I'd fixed to meet an old friend in London today for lunch and a dose of culture, which turned out to be fortuitous timing since the Systems Administrator tells me that it poured with rain here until about four o'clock. I still hadn't seen the Barbara Hepworth exhibition at Tate Britain, and it closes in only a month's time. The Tate keeps close tabs on its supporters, and sent me an email just the other day urging me not to miss it. In fact, I did try to organise our trip for before the holiday, but my friend had relatives staying, and the timings didn't work.
I adore Barbara Hepworth's work, or at least great chunks of it. The exhibition starts with relatively small, figurative sculptures by her and several of her contemporaries, and I must admit that at the end of room 1 I'd have been hard pressed to match the artwork to the maker. There are also some graphic works by Ben Nicholson, which I suppose is fair enough since they were sharing a studio at the time and exhibited together. But the real excitement comes later on. I have coveted Pelagos for years, and joy of joys there are more in the same vein. I wish I could work out what it is about Hepworth's sculptures that makes them so perfect. They are so balanced and exactly the right shape. The only pieces I didn't take to were the ones with rectangular notches taken out of the edges, because they interrupted the flow and bizarrely put me in mind of vine weevil damage.
I liked it so much, I'll probably go back in a couple of weeks' time after meeting another friend for lunch. Indian textiles at the V&A and Celts at the British Museum can wait. In fact, if I lived or worked in the area I'd go every week. I don't really understand why I haven't been before, except that July and August are such sticky months and a bit of a lost cause.
From Tate Britain it's a short yomp along the Embankment and up Whitehall to the National Portrait Gallery. In Whitehall I noticed for the first time a large equestrian statue of Field Marshall Douglas Haig, and remembered his pronouncement I read in the Bovington Tank Museum, made in 1925, that there would always be a role in warfare for a well bred horse. If you want to know about the future I guess you shouldn't ask the experts on the recent past. The first Earl Haig was born six years after the charge of the light brigade. By the time of his death, three years after his horse remark, the tank and the machine gun were battlefield realities.
The National Portrait Gallery is showing an exhibition of photographs of Audrey Hepburn, closing fairly soon, which I wanted to see since I like Audrey Hepburn. Actually, that's not strictly true. I know almost nothing about Audrey Hepburn, even after having been to the exhibition. I can't think of a single thing that she said, and I haven't watched most of her films. Rather, I like looking at Audrey Hepburn because she was extremely pretty, in a gamine style that I admire, at a point in history when they made good clothes. It isn't a very big exhibition, and was so crowded the gallery weren't selling tickets for immediate admission. The cheerful man on the ticket desk apologised, and blamed the rain for driving the punters in, which puzzled me in as far as the Tate had been rather quiet and I'd blamed the rain for keeping the punters at home.
Never mind. Three quarters of an hour wandering around the Portrait Gallery is never wasted. I went and communed with the subjects of the early twentieth century room, where it is nice to see real life friends Clement Attlee and Ernie ('You get yourself down to the Palace, Clem') Bevin hung side by side, but I am not sure what George V and Queen Mary did to deserve Oswald Moseley.
The Audrey Hepworths were lovely. I know that feminists grumble that she helped set a largely unattainable ideal female form for the twentieth century and that her tiny frame was partly down to semi starvation during her teenage years in the Nazi occupied Netherlands. But I really don't mind. I like Audrey Hepburn.
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