Thursday 14 August 2014

three exhibitions

I went to London today, for an art fix.  I'd been waiting for a day when it was forecast to rain enough not to be good gardening weather, but not so much that lightning strikes and flooding would take out the trains.  The forecasts recently have been a movable feast, but today's still looked promising by breakfast time, light rain showers throughout the day.

I started with British Folk Art at Tate Britain.  Or at least, to be strictly accurate I started with a latte and a pain au chocolat in the new Members Room under the rotunda.  I don't know the original purpose of the space, and feel vaguely idle that I haven't tried to find out, but the stone balustrade round the central void dips in and out with a sort of crinkle crankle effect, creating little niches that are just big enough to take a cafe table and a couple of chairs.  I was able to get a niche to myself, and admire my surroundings over my elevenses.

The Folk Art is quite fun, and much as you'd expect it to be, a mixture of the practical and informational, such as tradesmen's signs, and purely decorative, like the cockerel painstakingly made out of slivers of bone by a French prisoner of war.  I've always had a soft spot for quilts and ships' figureheads, and enjoyed it.  The art establishment seems to get itself into a needless tizz about the status of folk art, made worse by the incoherent distinction between Art and Craft.  It seems to me that human beings like making things, indeed, that along with the use of language it is one of the characteristics that differentiates us as a species.  Some makers have more creativity and energy than others.  Constable and Van Gogh had oil paints, the French prisoner of war had old bones from the kitchen.  Each did what he could in the circumstances.

From the Tate it's a short walk to the National Gallery, which has got a free temporary exhibition on architecture in Italian Renaissance painting.  It's small, but interesting, and makes you look at pictures more carefully, and think about how the artist has divided the space, and the relationship between the figures in the painting (there are always figures) and the space they inhabit.  I fell for a small annunciation scene in tempera, a solemn Gabriel in a lovely apricot coloured robe with beautiful multicoloured wings, kneeling before a slender Mary whose face and gestures expressed a strange teenage hauteur, by an unknown artist of the mid fifteenth century.  I'd have liked to take that home with me.

The main event at the National Gallery was their exhibition Making Colour, an examination of the choices and limitations painters have faced through the centuries in sourcing paint of different colours.  Some of the material was familiar from TV programmes, like the torturous and expensive route by which lapis lazuli reached Western Europe, and the problems of pigments proving unstable over time.  However, it's well done, and makes a nice pair with the architecture exhibition, in terms of inviting one to think about how pictures are done.

Somebody tried to photograph one of the paintings on her phone, and was warned off by a guard, which reminded me of the National Gallery's recent decision to allow photographs of the permanent collection, though not loaned items due to copyright restrictions, provided they didn't use of flash or tripod.  They say that now so many people have cameras in their phones and tablets, and are so used to photographing things and sharing them, taking pictures is simply part of how many people interact with things, and that it might encourage them to go away and find out more afterwards.  I felt a twinge of anxiety on hearing the story on the Today programme that it would make it harder to get an uninterrupted view of paintings without other people's hands and tablets held up in front of them, but apart from that I didn't mind one way or the other.

Not so the expert Today had wheeled on to flesh the story out.  It was wrong to allow it, he said, because it would stop the public from looking at the pictures properly.  Instead of concentrating on them for a decent amount of time, their attention would be on capturing the image, and then they would move on to the next thing.  Why, there was one Leonardo drawing in the collection that he could easily look at for half an hour.  Oh dear.  Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.  If people taking pictures is going to stop other people's enjoyment because it encourages them to stand in the way, or might damage the pictures as they lean back to take selfies, as apparently some guards have suggested, that would be a valid reason to stop them taking pictures.  As a small child I sang I'm a Little Teapot in the Ashmolean, complete with actions, which probably annoyed some other visitors at the time, and maybe we should have a general presumption against singing in galleries.  Maybe we should try and give some guidance on how to look at pictures so as to get more out of them, for those who want to know.  But an ordnance whose purpose is to prevent the great masses from looking at art in the wrong way?

Addendum  Today's Today was setting up a debate on whether or not women should wear high heels, just before the sport slot at half past eight, but I can't tell you how it went, because at that point I got up and turned the radio off.

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