (or thinking) something else". Bennett never went in for the angry rejection of the narrowness of his parents that fuelled the work of Dennis Potter, say, or Philip Larkin. He felt himself to be too kind for that. You could see, however, his entire career as an act of rebellion against the identity he was stuck with, even as he publicly perpetuated it. Reserve and restraint, those English virtues, were never much use in facing up to the real difficulties of character, just a method of pretending they didn't exist. Bennett's first play, Forty Years On, written in 1968 in his parents' front room after he returned from the glitz of Broadway and Beyond the Fringe, contained the following exchange, son to father: "Have you ever thought what's happened to all the shy people? What became of them all of a sudden? … Whatever happened to reserve, Dad, and self-consciousness? Was it your government that got rid of guilt? Tell me this, Dad. How is it easier, how is it easier to reach out and touch someone for the first time? Why is it easier for me, now, than it was for you, then, whenever that was? Because that's an irreducible fact… " That ease was something that Bennett found it simpler to dramatise than to experience, however. In his 2005 essay "Written on the Body", he details the loneliness that ingrained awkwardness occasioned, shyness masking an unwillingness to face up to who he was, and a preference for self-deception. Bennett is sometimes depicted as nostalgic for the rationed emotional range of the postwar years, the comical net-curtain chatter of the voices in his Talking Heads, but however much warmth and comedy he could find in those voices, the structure of those monologues was always an argument against the bottling up of things, against repression. In Writing Home he said: "I do not long for the world as it was when I was a child. I do not long for the person I was in that world. I do not want to be the person I am now in that world then. None of the forms nostalgia can take fits. I found childhood boring. I was glad it was over." Bennett once added to Auden's most famous line – "we must love one another or die" – the two words "of embarrassment"; it's a good joke, a wry comment on the strangled social unease he so delights in exploring, but applied to himself it could have been fatal. Writing and performing allowed him a way out, even if it has taken him a long while to acknowledge that fact. One of the discussions in The Habit of Art, between the open-hearted Auden and the tortured Britten, centres on when it became possible for gay men to say in public that they had "partners". Auden had to go to America to get away with it. Britten, despite his long-term relationship with Peter Pears, never managed it. Was it possible in 1955, or 1969, or 1972? While this debate goes on, it is hard not to think that Bennett in writing it was also turning over this question in his own mind, and wondering why it took him until his 60s to say openly that he had a partner "Why," Auden subsequently wonders of Britten in 1972, about the hidden desire in his music, "are you still sending your messages in code? These days you can come clean… " If that question had been put to Bennett's younger self, he might have had no ready answer to it. (When Ian McKellen asked him, on stage at an Aids benefit in the 80s, if he was gay, Bennett replied that the question was like asking a man who was wandering in the desert if he preferred "Malvern or Perrier water".) Since his cancer, however, he seems to have wanted to put right some of that earlier evasion, acknowledging without ironies – in Untold Stories – the facts of his life: "Always a late starter, I must count myself blessed that, at a time in my 50s, when I expected to remain permanently unattached, I found, or was found by a partner who, though much younger than I am, now shares my life [Rupert Thomas, an editor at World of Interiors]. I can't quite boast that it is an ordinary life, or my parents' ambition, a life like other people's. But it does for us." The liberating force of this belated coming out finds expression in The Habit of Art. Bennett jokingly refers to it as his Late Style, the capital letters as usual signalling his amusement at the pomposity of the idea: "Feeling I'd scarcely arrived at a style, I now find I'm near the end of it. I'm not quite