Journeys With The Waste Land review – 'If only they'd picked Cats instead!'

This attempt to connect TS Eliot’s great modernist poem with paintings by Hopper, Twombly and more ends up feeling like a stilted stagger through the shards of a masterpiece

TS Eliot would have loathed this exhibition. The English language’s great 20th-century poet was a proud elitist. His 1922 masterwork The Waste Land is full of contempt for what he saw as the vulgar culture of jumped-up commoners:

“He, the young man carbuncular, arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”

The stillborn attempts at thirdhand cubism hit you like a wet fish

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