three exhibitions

I have visited three exhibitions today, and my brain is rather full.  That's the trouble with occassional cultural trips to London: I feel the need to cram in as much culture as possible, what with the cost of train tickets, and finding the time to take a day off from everything else to go to London at all.

First of all I saw Jan Gossaert's Renaissance at the National Gallery.  It is very good, and it is on until 30th May, so plenty of time left for others to go and see it.  There are a fair few religious works, as you would expect of a Flemish artist working in the first part of the sixteenth century, an entire room full of portraits, and some frankly sexy ('erotic' is the word favoured by curators) versions of Adam and Eve and Mary Magdalen.  As well as paintings and drawings by Gossaert, there are works by some of his contemporaries, including a couple of lovely Durer woodcuts.  I went to this one with a friend, who bought the tickets, so I was relieved that they seemed to broadly enjoy it too, once we got past the initial rash of Virgin and Childs.  It is a heavy responsibility inciting other people into art galleries.  As a 21st century person of No Religion I tried to imagine what you would feel looking at a portrait of the Virgin and Child, if you were a devout Catholic in the sixteenth century, but failed.

In the afternoon I went to the National Portrait Gallery and looked at a couple of photographic exhibitions.  There is a risk doing this of ending up completely confused about who took which pictures, but in this case they are not that similar.  The big show (timed entry tickets, eleven quid) is of Hoppe portraits.  I'd never heard of Hoppe (sorry, there should be an accent over that final e but I can't work out how to insert it), not being all that well up on the history of photography, but it reviewed well in the papers.  It's great.  Again on until 30 May.  These pictures were mostly taken in the 1920s and 30s.  Some of the subjects I know of and admire, including poet Edward Thomas (looking tense), John Masefield (The Midnight Folk, The Box of Delights and The Bird of Dawning still count among my favourites) looking unexpectedly young and romantic, and Vita Sackville-West (in literary rather than gardening mode).  There is a marvellous picture of Thomas Hardy as quite an old man.  He was notoriously camera shy and Hoppe had almost despaired of getting the shot when Hardy suddenly settled.  He looks composed but wistful, and I was reminded of his rueful poetry about his first wife (marriage not a success.  I rate Hardy as a poet hugely more than as a novelist).  Some of the portraits are of people I hadn't heard of, so while I imagined them and their lives I may have been wildly off the mark.  Then there are some quirky scenes from life: a cupboard of skeletons at a shop that used to sell them to artists and medical students (female skeletons were rarer and cost more), an elaborately quoiffed and made-up woman working making wax heads for Madame Tussauds, three bell-ringers (one gloriously podgy) captured in mid-ring at St Olaves in Hart St. before the war.  It is really, really good.  Some of the pictures are original silver and whatsit prints, and are soft and wonderful as objects in themselves.

Then I whizzed around Ida Kar, an Armenian photographic artist who moved to Britain after WWII.  This exhibition is mostly of works from the 1950s and 1960s, so later than Hoppe, though I think they both include shots of Jacob Epstein.  Ida Kar must be less prestigous than Hoppe in that tickets are untimed and only three quid, though she did have a blockbusting exhibition at The Whitechapel Gallery back in 1960.  You can get a combined ticket, as I did, in which case you don't have to go to Kar on the same day if you've run out of time or energy.  Kar's portraits mostly show their subject in their own home, or studio, or at least staged with a pile of props related to their career, whereas Hoppe mostly eschewed props, apart from the odd costume.  It is good show, and bigger than I had expected, and I'm slightly regretful that I ended up looking at it against the clock (last cheap day return home from Liverpool Street before the commuter period is at 4.15pm.  Miss that and you're left hanging around London until quarter to seven), and with a brain already stuffed with images.  It's on until June 19th, and if I do have a spare afternoon in town I'd like to go again.