sure what Late Style means except that it's some sort of licence, a permit for ageing practitioners to kick their heels up." Kick his heels up, Bennett does, having all sorts of fun with his outrageous Auden (who memorably confuses his biographer at one point with a rent boy: "I'm going to suck you off," the poet insists. "But I'm from the BBC!" says a startled Humphrey Carpenter, brandishing a microphone.) Richard Eyre once suggested to me that the kind of anecdote for which Bennett is famous tends to "seek him out… when you are with Alan you feel that his particular perception of the world is so powerful that the world itself becomes Bennettesque around him." It has taken nearly a lifetime for that perception of the world to take proper public account of all the impulses that created it. "For a long time, years even," Bennett recently wrote, "it seemed to me I had nothing to put into what I wrote; and nor had I. I did not yet appreciate you do not put yourself into what you write, you find yourself there." The habit of art is, above all, a process of self-discovery. David kynaston Historian and author He depicts with an unerring eye the cruelties as well as niceties of social class. Bennett, educated at a grammar school, is a classic story of postwar upward social mobility but has recorded a scarring episode from his Cambridge entrance exam in 1951. "They were loud, self-confident and all seemed to know one another, shouting down the table to prove it while also being shockingly greedy," was his first encounter with public schoolboys in the mass. Better taught, better prepared, they did not question their entitlement to the glittering prizes. "I thought that was unfair when I was 17," Bennett added on the radio last year. "And that view has never changed." As we prepare for another Old Etonian prime minister, his anger at the fundamentally unfair socio-educational divide remains as pertinent as ever. Lucy Prebble Playwright Mental illness, racism, paedophilia, sexual exploitation. Bennett's subjects are savage, dark and beautiful. I don't understand why he gets perceived as a warm and cuddly writer. Perhaps it is a patronising cliché about "the North", or because his skill with humour is so profound. Yet it is the darkness of his work that stays with me. Bennett does what any good writer does – smiles as he plunges in the knife. Then, as a great writer, he leaves the blade stuck in. Sarah Millican Comedian I'm a massive fan. He writes the way that people talk. Theatre always felt to me like posh people having cups of tea but when you see his plays you think ,"Oh, I know her. She lives down the street from me mam." People say his characters are bleak but I always thought of them as very normal. Michael Frayn Playwright and novelist Bennett's ear for the way people reveal themselves through the words they utter is mercilessly exact, and yet, having exposed them so precisely for what they are, he accepts them with understanding and generosity at exactly that valuation. He has also, with the same cunning mixture of frankness and artifice, wonderfully brought to life a character called Alan Bennett, which allows him to tell us a good deal of the truth about that most elusive of any writer's subjects, his own self. Lucy Porter Actress and comedian His comedy is widely described as that of the meek, overlooked and downtrodden, and that's what I love about him. He shows that affection, observation and a brilliant turn of phrase are comedy tools as effective as the bludgeoning putdown. The Habit of Art is on at the National Theatre, with on-the-day seats and returns only until 24 January. Further performances from January to April 2010 will be open for general booking from 2 December; 020 7452 3000, nationaltheatre.org.uk Alan Bennett Theatre WH Auden Tim Adams guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

