JON BALDWIN recommends a provocative assertion of how working-class culture can rethink knowledge
‘So familiar and yet so unfathomable’
If 17th-century Dutch art is your thing this must be your book, believes MICHAL BONCZA
ENIGMATIC: Carel Fabritius’ View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall
These are vivid accounts of people’s experiences of far-right violence along with documentation of popular resistance, says MARJORIE MAYO
The Star's critic MARIA DUARTE, JOHN GREEN and ANGUS REID review An Army of Women, Julie Keeps Quiet, The Friend and The Ugly Stepsister
GORDON PARSONS squirms at a production that attempts to update Shakespeare’s comedy to a tale of Premier League football
Above a Gothic bar just down from Brighton station, something spooky is happening, suggests JAMES WALSH
PETER MASON is enthralled by an assembly of objects, ancient and modern, that have lain in the mud of London’s river
MIK SABIERS enjoys the theatrical feminist six piece who have a lot of fun that the audience feeds off as the set rolls on
Thunderclap: A memoir of Art and Life and Sudden Death
by Laura Cummings
Chatto and Windus £12.99
THE thunderclap of the title was a gunpowder explosion on October 12 1654, which devastated the city of Delft killing over a hundred and leaving thousands injured. Among the dead was Carel Fabritius, Rembrandt van Rijn’s most promising apprentice.
Fabritius holds a special fascination for Laura Cummings as does his View of Delft, with a Musical Instrument Seller’s Stall, painted two years before his death (at the National Gallery, London): “for pictures can shore you up, remind you of who you are and what you stand for.”
Cummings, the insightful art critic of the Guardian, employs anecdote, fascinating historical detail and personal memories to weave a superb narrative, one that becomes a spellbinding vademecum to Dutch art of the time, its social and political context, and a plethora of actors across the ages including Rembrandt and the French socialist art critic and revolutionary Theophile Thore-Burger who revived Vermeer and catalogued Fabritius among many others.
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