I went to London again today. A friend had spotted that the Mayoral Gallery in Duke Street was showing a recreation of Miro's studio, and as we are both keen on Miro we agreed that it would form a good basis for a day out. It was a small exhibition, but evocative, with some of his paintings and the original furniture from his Mallorcan studio upstairs, and a short documentary about him playing downstairs, along with his letters concerning the studio. The vintage film footage made him sound an utterly delightful man. It had been his dream for years to have a really big studio. Once in mid life an architect friend designed one for him, he was so overawed by the space that it took him two years before he could work in it. Construction ran late as well, but in his letters he always sounded optimistic that it was about to speed up. I was deeply touched by his rocking chair, and his paint spattered radiator, and the eclectic collection of small domestic utensils, ornaments, shells, leaves and magazine and newspaper cuttings with which he had surrounded himself. The exhibition is only on for another couple of days, and I still haven't worked out why a gallery just off Piccadilly bothered to stage a free to view recreation of Miro's studio in the first place, but I'm pleased that they did. I have never asked a gallery owner, but I am sure that any West End art dealer who knew their trade could tell instantly from my body language that I was not in the market for a Miro, irrespective of how I was dressed.
From Duke Street it is a short walk to the Institute of Contemporary Art who are showing the fairly recent works of a living artist (the clue's in the name), Betty Woodman. The review in Time Out said she worked partly in ceramics, and as Grayson Perry devotees we thought we would go and see somebody else's take on ceramics in the early part of the twenty-first century. I'd never been to the ICA before, unless it was ever used to host a reception in my City days, and on the whole anything with mixed media in the description leaves me feeling deeply suspicious before I've even seen it. I'm afraid I don't get a lot of contemporary art, and I could not work out what anybody would do with the assemblages of objects laid out on the floor on sheets of paper. What exactly were they for and how would you vacuum? And I couldn't honestly see the essential difference between most of the ceramics and the brightly coloured naive painted pots I might find in a garden centre. But that is probably my fault for being a hopeless reactionary. I tried, though.
From the ICA is another short walk to the Mall Galleries which are showing the finalists in a figurative painting competition. I don't know whether figurative painting is even taught in art schools any more, or whether it is regarded as being about as relevant to contemporary art as the arts of stained glass and tapestry weaving. I'm not sure whether you can't go all the way through art school without doing any sort of painting. As a hopeless reactionary I'm partial to the genre. From Rembrandt to Rothko, there should be something there for everybody. The winning picture showed three men hard at work in a traditional umbrella making workshop. It must have been about the last traditional umbrella manufacturer in the whole of the UK, and the painting was skilfully done in a traditional way. Some of the other entries were wackier, some derivative, one made a clever and explicit reference to Hogarth. I didn't leave feeling I'd seen the new Rembrandt, but there were several I'd have happily lived with (though I'd rather have had a Miro).
Finally we stopped off at Somerset House which is hosting an exhibition about post-war public art, put together by Historic England to coincide with the recent listing of some 1050s and 1960s works, and to highlight the risks posed by theft, neglect and redevelopment. Historic England is one of the bodies spun out of the old English Heritage, and has inherited its late parent's lack of nous in presenting things for public viewing. White type on a mid blue background is not the most legible choice for labelling exhibits, especially presented at chest height in a fairly dim room, and what is the point of putting Do Not Touch signs on a bronze that has spent the past few decades in a public outdoors space where anybody can touch it? Especially in an exhibition where you are showing photographs of people interacting with the artworks, that is touching them or climbing on them, as if this were a thing to be encouraged. But the ideas in the exhibition are interesting, even if the presentation is creaky, and I'm glad somebody is championing the concept of public art in these times of austerity.
On our final walk back through the City to Liverpool Street we made a particular point of taking the route through Paternoster Square with its Elizabeth Frink bronze of a shepherd and his sheep, and as one, we touched their legs.
No comments:
Post a Comment