least. After a long drive to her hometown, Hope, Idaho, the man at the Ellisport Bay marina directs us to "follow the signs to Beyond Hope and then take a left". A postwoman escorts us the last few hundred metres, through a nature reservation where beagles chase after young deer and wild turkeys wander through the trees and points us to the sculpture of a fighter jet bearing a toothy grin which is parked in the front garden of her log-cabin home on the shores of Lake Pend Oreille. Nancy Reddin Kienholz, the fifth (and final) wife of the Californian sculptor Ed Kienholz who died of a heart attack 14 years ago, emerges from behind the screen door of her home and studio. In 1979, Ed Kienholz, always something of a loner, declared that everything he had made from 1972 onwards was a collaboration with Nancy, a photojournalist whom he had met that year at a party in LA. "I knew who he was – you could not not have known who Ed Kienholz was," she says, referring to the controversy that had followed the premiere at the LA County Museum of Art in 1964 of his Back Seat Dodge '38, which showed an impassioned couple in the back seat of an old Dodge. The Kienholzes established studios in Berlin and Houston as well as the one in Idaho which heaves with the energy and profusion of their brash and bold works. Ed Kienholz was a pioneer of assemblage, or "funk" art, in the 1950s and 60s, a movement dedicated to collecting society's debris from flea markets and junk shops to make artworks that provoked our social conscience. He expanded the form to installation scale and many works – State Hospital, for example, which showed two abandoned inmates on a bed in a psychiatric unit and was inspired by his time as a hospital attendant – were based on his own experiences. His contemporaries were Claes Oldenburg, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin and Robert Irwin. Although not perhaps widely acknowledged as such, Kienholz's work is a major reference point for contemporary British artists such as Damien Hirst, Mike Nelson and Paul McCarthy. "Ed taught me everything I know about art and we worked together for 24 hours a day," says Nancy. It was an intense collaboration, friendship and marriage which worked, she said, because she quickly recognised, "that art was more important for him than he or I or our children, and once that was clear, it became our focus and it was fun". Right now, she is quietly seething because the builders who were constructing a new gallery for their artworks have disappeared. "They've gone off to hunt elk for two weeks, leaving me with a building site," she says, rolling her deep green eyes. These are busy days for Nancy Kienholz, 66, who is preparing for one of the most important moments in her life as an artist, a date at the National Gallery in London, with an exhibition that curators hope will introduce a new generation to the couple. Their last London show was at the ICA in 1971, their last UK show at the Baltic in Gateshead in 2005. Nancy and Ed's biggest environmental sculpture, The Hoerengracht (Whores' Canal) – a garish, life-size depiction made over five years in their Berlin studio of a 1980s Amsterdam brothel district – will stand alongside paintings from the gallery's permanent collection of Dutch masters depicting prostitution scenes from the 17th century. It will be the first time that the gallery has exhibited a modern installation. "It's as good as it gets," says Nancy. When the letter from Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery, arrived earlier this year inviting her to exhibit The Hoerengracht – whose name is a pun on the elegant street Herengracht or "Gentleman's Canal" – because he wanted to compare it to the Dutch old masters such as Vermeer and De Hooch, Nancy thought it must be a joke. "I was incredulous," she says. "Such a thing was beyond my imagination and then I had to laugh when they said they were interested in drawing this comparison. I thought it must be Ed up where he is, thinking, 'Nancy's getting complacent, she needs something else to do.'" Simultaneously, a work she calls the "precursor" to The Hoerengracht, Roxy's, based on a whorehouse in Nevada Ed visited in the 1940s and which had shocked him to the core, is going on show in a Berlin gallery. Another piece, The Beanery – a reconstruction of a seedy and famous LA bar where Ed used to hang out with the likes of David Hockney and Dennis Hopper in the 60s, to the extent that it became known as "Ed's living room" – is also expected to be shown again in 2010. There are also moves afoot to exhibit Kienholz's newly restored 1972 installation Five Car Stud – a tableau of a black man being castrated by white racists – in the United States where it has always been considered too controversial to be shown. "Something of a Kienholz revival is going on and it's about