I went up to London today with a friend for a trip to Tate Modern. The main focus of the expedition was their Agnes Martin exhibition, which opened last month and runs until October. Agnes Martin was a Canadian artist. I'd never heard of her until I read about the show in the Tate magazine, and my friend hadn't heard of her either until she saw a review in Time Out, but we agreed that she sounded worthy of further investigation. And a big part of the point of buying membership is to reduce the marginal cost of entry to exhibitions to zero, as an encouragement to try new things and those you aren't sure you're going to like.
We were pretty sure we would like Agnes Martin, and were not disappointed. She was primarily a painter, active from the 1950s until her death in 2004 aged 92. Her paintings are very, very abstract. Once she produced a small and perfect preparatory drawing of the outline of an egg, carefully measured out, and translated to a drawing of an egg consisting of a series of neatly calibrated parallel lines in the exact shape of an egg but with no outline at all. The majority of the others are based on grids, sometimes filled with pale washes of colour, sometimes with a zillion individually painted dots that must have taken an almost unbelievably long time to do.
She did not appear to have employed studio assistants. No Agnes Martin factory to rival the Andy Warhol factory, or Damien Hirst's dot painting minions. The exhibition notes said that she suffered from schizophrenia, and our assumption was that making her subtly varied, almost endlessly repeating arrays of thin lines and dots was her form of self treatment. Their effect was mesmerising, beautiful and strangely calming. The colours were so subtle that on first going into each room we struggled to make sense of the paintings, as there seemed to be almost nothing there. Then as our eyes (or minds) adjusted the colours became progressively stronger. My friend is a cognitive psychologist by profession, though her speciality is language processing rather than vision, but it was right up her street.
We were reminded more than once of Rothko, whose Seagram series I find unfathomably beautiful and endlessly fascinating despite the fact that almost nothing is happening. Mark Rothko was a depressive who eventually killed himself, and afterwards I thought how strange it was that two such meditative and calming bodies of work had been produced by artists who both suffered from mental illness. Coincidence, or were the paintings attempts at self-soothing that somehow ended up with the ability to sooth onlookers as well?
After Agnes Martin and lunch we made a return visit to Sonia Delaunay, which ends early next month. That was far busier than the first exhibition, proof either that Tate visitors like brightly coloured, swirling pictures more than pale, still ones, or else that lots of people had suddenly realised that the show was about to finish and they still hadn't seen it. Sonia Delaunay was great. I love her palette, especially from her middle period, and the vivid sense of movement in her paintings, and the fact that she designed textiles as well as painted. We saw the two in the right order, putting the pale and unfamiliar before the previously viewed, colourful and rumbustious. The two combined make a great day trip. You have until the end of the first week of August to catch the pair of them.
Addendum There was one worrying moment on the way home when the train doors stuck and wouldn't open at a station, but apart from that Abellio Greater Anglia almost did us proud, only ten minutes or so late on the way in. They aren't running Sunday morning services until quarter past ten, though, for as long ahead as they forecast on their website, which has put the dampers on my planned trip to the Kew steam museum and gardens with the Systems Administrator, since weekends are when the engines are steaming. My friend and I agreed that it was great to live close enough to London to be able to go up for day trips, but it would be even better if we could do it on Sundays.
No comments:
Post a Comment