In praise of … Jack Nicholson

Jack Nicholson

In praise of … Jack Nicholson

Editorial
Monday 9 September 2013

If Jack Nicholson is really retiring the cinema will have lost one of its great presences. But defining it is no simple task. It has been a while since the most nominated male actor in Hollywood history has made a film that compares to as Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Carnal Knowledge, Chinatown, Terms of Endearment. Even uncontained or badly directed, Nicholson had the capacity to act everyone else off the screen, and Stephen King, who wrote the original novel, expressed doubts about casting Nicholson as the deranged caretaker in The Shining, because in King's view he simply could not play the ordinary man. There is nothing ordinary about him. At his best, Nicholson taunts. He treads the finest of lines between derangement and all too sane fury, between moral purpose and its exact opposite. Time out of number he has made Mephistopheles easily the most sympathetic character in the cast.

THE GUARDIAN

In praise of … Giorgio Vasari

In praise of … Giorgio Vasari

Editorial

28 July 2011

Michelangelo never wanted to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and did everything he could to avoid it. It was a plot by his rivals to draw him away from sculpture, which they saw he had mastered. When the pope forced his hand, he invented a kind of freestanding scaffolding and let nobody into the chapel. But Raphael sneaked in and, seeing the work-in-progress, immediately changed his own style and repainted his most recent masterpiece. Such are the stories told by Giorgio Vasari, born 500 years ago tomorrow, in Lives of the Painters, Sculptors and Architects. Nobody did more than this ardent Florentine to establish the idea of the artist. He wrote with the scholar's learning and the courtier's ease, and his book told a story of Italian Renaissance art from which all others derive, and founded the history of art. Vasari did for artists what Plutarch did for politicians, and the two have the same eye for detail. Leonardo da Vinci could bend a horseshoe with one hand and bought birds just to free them from their cages. When the shepherd boy Giotto was brought to a great workshop, he painted a fly on the nose of a portrait so lifelike that the master kept waving it away. Michelangelo made the world's best snowman. He carved his David out of a block of marble so damaged it was thought worthless. Vasari's greatest compliment to his artists was that by brush or chisel their work came to life. Our greatest compliment to him is that he sends us back to art with a new wonder.

THE GUARDIAN