art

A friend and I went on a cultural expedition to London today.  We started with the Estorick in Islington, because she'd read a positive review in Time Out of the current temporary exhibition of Modigliani drawings and wanted to see them.  I warned her that the Estorick when you got there was not so big as reviewers tended to make you think it was going to be, but was quite happy to take a short detour to north London.  It turned into a slightly longer detour than it need have been due to my inability to read the signposts at Moorgate station, as aiming for the overground we ended up in the underground and walking up from the Angel.  Still, it was a nice, sunny day and we sussed out a bus stop for later, as well as a sleeveless shirt dress in Hobbs in a fetching shade of greyish blue linen, that probably would suit me, and that I almost certainly won't buy, being living proof of the French adage that the reason why English women are so shabby is that they spend all their money on their gardens.  The Modigliani drawings are nice in an understated way, and very much of their time, with strong elements of Art Deco and the influence of Japanese prints coming through.

From Islington it was a wiggly bus ride through the City to London bridge, which took us past Wesley's chapel and within sight of historic pub The Eagle, as in Up and down the City Road, in and out the Eagle, that's the way the money goes, Pop goes the weasel.  From London bridge it is a short and pleasant walk along the south bank, mostly by the river, to Tate Modern, but we passed up on the foodie delights of the Borough Market food stalls for lunch.  The queues are too long and the prices too steep, and we went to Pret instead.  My friend did introduce me to a useful covered area under the railway arches, kitted out with flowers, seats and public loos, where we were able to sit down and eat our lunch, which is easier than trying to stroll along the south bank consuming an avocado wrap without most of it ending up on the pavement or your shirt.

Tate Modern is showing Sonia Delaunay until 9th August.  She was an affluent middle class Russian jew who escaped to Paris as soon as she could, just in time for the great Parisian artistic flowering of the early twentieth century.  There she met the artists of the day, made a marriage of convenience to a homosexual friend so that her family would let her stay in Paris, soon met fellow artist Robert Delaunay who became the love of her life and married him instead, and had a flourishing career as an artist and textile designer, producing opera costumes, couture garments and fabrics.  I've seen references to the Delaunays in other exhibitions, and gather that they were one of the glamorous and glittering power couples of the art world.  The Russian revolution meant that Sonia's flow of funds from home dried up, and they had to take their commercial work more seriously after that, but Sonia appears to have been an astute business woman, or at least an energetic and entrepreneurial one.

Robert died in 1941, and after his death Sonia devoted herself in large part to preserving his legacy. During their lifetimes I gather that he was generally considered a more substantial artist than she was.  Her merits seem to have been reappraised and her marks revised upwards in recent decades. Perhaps she was not always taken entirely seriously as an artist because she also worked as a designer, and the art establishment did not take textile and costume design seriously.  Or perhaps they followed her lead in giving their main attention to Robert.  Or maybe they were simply sexist. Sonia, quamquam est femina.  It's hard to tell from this exhibition because it deliberately does not talk about Robert very much.

I loved her work, in particular her palette from the middle period, when she used the same rich, earth colours as Paul Klee, and some of her textile designs for the Amsterdam firm of Metz. Everything she did had a marvellous swirling sense of movement.  My friend especially loved a semi abstract picture of people dancing spread over a wide canvas, and was sorry at the end of the exhibition to find that there was no postcard, and the reproduction of it in the catalogue running across across two pages and disappearing down the crack in the middle did not do it justice.  Some of the costumes, patchworks and embroideries were lovely too, but of course the art establishment didn't generally accept those as Art, relegating them to mere Craft.

After all that walking about and thinking we needed a cup of tea, and then before coming home we went to say hello to the Rothkos for a quarter of an hour.  Though there is something about the Seagram murals, I could quite happily sit and look at them all afternoon.