time too," says Colin Wiggins, who is curating the Hoerengracht exhibition at the National Gallery. Back in Hope, in the gymnasium of the bat-infested former schoolhouse, a team of workers is making the final preparations before packing the huge Hoerengracht. The work is to be put into 40 wooden crates and loaded on to flatbed, air-ride trucks, taken to New Jersey, transported across the Atlantic, then driven to the National Gallery where it will be reassembled. Some of the mannequins in the tableau, which were cast from the bodies of friends in Berlin, have been freed from their cell-like rooms as they wait to be packed. They stand in the corridor of the school, drawing on cigarettes and looking bored or wasted. Others are still encased behind glowing doors and windows in this chunk of a neighbourhood which is reproduced in detail from the brick walls to the bike stands, the street signs, the leaves and detritus of city life, and in the interiors of the women's working spaces, complete with their knick-knacks, alarm clocks, snow-shakers, mascaras and lipsticks, exposed plumbing and dirty radiators. Radio music blares from their rooms as bulbs of different hues flash. The viewer walks down the boldly lit street and gazes into the rooms. Translucent resin covers every surface: it runs down the window panes and the women's faces, suggesting a plastic and artificial atmosphere, not to mention unpleasant, oozing substances that cannot be controlled or cleaned up. The women wear "cookie boxes" (glass cases) around their heads to convey the message that although their bodies are for sale, they remain the mistresses of their emotions and kisses. Daryl Witcraft, a fibreglass expert, handyman and old friend of the Kienholzes, leads a repair team that includes his wife, Sherry. The crew is busy fitting new light bulbs, touching up the resin on the prostitutes, trying to fix the moth-eaten lapdog and repainting the bricks of the houses. "We've put this up and taken it down dozens of times over the years, most recently in Sydney in 2006," says Daryl, as he crawls through a small door at pavement level from the control centre of The Hoerengracht. This is where all the light switches, sound effects, window and door hatches, as well as copious supplies of Dr Pepper, steel wool and replacement light bulbs, are concealed. "Let's make more of the dog," suggests Nancy, pointing to the lapdog that sits at the feet of prostitute Maryann and, like much of the tableau, is now reminiscent of times past. Nancy and Ed started making the installation in 1983. They paid the sex workers 50 guilders a head to be allowed to enter and photograph their rooms to gather information. She is tickled that their work is now being seen as a historical document of the red light district of the 1970s and 80s. The Amsterdam city authorities have been trying, and succeeding, for several years to reduce the number of window prostitutes, replacing them in many cases with jewellery and fashion designers as they struggle to find a balance between sex tourism and gentrification. New laws mean brothels have had to change beyond recognition – the wallpaper and carpets seen in The Hoerengracht have been replaced by white tiles which can be hosed down after each session. "As a result," says Annemarie de Wildt, curator at Amsterdam's Historical Museum, to which the artwork will transfer after London, "The Hoerengracht captures the spirit of a particular moment in time which has all but disappeared." Pets are certainly out. So, too, are the "puff hunds" (literally "brothel dogs"), the kitsch porcelain lapdogs that used to sit in the windows and, if their backs faced the street, indicated that the prostitute was unavailable. "In the Second World War, soldiers were not allowed to visit the brothels, so they'd buy the dogs, saying they'd gone in to buy a present for their mothers," says Nancy. "Ed reckoned that's where the song 'How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?' came from." Bald-headed eagles and turkey vultures soar above us as we take a trip in Nancy's motorboat around the majestic Lake Pend Oreille. Nancy points out Ed's burial spot in the mountains she part-owns. Ed died of a heart attack one morning following an evening of revelry in the Billy Bar above their studio. Daryl and friends dug a big hole in the mountainside. Ed's