Today I made a dash to London to catch two exhibitions that are going to end soon. Modigliani at Tate Modern finishes this Sunday, and as there won't be any trains on the Colchester line over the Easter weekend it was a case of now or never. The Royal Academy's show reuniting the art collection of Charles I runs until 15 April, but I wasn't sure I'd make it to town again before then, and as it's been well reviewed I thought I might as well not leave it until the last minute rush along with all the other people who still hadn't seen it. Otherwise in an ideal world I wouldn't have crammed both exhibitions into one day. They were both good, in their very different ways, but my brain is now aching.
I am not sure what I think about Modigliani, which isn't to say I didn't enjoy spending an hour and a half looking at his paintings. Some of the early portraits were very clearly influenced by Cezanne, whom Modigliani admired. Swap a cello for one of the card player's cards and you have it, same palette, similar mood. A later work of a sultry, sideways glancing woman in an orange dress had a background lifted straight from Matisse. The portraits of Modigliani's first dealer, dating from fairly early in his (anyway fairly short) career were fun, capturing a jaunty, chin-in-the-air, spivvy confidence that may or may not have been an accurate reflection of the sitter. The little peasant sitting stolidly in his chair in one of the later rooms took us straight back to Cezanne. In between were lots of nude women with wide hips, tiny mouths and rebellious expressions. They were very decorative and I could imagine them looking absolutely splendid in a smart interwar apartment, along with some Art Deco furniture and maybe a few lines of cocaine laid out on the baby grand.
Jonathan Jones in the Guardian says it was a gorgeous show about a slightly silly artist. I don't always agree with Jonathan Jones but on this occasion I think he got it spot on.
I see from the Royal Academy's latest email news (which may be my last since they still have not asked my permission to send me emails after the new data protection law comes in. They only have my address because I am a lapsed Friend and ages ago bought a ticket in advance to something) that the Queen recently visited Charles I: King and Collector. That must have been a mixed experience for her, since on the one hand a lot of the paintings were reacquired by the Royal Collection after it was dispersed during the Commonwealth so she has seen them before and lent them to the RA in the first place, but on the other hand when she looked at the pictures that were now in European or American ownership she might have been thinking that if only Charles I had managed things a bit better they would still have been One's.
I liked Charles I: King and Collector, firstly because it was fascinating to get an overview of Royal and aristocratic taste at that discrete point in history, and secondly because I really liked some of the pictures. There are lots of Van Dycks and I like Van Dyck, and some lovely Northern Renaissance paintings, and some splendid Titians (and I was charmed by the inclusion of a small, eager dog advancing on a spitting tabby cat under the table where Christ was supping with two of his disciples at Emmaus), and some nice Tudor miniatures. There are three wonderful Holbein portrait drawings, including one of Sir Thomas More's son who sits with averted eyes and downcast head, looking young and awkward and miserable, which touched me in a way that nothing in the Modigliani exhibition did. There again, there was nothing even remotely silly about Holbein.
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