I went to London today. The plan was to meet an old friend and former colleague I hadn't seen for some time, look at an art exhibition and get some lunch, and then visit this year's Serpentine Pavilion in the afternoon, while my erstwhile colleague returned to the world of real work and a meeting requiring a suit. The meeting was on his initiative, but I was left to come up with a list of potential exhibitions, and in the event required to choose. I thought it was magnaminious of him to let me have the final say, given that I fully intended to go to whatever didn't make our shortlist later anyway, so if he were only having one bite at the cherry he might has well have chosen whatever he liked best.
It boiled down to a choice between Hungarian photopgraphy at The RA, which ends on 2nd October, and Dutch landscapes at The Queen's Gallery, which ends on 9th October, so once again I'm leaving things to the last minute. I opted for the landscapes, but when we got past the queue of people waiting for the 12.15pm entry slot and made it to the ticket desk we discovered that the next entry available was timed for 3.30pm. I was rather chagrined by this, since the previous time I visited I got straight in, but apparently it is busier when the rest of Buckingham Palace is open, as people buy gallery tickets as part of the whole tour. We agreed that it would be Hungarian photographs after all, and yomped back across Green Park to Piccadilly, from whence we had both recently come. Fortunately it is not very far and we are both stout walkers (indeed he runs, an occupation I consider to be an invention of the devil, designed to store up ruin for human joints, while giving us a foretaste of suffering).
There are pelicans in Green Park. I had a look at them on the way to the Queen's Gallery, as I had time in hand. Also lots of coot, which are the ones with white faces, as distinct from moorhens which have red faces. Coots have the most extraordinary feet. They are black, and not webbed like a duck, but each individual toe has broad scaley scalloped flaps down each side, to increase surface area and resistance when paddling. I never looked close up at a coot's feet before, but of course the birds in Green Park are extremely tame.
The Hungarian photos were very good. Some were of rural life in Hungary between the wars, others produced under Soviet influence portraits of heavy industry. There was a beautiful sequence of shots of Paris, and my absolute favourite, Washington Square in the snow. The branches of several trees curled elaborately, iron railings looped, and there were two ornate lamp-posts, two people walking separately, and several seats. The viewpoint was high, the depth of field not great, and the foreground trees were truncated mid-crown. The effect reminded me of Japanese and Chinese pictures, where there is no conventional Western perspective and important features are made larger irrespective of actual size, as the snowy background made it impossible to judge how far away anything was, and the furthest tree was significantly bigger than those in the foreground. I shall investigate whether they sell a copy of that one, as we didn't stop to look at the shop.
By the time we emerged from the RA the promised sunshine had appeared, and Hyde Park looked very pretty as I walked across it. I'd thought on a whim as I went around Hyde Park Corner that I could go and look at the Wellington Museum, but that turns out not to be open on Tuesdays. A treat for another day. This year's Serpentine Pavilion is a Hortus Conclusus by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, with planting by Piet Oudolf. Put like that it sounds as though I have heard of Peter Zumthor. Actually I hadn't, until I saw he was responsible for this year's pavilion. I have heard of Piet Oudolf, obviously, him being a famous garden designer. I didn't bother to go to last year's pavilion, as the best that anybody seemed to be able to find to say about it was that it was red, to mimic the buses. The year before that there was an amoeba shaped roof made out of polished aluminium, which did really reflect the buses, upside down, and the year before that a brutal, multi-level stucture of glass and timber that I liked, though some architectural correspondents were very rude about it. This year's pavilion is a credit-crunch pavilion, covered in what looks like black painted hessian, and I think we can safely assume that it was cheaper to build than the amoeba or the tiered glass and timber. It presents a vertical face all round, no visible roof. Inside you pass through a fairly narrow, tall, (black) corridor into an enclosed rectangular garden, surrounded by a walkway with a shallow pitched, (black) roof, wide in proportion to the space it encloses. Think cathedral cloisters meet Zen garden and you're there, except that this Hortus Conclusus incorporates a bench around the entire perimeter plus lots of tiny galvanised cafe tables and white canvas stools, so you can have a sit down.
The planting was full, and in Piet Oudolf style used plants close to the wild species, some of which had finished blooming and, in Oudolf style, the seed heads remained. The cloister was also full, of young people with sketch pads. The roof kept the sun out of our eyes, while it lit the central planted area, and it was pleasant to sit listening to the chatter of young voices and watching the bees working the plants. Actually, I think the bees were working harder than some of the students. It struck me, as I looked at the planting, that I might be seeing a very different thing to the students. I couldn't have identified the exact species or cultivar of all of them, but I recognised autumn flowering Aconitum, hardy geranium, Joe Pye Weed or Eupatorium (which had largely finished), Actaea, Astrantia, Rodgersia, Liriope, some sort of Veronica, Aster, and thought that the grass, which looked like one used at Scampston, was Molinia. I was puzzled by something with red petals like ragged claws. I've just done a quick search on-line for a planting list and not found one, which seems a curious omission, though from an article in The Telegraph I think the red flowered thing could be a form of Monarda. If you aren't interested in gardening, which probably covers the majority of teenage artists, I presume the planting is a pure jumble of colour. It was very nice, predominantly soft colours with muted blues, greens, browns, and the odd flash of pink and soft red.
I once saw a TV programme in which subjects were given the individual elements of Matisse's snail as cut-outs, and invited to arrange them into a pattern, which turned out to be very hard to do. It would be interesting to be given free rein of a couple of top-quality herbaceous plant suppliers and that amount of space (and sorry, I didn't pace it out and I can't find a web article that gives the dimensions. I wish people would be more specific. It's quite big.) and see how difficult or easy it would be to be Piet Oudolf. Can anybody make a large rectangle of late flowering plants look good for that limited period, given access to some nice plants, or does it in fact take artistic ability? I really don't know. It's on until 16th October, if you want to go and see for yourself.
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