rotund, embalmed body was placed in the passenger seat of his brown 1940 Packard coupe – in his pocket a deck of cards and a dollar, on the seat beside him a bottle of 1931 Chianti, on the back seat the cremated remains of his dog, Smash, who had died days earlier – and the car was pushed into the hole to the strains of Glenn Miller. Nancy's place is like visiting planet Kienholz. The man's spirit infuses everything, starting with the huge, life-size fibreglass cast of him, with a lacquered, flat, sepia-coloured head and eyes that follow you everywhere. It's in the colourful Billy Bar above the studio, which they decided to build, says Nancy, mixing me one of her specialities, a Dirty Vodka Martini, because "going to bars in Idaho can be complicated and confrontational". It is also where Ed spent the evening before he died, playing pool with friends and listening to Al Jolson on the tape deck. Look into a mirror, open a door or turn a corner and the artworks or parts of them – loose limbs, dolls' legs, boars' heads, crucifixes, resuscitation dolls – are there, all around you. Countless drawers and cupboards are full of Kienholz finds from flea markets across the world. Rubber knees, whetstones, strips of fur, screw eye-hooks, doilies, Nancy's Brushes (Keep Out!) – it's all here and all neatly labelled. Colin Wiggins, the National Gallery curator who fell in love with Ed Kienholz's work after seeing what he describes as his "totemic" 1971 ICA show, sees the exhibition as a chance to put Kienholz back on the map. "I believe it's the piece with which I can subvert the whole National Gallery collection," he admits, hinting that it was not an uncontroversial decision. "It took a while to crank through the National Gallery system when I first proposed it." When he saw The Hoerengracht at the Baltic in 2005, Wiggins was "struck by the similarities with Vermeer", particularly by the "same fascination of looking into spaces and doorways into spaces beyond. It connects so magically and powerfully with the form and light and voyeurism of Dutch paintings of the 17th century". The Hoerengracht is going to be shown alongside paintings by Steen, Van Hoogstraten, De Hooch and Vermeer, pictures which at first glance appear to show gentle Dutch townscapes or serene Delft interiors, but on closer inspection depict tableaux of prostitution and sensual pleasure. "It does not take much to interpret the message behind the man who offers an oyster shell as a come-on to a woman who feigns shock at the same time as she makes a gesture by putting a knife into a glass," says Wiggins, referring to De Hooch's 1677 painting Musical Party in a Courtyard which will appear in the exhibition. While the Kienholzes made no conscious effort to refer to the Dutch masters there are some striking similarities. In The Hoerengracht, a furtive-looking man in a raincoat wandering the street looking for sex mirrors the young boy standing in a shadowy archway in De Hooch's Musical Party, for example; and there is a striking compositional similarity between the woman at her keyboard in Vermeer's Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, who is turned towards the viewer, and Jutta in Hoerengracht, who stands next to her telephone, looking at us in a confrontational pose as she waits for the next customer to call. "I love the contrast," says Nancy, seated on a stool in the Billy Bar. "Unlike the old masters, The Hoerengracht has nothing to do with good taste. It's a sleazy piece of art with dirty surfaces and tacky artefacts." After some heated discussion, the word "blow job" was removed from the draft of the exhibition catalogue, but still Nancy says: "I think there will be some complaints." She pauses to add with a mischievous smile: "But as Ed would have said, it's always so much more fun when there are scandalised patrons." Kienholz: The Hoerengracht opens at the National Gallery, London WC1 on 18 November National Gallery Art Kate Connolly guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Ed Kienholz's widow and collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz, talks to Kate Connolly as she prepares to show their masterwork installation The Hoerengracht at London's National Gallery Nancy Kienholz's house is in an obscure neck of the woods, to say the...

Related articles:

How much is that body in the window?

