As you walk along the Thames path from Blackfriars Bridge to Lambeth Bridge the mood shifts. At the Blackfriars end there are more joggers. From Tate Modern to the Coin Street development it gets arty, in a faintly grubby way. (The OXO restaurant itself was anything but grubby, at least when I was taken to eat there, which was about thirteen years ago, and even though I was then used to City eateries I was amazed that you could charge such huge amounts of money for such teeny-tiny plates of food. My stockbroker host was an impeccably groomed size zero who I'm sure never ate pudding, even tiny ones). In the base of the tower, and next to it, are lots of little shops and stalls selling lots of non-essential things that you would not buy, if you didn't have money to waste or disliked cluttered houses. You then come to a temporary installation of some beach huts, with assorted artistic conceits, a grotto you are asked not to enter as it is fragile, Hutstock with photos of an earlier musical happening, that sort of thing. There was one stencilled with the names of Essex coastal towns that was playing a recording of voices about something, but the door was already jammed with two other people listening, and I wanted to get on. There was a vintage fish and chip van, open and selling food when I passed, unlike the chrome streamlined 50s retro van further back, that was shut. The booksellers under Waterloo Bridge hadn't opened up, maybe because of the rain.
As you get to the London Eye the mood becomes more mainstream commercial, and outside the Sealife Centre there were queues of parents and children. There were queues to go on the Eye too, though given the weather conditions there wasn't going to be much of a view from the top. (We went on the Eye once. It was a family party for my parents' Ruby Wedding Anniversary. Afterwards we posed for photos on the grass behind it, taken by the Systems Administrator who did not mind not being in the picture. This was a good call since the rest of my family came out looking as though we were on day release from the insane asylum, mouths open and gazing in different directions with expressions of varied anxiety and astonishment. We finished up with tea at the National Film Theatre. It sells tea by the individual metal pot, and my father had great difficulty in making the man at the counter believe that it was not a joke or form of performance art and that he did really want twelve pots of tea. You get your own milk from thermos flasks on a counter, and I did another time and the milk was off).
The Watercolour exhibition at Tate Britain was very interesting. It shuts on 21 August, and I feel foolish to be rushing there so near the end when it has been on since 16 February, but that's the trouble with long-running exhibitions. You think you've got ages to get to them, and then they're over. I managed to miss something at the Imperial War Museum on that basis that was on for an entire year (admittedly the S.A. and I had planned a date to go, and it snowed that week and the trains gave up). The Watercolour show looks at the technical capabilities of the medium, and places it in a social context, which is influenced by the fact that watercolour is portable, quick to apply and relatively cheap. The earliest exhibit is a thirteenth century map of Britain, the thesis being that the first use of watercolour was for matters of record and education, so portraits, maps, botanical specimens and so on. The show moves on via landscapes and city views to big, expensive, highly worked salon pieces. There is some explanation of how watercolour is applied, with wet versus dry paper, and runny versus dryish paint, and the influence of the type of paper used, and techniques such as scratching. One room is devoted to art in war, which juxtaposes John Piper emotional and semi-abstract portrayals of ruined landscapes with highly detailed pictures of wounds (back to educational uses). To cheer us up we then come to art and the imagination, a lot of which is Victorian and not to my personal taste.
I did risk imparting another piece of knowledge uninvited to passers-by, as two stood in front of an Edward Burne-Jones picture of a couple dressed in medieval robes outside a door in the dark, looking anguished. It was called 'Clerk Saunders' and one lady remarked to her companion 'I don't understand that at all'. I murmered in her ear that I thought it referred to a traditional ballad. A high born lady loved her father's clerk, but her brothers disapproved and killed him, a medieval British version of an honour killing (though in retrospect I don't think they killed her, only her lover). The ladies seemed quite pleased that the picture had a back-story, and meant something after all. Every now and then the argument rears its head whether or not visual art should require verbal explanation. It is probably a really cliched art exam question. I suppose we could have all enjoyed inventing our own explanations for 'Clerk Saunders', but unless the viewers share the same corpus of knowledge they may not get the cultural references the painter had in mind. The iconography of a lot of renaissance religious painting is lost on me, which is probably one reason why I generally find it very dull.
The final room is intended to show that watercolour is still contemporary and relevant, so a bit of acrylic creeps in (water based medium) and a couple of conceptual sillinessess. I didn't drag myself all the way to Millbank to look at a teaspoon stuck to a small piece of wood, painted a muddy shade of apricot and mounted on the wall. But overall it is an interesting exhibition.
Also on in London and ending within the next few weeks are The Vorticists at Tate Britain until 4 September, Toulouse Lautrec's pictures of Jane Avril at The Courtauld until 18 September, and a couple of interesting sounding things at the Whitechapel Gallery (which does very nice chocolate muffins, better than the Tate).
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