I went to Tate Modern today. A friend was keen to see the Matisse cut-outs, and I was more than happy to take her and get some use out of my upgraded Member plus Guest card, and happy to leave it until the initial rush had died down, and she was safely past the university exam season and into a relative lull at work.
The cut-outs have attracted rave reviews, and I expected to like them. I know that not everybody does like Matisse. One of my other gallery visiting friends can't stand him, says he can't see the point of it, but I have always warmed to Matisse. Bright though never garish colours, fluid lines, organic shapes, movement, all do it for me. I have never sat down and read a biography of Matisse (maybe after typing this I will read his Wikipedia entry), but I feel that lunch with Matisse would be a cheerful affair. Maybe I shouldn't risk reading about his life, in case he was a grumpy misanthrope. It is always disappointing to discover that artists whose work you love were miserable gits in real life.
The cut-outs are great. They started small and got bigger, and more elaborate. Almost everybody must have been introduced to The Snail while they were at school, and been taught that Matisse turned to cutting out and arranging pieces of paper when he was no longer physically able to paint, but that version ignores the fact that The Snail is only one work in a sequence of collages that went on over a period of years, Matisse refining his technique and his ideas as he went on.
So the exhibition runs to fourteen rooms, culminating in not another cut-out but a stained glass window, which brings out the finest qualities in Matisse's use of rich colour. Apart from that, though, and The Snail, we both warmed most to his slightly earlier, simpler, less grandiose and more apparently spontaneous works. But it is all good, and you have until 7 September to enjoy it.
After lunch we went and looked at the newly opened Malevich exhibition, so newly opened that today was its first day. My friend was hesitant to suggest it, thinking that it would be horribly crowded, but we agreed there was no harm in sticking our noses through the door. It was not packed out, despite getting a mention on the Today programme this morning. I am afraid that the great British art viewing public has not really taken the early twentieth century Russian avant-garde to its bosom. A nice bit of Leonardo or Vermeer, or some Monet haystacks, and you would not be able to keep them out, but the creator of the Black Square leaves them largely unmoved.
I had heard of the Black Square because somebody took me to a lecture about Russian art in the twentieth century, and was not averse to seeing it. Malevich took his time getting there. In fact, as a painter he made me think of a creature from one of Kiplings or Ted Hugh's fables, trying out what it was to be first one sort of a thing and then another. You can see echoes of Cezanne, Suerat, Matisse and Mughal paintings just in the first room, passing via Cubism into a sort of Futurism, before he settled on the Black Square. By the end of his life he was back to figurative art, partly because that was all he was permitted to do in Stalin's Russia.
As Mark Twain has it, the statements was interesting but tough. Life cannot have been easy for Malevich in a Russia that passed from war to revolution to the ascent of Stalin. All I know about his personal life is that he had a wife, because he painted her. She doesn't look happy. I didn't get the impression that Malevich was happy in his own skin either. And I don't share his concern that art should be wholly abstract and purged of nature. I like nature. Hence I find Henri Matisse's organic seaweed inspired doodles more congenial than Kazimir Malevich's angular abstractions. But it was interesting, and certainly worth seeing.
Addendum We got a bonus extra spectacle as we walked down from Liverpool Street to St Pauls to cross the bouncy bridge. There was an unexpected crowd of people held back by railings in front of the Guildhall, and, rather incongruously, a pair of horses and a cart. This turned out to be the traditional annual ceremony of carriage marking, at which the Lord Mayor branded the wooden registration plates of all vehicles using the City's roads, to show they had paid their equivalent of the Road Licence Fund. We saw a Brighton to London stagecoach, a Victorian police van, and a splendid hearse, as well as vintage buses and lorries and a taxi, and to bring things up to date a City of London Police motorcycle wearing a wooden licence plate. I never even heard of it before, despite all those years working in the City, but it was extremely jolly. When we walked back all that remained were a few smiling men in linen suits and ladies of a certain age in their best dresses and fascinators, presumably having been to a Mayoral lunch, while workmen were hosing away the evidence of the horses.
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