I went yesterday to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in yet another case of catching something I wanted to see which was going to end soon. If I made New Year’s resolutions then my one for 2012 ought to have been to get more organised. I’d promised my uncle that I’d go to my aunt’s lunchtime recital, so I went to Whitechapel via Wesley’s chapel. The concert started with a piece for cello and piano by a contemporary of Brahms called Albert Dietrich, who used to be famous in his day but has sunk almost without trace. Unfortunately the concert organiser had omitted to copy the copious notes my uncle had prepared, so the audience left no wiser about Dietrich than they were at the beginning, apart from having heard his Sonata in C major. Then there was some Faure. My aunt did not think the Dietrich went so well as it had at the run-through, and my uncle was preoccupied because my aunt was unhappy, and cross that his programme notes had got lost, so the effort I'd made to travel up to town went largely unappreciated by my relations.
I knew that bits of the East End were now very trendy, with prices to match (a far cry from the days when my grandfather grew up there), but I hadn’t seen it for myself, until cutting through from Wesley’s chapel to Whitechapel High Street via the Commercial Road. Blimey, there are some posh shops and eateries round the back of Spitalfields. The trendy bits seem to pop up among the unreconstructed areas like currants in a bun, so one minute I was walking past uber-cool clothes shops and delis, and the next minute back in the Tower Hamlets that is the most derived borough in the country.
The Whitechapel Gallery is a lovely art gallery. I’ve said so before. It is a very nice, quiet, soothing space. I feel good just being in the building. It has the best art gallery café I know. Lemon polenta cake yesterday, yummy (I love the slight grittiness). The main draw for me was the third selection of works from the Government Art Collection (I missed part two), this time chosen by Simon Schama. The Government has managed to acquire an eclectic set of art, and the current offering has everything from a neon installation to a portrait of Admiral Nelson after his victory at the battle of the Nile. My favourite thing in the room was probably Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman. Drawn in the style of a Tudor map, from a distance it looks just like the real thing, showing an island with estuaries, mountains, and trees. There are pictures of little buildings and towns, and the whole thing looks very English, until you read the captions and find that the regions are called Normal, Myth, Posh and Guru, the seas off the coast called Paranoia, Anorexia Nervosa, and Schizophrenia, and the names of the buildings and towns are all states of mind or human behaviours. It was funny and clever and I’d have liked to buy the poster, but there weren’t any. Goodness knows if it’s Art, but who cares?
The Government Art Collection exhibition (which only takes up one room, it’s not big) comes with a chunky free booklet, telling you something about Simon Schama’s thought-processes in making his selection, and a bit about each individual work, including where each one is normally hung, a detail that gives an extra layer of interest to the show. In the Cabinet Office they go in for modern, conceptual pieces (though they do also have Lord Nelson). A Howard Hodgkin oil painting titled Mud on the Nile normally lives in our ambassador’s residence in Cairo, while the Government Office for the East of England in Cambridge has to make do with a giant colour photograph of allotments in Ely. It’s great fun. You have until 26 February to see it, then twelve works from number 10 Downing Street, selected by number 10 staff, go on show from 9 March.
The other thing I particularly wanted to catch was a meta-exhibition, a show about a show the Whitechapel did in 1961 of Rothko’s work. I went to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate a while back and loved it. I went twice, and if only I’d still been working in the City I’d have gone every week. Nothing much seems to be happening in those huge canvases, and yet everything is happening. I could look at them for hours. There is just one smallish Rothko at the current Whitechapel show, a red and black one, plus photographs of visitors to the original 1961 exhibition, looking grave and absorbed and wearing amazing 1960s hairstyles and spectacles. There are letters between Rothko and various UK artists and gallery directors discussing the arrangements for that show, a visit Rothko made to the UK, the Tate’s first purchase of a Rothko, and his subsequent gift to them of the Seagram murals. Rothko was very particular about how his paintings should be hung, at what height from the floor, against what shade of white paint, and how they should be lit, suffuse moderately bright ambient light please and definitely no spot lights. He rejected the claim by one friend and admirer that his great canvases were like great calm windows in a cathedral, saying that on the contrary they were full of rage and turmoil. Three months after making his gift to the Tate he killed himself.
There were some other things on as well, but by then I was very tired and not in the mood, so I gave up. I was able to go straight home instead of hanging around London for another hour and three quarters, because the new railway company on the Colchester line is so far following the example of their predecessor, and lifting the evening restrictions on cheap day travel for half term week. A friend discovered this wrinkle in the ticketing system a couple of years ago, and it makes a huge difference. My train home was not full when it left Liverpool Street, and while I see that season ticket holders who have to make the journey every day should get priority for seats during the rush hour, I wish the train company would take a less sweeping view of when the rush hour is. Normally I can’t get any train home between 4.15pm and 6.44pm. A quarter past four is too early. It really limits how much the day-tripper can fit into their trip to town, and most office workers don’t leave their desks for at least another three quarters of an hour after that. The alternative of hanging around London until quarter to seven can be utterly dismal. Fine on a sunny summer’s day, when you can sit outside with a book, OK if you are with somebody, miserable on a chilly day in February when you are tired and at the tail end of a cold.
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