I went to London today, for my rescheduled trip to the British Museum's Life and Death in Pompei and Herculaneum exhibition, after the funeral fell on the original date in April. My companion was hit with a departmental meeting, after I'd booked for the second time, but extracted from her managers a promise that it would be over by one, backed up by a threat that if it wasn't then she was leaving anyway. The earliest admission I could get in late June, even booking in early May, was half past three, which left us time for lunch before Pompei.
I thought that I'd go early enough to see something else before lunch, to maximise the value of my lost day of gardening, and my ticket, now over thirty quid including parking for an off-peak day return. That's about 25 pence a mile. I don't think my marginal cost of driving is as much as that, and a friend who lives outside the congestion charge zone would let me park in her drive, so I'd only have to pay the tube fare to Islington and back. Anyway, I let the train take the strain, and went to the Courtauld to see their current exhibition, Collecting Gaugin. This was much smaller than the Gaugin exhibition held at the Tate a couple of years ago, and blissfully quiet in comparison, except when a party of school children trooped through, being shushed by their teachers and shushing each other. They were mostly carrying sketch pads, but I didn't see a single one in use, or many of the children looking at the pictures.
Two of the largest and most polished canvases are in the permanent collection and can be seen any time, as can Gaugin's marble head of his long-suffering wife, and the two canvases sold by Samuel Courtauld before gifting his collection to the gallery and borrowed back for the duration wouldn't have made Gaugin's reputation, if he hadn't done anything else. What made this exhibition really worth catching for me was the series of wood block prints, part of the Courtauld collection, but not on permanent display. They represent Gaugin's ideas about Taihiti, some gleaned from books, and embellished with borrowings from other traditions. He worked on his blocks with an eclectic set of improvised tools including razor blades and needles, rather than classic wood engraver's equipment, and the resulting pictures, printed by his son two decades after his death, show an extraordinary range of textures, and seemed to me far closer to Henry Moore than Eric Ravilious. I really liked them, and would call again if I'm in that part of town before it closes on 8 September.
The Pompei exhibition was marvellous. That wasn't very surprising, since it has reviewed superbly, and is proving one of the BM's biggest blockbusters ever. As you enter you are greeted by a plaster cast of the void left in the ashes by a poor tormented dog, and a carbonised table, then given some scene setting maps, information panels and a film, neatly done in sections so that you can join and leave at any point, before you reach the main body of the artefacts. It is astonishing what remained intact, or virtually unbroken, beneath the ash and boulders. The contents of a Roman villa are revealed, room by room, in the form of furniture, frescos, carbonised food and furniture, pottery, glass (how on earth did glass survive), mosaics, jewellery and statues, interposed with photographs of Pompei and Herculaneum themselves. Only at the very end do you reach a few more casts of the unlucky inhabitants.
The Romans didn't do good taste, most of the time. We were both very taken with a small sculpture of a small boy, seated in a posture so reminiscent of the Buddha that we both felt the artist must have seen and been influenced by eastern art. Some of the mosaics are beautiful, very lively and skilful. A lot of it is fascinating Roman bling. The papers have all got very excited about the graphic statue of Pan having sex with a goat, in the missionary position, but I actually preferred the side table held up by a stone panther.
It took a long time to get round, partly because there was a lot of it, and partly because it was crowded, but it was a civilised crowd, and you could see everything, if you waited your turn. We left at five fifteen, having slightly rushed the last couple of rooms because it closed at half past, and also because after an hour and a half our brains were beginning to fill. The staff were very helpful about warning us from five onwards how long we had left, and how far through the exhibition we were in a given room. My only, tiny criticism was that I would have liked the labels to each exhibit to be in a slightly larger font, given that it was crowded and people were trying to read them from quite a distance.
We returned to Liverpool Street via the Postman's Park, which my friend had never seen before and was very taken with. There again, she hadn't seen Colchester North station car park before either, when I gave her a lift home to save her waiting for the branch line connection.
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