Art & Design

Tim Marlow Meets

Famous guests reveal their favourite artwork

Tim Marlow Meets

Tony Bennett at his New York studio
Tim Marlow Meets

Mike Leigh at the Cartoon Museum
Tim Marlow Meets

Michael Palin at the Tate Britain
Tim Marlow Meets

Tim Marlow meets fashion designer Paul Smith at his London studios
Tim Marlow Meets

Tim Marlow meets with opera soprano Renée Fleming

Paul Smith; Mike Leigh; Renée Fleming; Tony Bennett; Michael Palin. Not the line-up for the next celebrity reality show (although we’d love to hear a Fleming/Bennett duet, or see a smiley Palin in a Leigh kitchen-sink drama): they might seem a disparate bunch, but these five individuals have each had an indelible impact on our culture, art and collective consciousness. From the inspired lunacy of Monty Python to the sharp suits and signature stripes of Paul Smith’s eponymous clothing label, each has made a unique contribution to today’s culture.

This series follows art historian, broadcaster and current Director of Exhibitions at London’s White Cube gallery Tim Marlow, as he explores the ways in which visual art inspires and motivates their lives and work. Each part sees Marlow taken by his guest to their favourite museum or gallery, and together they explore and discuss the works of art – paintings, sculpture, photographs, and in one case, cartoons – which have had an inspirational influence on their lives.

Marlow Meets Paul Smith
From his far-reaching influence on British fashion from his Covent Garden shop in the 1970s to his global chain of stores that now reaches as far as Dubai and Japan, Paul Smith has always been a designer with a distinctive signature style, mixing traditional British tailoring with bold colours, notably in his famous multicoloured stripe print. But as Tim Marlow discovers, there’s more to Sir Paul Smith (he was knighted in 2000) than a sharp suit. Since the 1960s, Smith has collected visual art, and as a result has a huge collection at his London studio, around which Marlow gets an exclusive private tour.
The tour through the studio packed with artworks takes in a number of Smith’s favourite pieces, from Hockney to Matisse via Marc Quinn and Banksy, although perhaps the most remarkable is the curious installation made up of items – including a traffic cone, a surfboard and a shell – sent to him over a twenty-tear period by an anonymous donor. Throughout, he and Marlow analyse why it is that his favourite pieces mean so much to him and get to the bottom of his magpie taste, taking in the relationship between art and fashion; his love of visual jokes; the influence of his Slade-educated wife; the importance of words (he notes: “I can’t really draw that well...but I can actually write things down that will then turn into a beautiful dress or a suit.”) and reveals that his trademark signature is not in fact his own hand...

Marlow Meets Mike Leigh
Mike Leigh, alumnus of, variously, RADA; Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts; the Central School of Art and Design and the London Film School has always had art of one sort or another at the centre of his life and work. Leigh’s cultural contribution will be familiar to most: he wrote a number of plays before venturing onto the big screen with his 1971 debut feature film Bleak Moments; in the intervening period between this debut and his next film High Hopes, some seventeen years on, he produced a number of television plays, most notably his comedic tour-de-force, Abigail’s Party. Since then, he has gone on to produce a number of acclaimed films set around his signature subject matter of small scale family drama, played out by ordinary people with limited resources, trying to do the right thing. They include Secrets & Lies; Life is Sweet and Naked, although he has occasionally branched off with films such as Topsy-Turvy, a study of Gilbert & Sullivan.
Noted for his edgy, uncomfortable social realism and tragic-comic approach, it is perhaps a surprise that Leigh chooses to escort Tim Marlow around the Cartoon Museum in central London. In it, Leigh reveals his admiration for the simplicity of the work by Kenneth Bird Fougasse, the cartoonist behind the ‘Careless Talk Costs Lives’ campaign of the Second World War; for the “lugubrious English restrained slowness” of Rowland Emett; for the social mores observed by the saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill; and his long-held passion for Ronald Searle – the illustrator of the St Trinian’s and Molesworth series, many of whose works were completed while he was in a Burmese prisoner of war camp – which began when Leigh was given a book of Searle’s at the age of six.

