I went up to London today, for a culture fix, and lunch with an old university friend I hadn't seen for a while. She was happy enough to meet in Covent Garden, which made a convenient jumping off point for the National Portrait Gallery, which has got an exhibition about Virginia Woolf, as well as the annual BP Portrait Award. The Woolf exhibition is on for a while yet, and I might have left it to another day if I hadn't been lunching in Upper Saint Martin's Lane, but the BP portraits end on 21 September, so if I hadn't been today I probably wouldn't have got there at all.
I have mixed feelings about the Bloomsbury set. I like their aesthetic, in a grungy sort of way, but it isn't the greatest art. I have enjoyed those of Virginia Woolf's books I've read, which is not all of them. On the other hand, they were terrible snobs, quite horrid about Arnold Bennett, on the grounds that he was northern, from the lower orders, a flashy dresser, and wrote commercially successful books. All of which is rather unattractive of them, and I can't pretend to myself that we'd have been friends, if we've ever met. But it was touching to see the pictures of them, knowing how Virginia's story ended, though my view of her life must be heavily coloured by having seen The Hours. Some of her letters are on display as well, but I found her handwriting entirely indecipherable. Overall it's worth seeing, but ranks as part of a day out, rather than the focal point and main event of your trip.
The BP Portrait Awards are always worth a look, if only to see what's going on in contemporary portraiture, an art form which has been relegated to a cultural backwater while all the hot money is on jewelled skulls, unmade beds and the like. This year's winner is jolly good, a homeless man with a direct and penetrating gaze, painted with the style and panache of a Renaissance figure. His head is outlined against a gold background intersected with chain link fence, giving him the air of an icon, and his legs are wrapped in a tartan rug, every fold and fibre of which is shown with the skill and fidelity you'd expect in a Van Dyck. The rest is a mixed bag, some tasteful nudes who could have stepped out of the RA summer show, some frankly dull heads, some worthy efforts, some pictures reminding me alarmingly of amateur exhibitions hung on railings in the 1970s.
The Hayward Gallery is showing The Human Factor, a review of the human form in contemporary sculpture, but only until 7 September, and this was the show I did want to catch before it closed. As bags go it was even more mixed than the BP portraits. There are three works by Katharina Fritsch, all displayed in different rooms rather than together, which I liked though not as much as I liked her green elephant years ago. I really, really liked the green elephant. A couple of smaller than life sized but vaguely realistic figures, a small boy and a school teacher, based on old photographs right down to the grainy texture, uneven lighting and odd palette, were oddly gripping. I couldn't decide if they were reassuring, sinister, or kitsch, but they certainly weren't boring. The joke of the bronze dancers abandoning their plinths, one to look out of the window and the other to sit on the ground behind the plinth snatching a furtive cigarette, would have been funnier if the reviews in the papers hadn't given away the punchline.
The reclining nude with a bee colony for a head, which has attracted a fair amount of attention, troubled me. They were live bees spread over several pieces of wild comb, kept out on the roof rather than inside the gallery with the public held back by a wire fence. I could see the point that the bronze dancers were making, about figures as passive objects of attention versus having their own lives and desires, and about normal expectations of how sculptures should behave (or rather be shown behaving), but what did a woman having several sections of honeycomb covered in live bees for a head have to say about anything, apart from being rather novel? And what happened to the bees when it rained? It is not natural for them to nest out in the open like that. I asked the security guard, who said that somebody came and covered the bees up, each time it rained.
As for the shop mannequins dressed in various strange outfits or with pieces gouged out of their stomachs, they belonged in my mind firmly in unmade bed territory. So there were aspects of contemporary treatment of the human form in sculpture which I thought were very silly (as was the treatment of the poor bees). But bits of the exhibition were really good, which is as much as I could reasonably expect.
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