Once again I have managed to leave it until the eleventh hour before going to see various exhibitions which I've wanted to visit since learning that they were going to be on. I put this down to lack of organisation, plus being busy doing other stuff, plus having a cold which meant that for several weeks I didn't have the energy to drag myself as far as London. The bad news is that any of you who make it to the end of the blog and think you'd like to see any of these exhibitions doesn't have very long to do it.
First off was the Whitechapel Gallery. I only went there for the first time last year, to my shame, because it is a lovely gallery. It is no more than a ten to fifteen minute walk from Liverpool Street Station, down Middlesex Street and up Whitechapel High Street (which is mostly being demolished at the moment so it is quite difficult to find a street name sign to reassure you that you have got the right road). Or for those who don't fancy a quarter of an hour walk through the East End, there is an entrance to Aldgate East tube station right next door to the gallery.
Whitechapel Gallery is based in what was originally the Passmore Edwards library, converted in 1901 to a gallery 'to bring great art to the people of the East End of London'. It's a fair bet that my grandfather would have known it, being brought up in Whitechapel and dedicated to self-improvement through education. It occupies an Arts and Crafts building by Charles Harrison Townsend, with some later additions, and the whole thing adds up to a nice, light, airy network of exhibition spaces plus the obligatory cafe and bookshop.
Current exhibitions I wanted to see were, firstly, selections from the Government Art Collection, subtitled At Work, which finishes on 4 September. Seven people who have all worked with art from the government collection in one capacity or another have picked some favourites, or at least pieces they thought the rest of us should see. This is interesting on several levels. It means we can look at paintings and artworks that are normally tucked away inside UK embassies around the world, or Number 10 Downing Street, or other places where you and I are unlikely to encounter them. It is interesting to discover what the government has been spending taxpayers' money on. And it is fascinating to see who chooses what. You get a booklet with this exhibition, and the various curators say how the artworks provided a talking point at times of stress during difficult negotiations and eased international diplomacy on its way, but we'll have to take their word for that (I always find magazine adverts rather risible that promise that the solar powered musical frog fountain or whatever it is will 'provide a talking point'. When I used to work in offices with artworks I found the main use of the art was to provide something else to think about during really boring meetings. Anyway).
The Government has been collecting quite a wide range of stuff on our behalf. Some you would expect, such as paintings of crowned heads of Europe through the centuries, but in the show there is also, for example, a Bridget Riley (chosen by the Chief of the Intelligence Service) and a Lowry (chosen by Samantha Cameron). What, if anything, does it tell us about Nick Clegg that one of his choices is an enigmatic early 1970s acrylic of a thermos flask on a rug in an ambiguous empty landscape? Amother of his choices is a photograph of Lucien Freud painting the Queen, which left me wondering why she has her handbag with her, when Freud is only painting her head? It can't be that she needs it to keep her keys, purse and mobile phone. Hankie, maybe, or habit. Lord Boateng chose, among others, a lively Edward Burra drawing of people in a New York jazz club from the late 1920s, which I really liked. The good news is that, if you like the idea of Government Art but don't have time to get to this selection, there will be further exhibitions over the next year.
Next up was a collection of black and white photographs of people and scenes around the East End, from an exhibition originally staged in 1972. If you are interested in London, and people, this is a fascinating slice of recent history. Again, it shuts on 4 September. On until 16 September is a career retrospective of a German photographer called Thomas Struth. I had never heard of him until this show came along, despite the fact that his career to date spans over thirty years. The first thing that strikes you about his pictures is that they are very, very large. Apparently they are printed directly on to perspex: I have no idea how difficult that is to do. Once you get over the shock of them being so large, you realise they are interesting irrespective of scale (or at least I thought so). Downstairs are landscapes, pictures of people looking at art, and gigantic or complex industrial objects. Upstairs are family groups from many parts of the world, photographed in their homes. Struth left it to them to decide where in their house or garden to be pictured, and how to arrange themselves, with the one proviso that they must look at the camera. He was struck by the similarities in families from different continents and cultures. That is interesting, as is the way that in large groups people indicate extra degrees of closeness by touching certain family members, and the fact that so many of them close their bodies off with folded arms or legs, even as they look at the camera. Then there are really giant photos of lush vegetation from around the world. Also large coloured cityscapes, and smaller black and white city shots from the early seventies, the latter with virtually no people in them. It is all strange, and interesting, and sticks in your mind (or at least mine).
The Struth exhibition costs £8.50 to go in, and was not very busy when I was there. The others are free and were more crowded, though not unpleasantly so. There is a very nice cafe, only accessible via the Struth exhibition for some reason. It has a mirror along one side with a quite good shaggy dog story etched on it about Stephen Speilberg and Stanley Kubrick, and serves good cake (lemon polenta today, chocolate muffin the last time I was there, yummy), and has natural light and attractive bent plywood chairs. There is a very good bookshop, assuming you are in the market for art books, which I wasn't, but it is the sort of independent bookshop that deserves to exist. Its postcards were the cheapest of the three galleries I visited (50p).
And the other two galleries will have to wait until tomorrow, because it's getting late and I'm tired and want something to eat.
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