suggest

whole article guardian.co.uk, culture

08.11.2009. 01:05h

It's always the same old story

can even start to damage their reputations, as anguished fans concede that their idols have feet of clay. Philip Roth is often cited as a great contemporary who has enjoyed a remarkable late flowering, from American Pastoral to Exit Ghost. But now, aged 76, his increasingly thin fiction – for example, his latest, The Humbling, massacred by the reviewers – suggests that he might be well advised to call it a day. Small chance. Leaving aside hungry publishers and agents, a failing life force will persuade most writers to go on to the bitter end. Another reason? Even inferior art will continue to have meaning where life itself seems pointless. Take Vladimir Nabokov. There is every reason to suspect he knew that The Original of Laura was far below his best work, but he battled on with it, even on his deathbed. Finally, admitting defeat in his last weeks, he ordered its destruction, even though this was a deed he could not bring himself to undertake and bequeathed to his luckless inheritors. Amid the acres of commentary that will greet Penguin's launch of this posthumous curiosity, it will be intriguing to see how many critics conclude that the old boy must have known that the game was up. Ageing great writers recognise the inevitable no more than the over-optimistic late starter. Leo Tolstoy wrote "I Cannot Be Silent" at the age of 79. Resurrection, his last novel of any consequence, appeared in 1900 when he was 72. Three score years and 10 still seems to retain its biblical magic, though not, strangely, in art: Picasso, and Matisse painted memorably deep into their 80s. But now that 80 is the new 70, you might think that literary endeavour would flourish among octogenarians. The evidence is not encouraging. Yes, Goethe completed Faust at 81, but here in Britain, both Graham Greene and William Golding published new, and inferior, books in their 80s. Doris Lessing won the Nobel prize for literature in 2007, aged 87, and published The Cleft in 2008. But even her most ardent fans would agree that she'll be remembered for The Grass Is Singing, and The Golden Notebook, published in 1962, when she was 43. It's a measure of the desperate condition of the British book trade that no publisher is going to tell a big-name writer that he or she would be better off leaving their latest typescript in the bottom drawer. Anyway, if literature is your life, then to be told that the rest is silence is a peculiar kind of cruelty. The issue is existential: how many of us, writers or not, have the self-knowledge to recognise our limits? In this context, I am fascinated by the example of William Shakespeare. As one of his finest biographers, Stephen Greenblatt, has put it, he always wrote "as if he thought that there were more interesting things in life to do than write plays", and stepped down with a carefree grace. In his final years he collaborated with John Fletcher, though not to much effect, and with a sense of going through the motions. Artistically, he had already stopped, some years short of 50, in the most remarkable way. Strictly speaking, The Tempest, probably written in 1611, is not Shakespeare's last play. But it remains an astonishing and telling farewell to the "rough magic" of his creativity and an extraordinary example of self-willed resignation. Where King Lear explores the impossibility of retirement, and the catastrophe of letting go, in The Tempest, the playwright seems to celebrate it. "Every third thought," says Prospero, "shall be my grave." He says that he is at the height of his powers but he's going to drown his book "deeper than did ever plummet sound"– break his magic staff and retire to Milan, implicitly to Stratford. This, says Greenblatt, "is represented not as weakness but as a moral triumph". But, then, Shakespeare was a genius. Whiffle and other Christmas piffle The inevitable run-up to Christmas is the signal for publishers to try locating the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, aka the Great Christmas Bestseller, a genre of short books designed, literally, as stocking fillers. Never mind that almost no one has managed to hit the jackpot, despite punting tens of thousands of pounds on forgettable titles: publishers have not ceased their quest for geese to lay another golden egg. This year's Christmas turkeys include Adam Jacot de Boinod's The Wonder of Whiffling and Other Extraordinary Words in the English Language (Particular Books). Well, good luck to him, but my money, already recorded here, is on The Last Word: Tales From the Tip of the Mother Tongue (Bloomsbury), by Ben MacIntyre . It's the perfect antidote to all mothers-in-law and every seasonal hangover. TV literary criticism for the Twitter generation Television abhors a vacuum. No sooner have Richard and Judy faded from our screens than Sky1 announces the launch of a daytime show, Angela and Friends, presented by Coronation Street actress Angela Griffin. This will include a books slot fronted by a new face, Alex Heminsley, who will have the power to select and criticise the chosen titles, aiming at a "younger and trendier" audience. The omens are good. Ms Heminsley used to write for these pages, so she is obviously gifted, attractive, wise and incredibly well-read. Let's hope she can import the highest literary criteria to the small screen. Book-loving viewers will be able to help her. The show will be soliciting contributions via Skype and Twitter. R&J already seems so yesterday... Philip Roth Doris Lessing Graham Greene William Shakespeare William Golding Vladimir Nabokov Thomas Mann Robert McCrum guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Great writers never die, they just fade away Literature and longevity make poor companions. If most writers' reputations are made, or at least begun, before the age of 40, then very few novelists put many runs on the scoreboard after 70. Arguably, they...