I abandoned the garden, and went to look at Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern. It's good to go and be cosmopolitan for the day, once in a while. I still love the City, though it is less and less my place. Buildings I knew are demolished and new ones erupt, and restaurants and wine bars where I was once wined and dined by stockbrokers, or met friends, or went out for after-work drinks with my esteemed colleagues, cease to be or are transmuted into something else. I don't wear the uniform any more. I used to have a briefcase, blue leather, handmade in Ireland and bought in Liberty, and was allowed into the offices and the livery halls, when I had an appointment or was on the list of names for the meeting. Nowadays I look at it from the outside.
I love the Members' Room at Tate Britain. It is right at the top of the building, with a fabulous view over the river to Saint Pauls, and is not generally full. It appeals to cultured solitaries like me, young mothers with toddlers, friends on a day out, and people with laptops doing some sort of work, or filling in the time between meetings. Two elderly ladies behind me in the queue for coffee (staff a bit slow today noticing that they had customers) were having a stately argument as one tried to pick up the whole tab, and the other insisted that she was paying for herself, and threatened her friend that 'otherwise I won't come out with you again'. A young chap with a laptop called someone up as he waited for his 1.00pm business meeting. He already had a bottle of beer on the go, and proposed meeting them at 3.30pm for draught prosecco. 'I love prosecco' he told them. He was upset that somebody else had sent him a clumsily worded e-mail, and said it might sound odd, but he really preferred not to do business with people like that. I thought that in these hard times his business must be going well for him to be able to be so picky. He tried to tell the person on the phone about Winston Churchill's remark that he didn't have time to write a short letter, and was obliged to send a long one, but the line can't have been very good, because he had to repeat it about four times, and I don't think they had heard of Winston Churchill, and he forgot the punchline about the long letter.
Gerhard Richter is a major German artist. He addresses serious themes including Germany's wartime past, and the nature of perception. Some of his pictures are large soft focus painted versions of photographs, which I find physically difficult to look at, and would be fascinated to know if they have a similar effect on other people. As the crystalline lenses of my eyes have lost elasticity (middle age), I need separate glasses for reading and seeing, which is fine when I settle down to either read or see, but cumbersome in situations where I need to switch between the two. Looking at Gerhard Richter's out-of-focus pictures I had the uneasy sensation that I was wearing the wrong glasses, and my eyes struggled to compensate.
It's a big exhibition. There are some abstracts, and some messing about with sheets of glass (regular readers will know what I think about that sort of thing). I don't grudge spending the morning there, instead of weeding, but I didn't emerge loving Gerhard Richter. Viewed as a sensory experience, his palette didn't do it for me. That is a matter of subjective, personal taste, but there it is. When Paul Klee painted a little square canvas only about 30cm by 30cm, made up of tiny coloured squares, Klee's colours made me so happy that I wanted to laugh, and then steal the painting so that I could look at it every day for the rest of my life. When Gerhard Richter painted a large square canvas made of lots of coloured squares, it didn't make me any happier than the paint chart said to have inspired it. Wrong colours (personally speaking). The political paintings were interesting, but if you really want to explore those sorts of ideas, words are better. (I'm reading Robert Fisk's history of the Middle East at the moment, The Great War for Civilisation. It is grim but fascinating. I'm up to page 657, and conveying the same range of facts and emotions using pictures would require an art gallery the size of Tokyo).
I had thought I might look at Rothko's Seagram murals, but they have been put into storage to make way for the forthcoming Damian Hirst show, and won't be on display again until that's over, which isn't until next September. Apparently some of the works are so heavy the Tate is having to reinforce the floor. Rothko displaced by a charlatan shark-pickler. How depressing.
Then I went to see The First Actresses at The National Portrait Gallery, which was great fun. The National Portrait Gallery does these small exhibitions very well, placing the pictures in an historic context, and so while gazing at the Gainsboroughs I learnt odd snippets of social history. The romantic and sex lives of the most popular eighteenth century actresses were scrutinised every bit as keenly as Sienna Miller's is today, and their dresses were copied. Some actresses on retiring from the stage succeeded as novelists and playwrights. Others married into the aristocracy. Richard Brinsley Sheridan forbade his wife to have any further involvement with the stage following their marriage, and her portrait gives no clue as to her past profession. Sarah Siddons looks a forbidding creature, but I suppose she was a tragic actress.
I'd been wondering whether I even wanted to see the Leonardo exhibition, on the grounds that the ratio of visitors to paintings would be too high, but the question has been taken out of my hands, as I read in the papers days ago that all advance tickets were sold for the entire run of the show, and today there were no buy-on-the-day tickets available. Never mind. I remember the Vermeer exhibition several years ago, where the main thing I saw was the backs of other people's necks, or the corners of paintings with other people's faces in front of most of the canvas. When the Systems Administrator and I were on holiday in The Netherlands we made a special trip to den Hague, to visit the excellent Mauritshuis, where we had Vermeer's View of Delft all to ourselves. Not even the security guard could be bothered to come and join us.
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