Thursday 12 March 2015

two exhibitions and a relocated lunch

I went up to town today, for lunch with an old friend.  We were originally due to meet last week, but when she heard I'd got a cold she kindly and tactfully suggested she wouldn't be offended if I needed to postpone, and I decided it would be prudent to take her up on the offer (I moved my Pilates lesson as well).  We agreed on same time, same place, the Royal Institution cafe at 12.15.  I got there first, and discovered it was closing at 1.00pm for a private function.  That is a big no-no in my book, and my friend said the same when she arrived.  You are either open to the public or you're not.  Randomly closing at fairly short notice is a huge disincentive for people to arrange to meet there, even if it is on your website.  Nobody wants to have to make a last minute check to see if their chosen venue has suddenly decided to shut, and if so contact the rest of their party to rearrange.  And face it, central London is full of places to eat, and doesn't owe the RI cafe a living.

We went to Fenwick instead, and it was very nice.  Or at least, it was an outrageous amount of money for small helpings of food, but you are not just paying for the food but for a table (and tablecloth and napkins) in the heart of London's West End (and small helpings of food is what most of Fenwick's customers probably eat, not like us ravenous gardeners).  I hadn't eaten in Fenwick for years, and it was a relief that it was good, since up to that point the day had seemed mildly jinxed. Only slightly, as the trains ran on time, but the coin operated turnstiles in the loos at Liverpool Street must have broken down just as I arrived.  A stranger told me rather bossily that I needed to put thirty pence in the slot, and I complained that I had, and out of the corner of my eye could see people recoiling from the other turnstiles that were not already labelled as out of order.  I thought I didn't need to pee that urgently and would use the loos in John Lewis, only to be rebuffed from the first Ladies I found by a large man who said they were working in there, and directed me to some other loos in strongly accented English I didn't follow.  By this stage it was starting to feel like one of those dreams where you wander fruitlessly in search of a lavatory, before waking and realising you really do need to go the loo.  But Fenwick broke the spell.

From Bond Street it is a short hop and skip down to the Royal Academy, which is one reason why we'd originally chosen the RI, since if I'd still been feeling shaky I wouldn't have had to walk too far.  The RA is showing Rubens and his legacy, a show that optimistically tries to cover the life's work of Peter Paul Rubens and his impact on subsequent generations of artists.  Since he was extremely prolific and he influenced an awful lot of other people this was something of a forlorn hope, and as some critics have complained, there aren't all that many paintings by Rubens in the exhibition and some of them aren't his finest.  I found it interesting, but I don't think I'd have liked it as much if I hadn't just finished reading Simon Shama's 'Rembrandt's Eyes', which contains a lot about Rubens (and indeed Rubens' parents lives before Rubens was born, and Rubens' teacher's teacher.  It is almost as circuitous as Tristam Shandy).  I found the links between Rubens and Constable or Renoir more convincing than the Rubens influence on Cy Twombly, and I think the curators rather glossed over the fact that one Van Dyck mythological scene predated the Rubens picture once thought to have influenced it (zeitgeist, anybody?).  But it was interesting enough to keep me there for an hour and a half.

The next part of the plan was dependent on health and whether my legs held up.  It was dry and they did, so I yomped down to Tate Modern to catch Conflict, Time, Photography before it closes this Sunday.  It's been on since late November, and I've been meaning to go for all of that time, but it never worked out that way.  If anything I wanted to see it more than the Rubens, but my friend lives in north London and works in the West End, and said she would prefer not to meet south of the river if possible, and it seemed mean to drag her down there.  There is not much point in my saying lots of enthusiastic things about an exhibition that's about to finish, but it is very good, showing photographs of the after-effects of war, dating from twenty seconds after the act (the Hiroshima blast) to a full century.  It takes in the atom bomb, Vietnam, Angola, the northern Ireland troubles, the Berlin wall, the Kuwait desert, the Lebanon, the Balkans, British and French coastal defences, the Great War, various Nazi hide-outs and hang-outs and probably more that I've forgotten.  The images are striking and sombre, and I found them more emotionally resonant than Rubens' titivating classical nudes about to be abducted or ravished, but I suppose they are more of my own time. Pictures like Don McCullin's shocked, dead-eyed American soldier minutes after a military action were as you'd expect, but I am still rattled by the photograph of a young woman practising the harp in what was once Hitler's breakfast room, and is now a college of the performing arts.  I'd have thought you'd want to raze the building to the ground, but maybe they thought enough of Germany had been erased already.

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