Marlow Meets Renée Fleming
The daughter of two voice teachers, Renée Fleming grew up with music in her blood, but it wasn’t until she was at university that she took up singing, and only then in a jazz trio in her spare time. Having discovered she was rather good at it however, she went on to graduate studies at both the Eastman School of Music and The Juilliard School, and in 1988, her big break came when she was invited to sing the Countess at the Houston Grand Opera. The following year saw her debuts at both the New York City Opera and Covent Garden, and in 1991 she made her Metropolitan Opera debut.
Almost twenty years on, she credits her enduring success to the diversity of her musical styles: she is equally happy singing Manon at the Opéra de la Bastille (a production for which she received high praise: no mean feat for an American in Paris) as she is performing Gershwin at the Met, or Schubert lieder with Christoph Eschenbach.
Here, Tim Marlow travels to New York to find out what the gallery choices of “the most gorgeous and busiest opera star on the circuit” (according to Vogue, and who are we to disagree?) reveal about her taste in visual art. He finds himself first on the Upper East Side at the Neue Galerie, a private museum devoted to German and Austrian art from the beginning of the 20th century, where Fleming’s favourite works include portraits by both Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, which Fleming particularly likes, not least because the sitter, Martha Hirsch, hated it. Together, Fleming and Marlow explore the parallels between art and music, and are particularly struck by the similarities of sitting for a portrait and putting on a performance. Fittingly, they conclude at the studio with a larger-than-life portrait of herself at the studio of one of America’s greatest living artists, Chuck Close, whose method is to have large Polaroid photographs embroidered into a tapestry.

Marlow Meets Tony Bennett
To many, Tony Bennett is the archetypal New Yorker: born the son of an immigrant Italian grocer in the undesirable district of Queens, Bennett left the US army after World War Two and has risen to become one of America's most enduring singing stars with a career spanning over fifty years: aeons in showbiz time. Perhaps less well-known however, is his second career as an artist, a skill he practises under his real name, Benedetto, and which is highly acclaimed: examples of his painting are displayed in Washington’s Smithsonian collection.
Fittingly, Bennett, a New Yorker to the core, chooses to take Tim Marlow to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he admits that settling on such a small number of favourites was incredibly difficult, not least because “I’ve never really seen everything in this museum and I’ve been coming here my whole life.”However, ha manages to whittle it down, selecting works by Velazquez (from whom he feels he has much to learn, particularly the economy of his brushstrokes); Manet; a self-portrait by Rembrandt; the Spanish Impressionist Sorolla and the only American of the lot, John Singer Sargent, who he reveals is “the boss”...

Marlow Meets Michael Palin
From legendary Python to cheerily intrepid world traveller, we think it’s fair to claim actor, author broadcaster and BAFTA award-winner (Best Supporting Actor for A Fish Called Wanda) Michael Palin CBE as something of a British institution. So it’s not all that surprising to discover that he chooses to take Tim Marlow on a tour of Tate Britain.
Palin’s taste has a distinctly British flavour, too, a theme that Marlow explores as they examine his choices. His first is JMW Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, which he recalls with fondness as one of the first paintings he ever spent a great deal of time looking, since a print of it hung by the telephone in his parents’ house. Palin then goes on to wax lyrical over the photographic qualities and theatrical lighting of Joseph Wright of Derby’s work, Iron Forge, as Marlow suggests Palin’s boyhood in industrial Sheffield – and in particular his visits to his father’s factory – may have influenced this particular choice. Other pieces on Palin’s itinerary include works by Marcus Gheeraerts, Whistler and Francis Bacon, but it is perhaps his view of a Sickert painting of a prostitute (and the ensuing Ripper rumours) that is the most revealing: “I find that what success offers you is actually something very, very superficial and in this case Sickert was a very well known artist at the time...he could have been purely a society painter and paid lots and lots of money but the fact is he wanted to paint things like this strikes a chord in me.”