I went to London today. It transpired the other day that a friend I hadn't seen for a while had just lost her job. Admittedly the people she used to work for always sounded a difficult lot, and past updates on her job tended to be tales of lamentation about missed appraisals and blocked promotions, and she was always on permanent standby 24-7 while being employed and remunerated as a part-timer. Nonetheless, a job is a job in these hard times, and pays the school fees and keeps one's hand in, and one's feeling of self respect, so I went up to town for a commiseration lunch. This prodded me into going to see Picasso and Modern British Art at Tate Britain before it shuts this weekend, which I might otherwise not have galvanised myself to do.
We met in Covent Garden so I had time beforehand to nip into the Courtauld to see their Old Master drawings. The Courtauld Gallery say on their homepage that it is one of the finest small museums in the world, and I think they are probably right, although there are a great many small museums I haven't been to, so who am I to judge. One of the beauties of the National Art Pass is that it lets you into the Courtauld for free, so that instead of feeling that now you have paid to go in you must try and see everything to get your money's worth, you can stroll in when you have three quarters of an hour to spare and look at part of it. The current temporary exhibition is taken from their own collection of drawings, from Albrecht Durer to Van Gogh.
Drawing used to form a key part of the discipline of an artist's education, and nowadays one hears the odd explosion of opinion from or in support of people who can draw, such as David Hockney, and against the conceptual artists who can't. It has been said in defence of Tracey Emin that she can draw. I'm agnostic on the subject. It is possible to produce a drawing that is absolutely correct in every aspect of proportion and foreshortening that is nonetheless dull and dead as ditchwater, while the perspective in some great paintings is distinctly wonky, so I'm not sure what 'being able to draw' means exactly. Possessing a certain combination of manual dexterity, acuteness of observation, and alchemical magic to breath life into a flat piece of paper, I suppose. Anyway, the Courtauld exhibition is well worth a look. I particularly liked two merchants by Rembrandt, a heaving sea by Breugel (I think) and a tile factory by Van Gogh, because I found their lines lively and compelling, and I am interested in landscapes and people, but you might have different favourites. It is well curated, the caption of one drawing that was a copy of another work remarking severely that the right elbow was unresolved, and after looking at it again I thought the Courtauld's expert was spot on, the right elbow was unresolved. It runs until 9 September, so you've got time to see it, though not so much time, for non-Londoners avoiding the Olympics.
Picasso and Modern British Art felt like slightly hard work. I think a lot of other people expected it might be, because with four days to go it wasn't full. I have never been able to get Picasso. One of the few art books we had at home when I was a child was on Picasso, so I first encountered some of the most famous images at a tender age, and didn't get them. In my twenties I saw Guernica in a spare hour snatched from an investment meeting in Madrid, and didn't get it. I don't know why not. The first time I saw a Gaugin, or a Van Gogh, I was hooked. Rembrandt's portraits immediately struck me as great. As a thirteen year old I was grabbed by Giotto (only in reproduction), but I never got Picasso. I feel inadequate about this each time I read what a great, ground-breaking, insightful, important European artist he was, but I can't help it. I need the insightful curator's note to explain to me what it is that for me is unresolved, but I haven't found it yet. The reviews for this exhibition that I saw were mostly rather tepid, but that was because the reviewers were complaining how second rate Duncan Grant and Wyndham Lewis were, rather than because they didn't get Picasso either. Anyway, I made the effort, and got some more use out of my Tate membership.
I had a look at Migrations as well. This exhibition explores British art through the theme of migration from 1500 to the present day. The main message seems to be that originally foreign artists came to this country to work for rich patrons and produced the sort of art that their employers wanted, chiefly portraits (flattering) of their patrons and the patrons' wives and estates, until the start of the twentieth century, when immigrant and first generation immigrant artists began to produce works about what it meant to be an immigrant. So about the edgiest things you get are a John Singer Sergent preparatory sketch of a woman with her nose in the air showing too much cleavage and some Tissot girls with chubby chins who might not be completely respectable, until you reach the multi screen video installation of a third world anchorage full of abandoned ships. That lasts for eight minutes and I enjoyed it, though it is a pity that the room isn't sound proofed, so the accompanying minimalist musical soundtrack with metallic clangs and dog barking also accompanies Canaletto's large speculatively produced painting of the old Horse Guards Parade and all the rest of the exhibition from 1500 to about 1890. I was not convinced by the four clear plastic tubes with foam coming out of the top, which simply looked like what you would get if you allowed some students armed with washing up liquid too near a fairly cheap water feature, but overall I probably enjoyed this more than Picasso, because it didn't contain any Picasso, and I could sit down for eight minutes in the dark and watch tropical seas lapping the rusting ships while I digested my chocolate fondant. A two course lunch isn't really a good preparation for an afternoon looking at art.
Addendum The Lancastrian Lemon Tart was rather good. Shortcrust pastry and lemon curd you can look up for yourself, if you fancy trying it. The almond topping as given in the recipe for a ten inch flan dish is 1/4lb of caster sugar stirred into 1/4lb of melted unsalted butter, with 1/4lb ground almonds added, and finally the grated rind of a lemon with 2 teaspoons of lemon juice and two size three beaten eggs. Having made it once I should say that one could usefully up the quantity of almond topping, and that 200 C is too hot an oven. I made the lemon curd on the day, but as that keeps for a month in the fridge I could have made it well in advance, if I'd been cooking for a party. It is very rich, and a small slice goes a long way.
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