three exhibitions

Finally I got to London to see some exhibitions before they closed.  I'd been meaning to go since the gap between Christmas and the New Year, but ended up busy with other things, and having a cold so that I didn't feel like going anywhere.  So here is the usual mad scramble, with it being little use for you to think Oh, that sounds nice, because it will probably have finished.

The British Library is doing Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination.  You've got a week left to see that one.  I felt very smug at the beginning, because I have read Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, but counterbalancing that was the fact that I hadn't read any of the other eighteenth century Gothick novels featured.  I did better with the nineteenth century, having clocked up the Bronte sisters, Basil as well as The Woman in White, Poe, and even read Lady Audley's secret, but failed to connect when the exhibition reached the film age, since neither of us like horror films.  I wouldn't have thought of counting Dickens as following in the Gothick genre, but the exhibition persuaded me that he did.  I'd have like to see a slightly stronger finishing section as the show brought the legacy of the Gothick into the modern era, as Goth fashion was limited to one Alexander McQueen dress, scarcely mainstream, and why no Addams family?  It's an entertaining exhibition, following on well from their Georgians this time last year, and my enjoyment was only slightly marred by the school trip, shepherded by a teacher with a loud voice, who were trying to fill in worksheets and had nowhere to rest them except on the exhibition cases.  It seemed like quite a well-heeled school, or at least two of the pupils were called Hugo and Caspar, so I thought they might have run to clip boards.

The Royal Academy has Giovanni Battista Moroni on until January 25th, a late sixteenth century painter from Northern Italy.  He produced religious art for the counter-reformation, which was probably practically obligatory in that time and place, but the really appealing paintings are the portraits.  They have reviewed very well and deservedly so.  Moroni could do fabric.  Boy, could he do clothes.  If you enjoy satin, lace, ruffs, ermine, velvet, damask, jewels, and embroidery conjured before your eyes in oil paint you will adore Moroni, but more than that, his people almost speak to you, haughty, guarded, shyly smiling, dull stuffed shirts you'd hope not to be stuck with at a party, smouldering with suppressed violence, kindly, tired.  He was a great portraitist, and portraits are one of my favourite genres.

The Courtauld has Egon Schiele's Radical Nudes, now in their final few days.  They are spiky, energetic, moderately pornographic drawings that pulse with energy and a wonderful economy of line.  Even allowing for the fact that Moroni's sitters have a great many clothes on, while Schiele's don't have any, it is amazing how two artists could come up with such different conclusions, faced with the human body.  Schiele is brilliant but not at all comfortable.  He died in the Spanish flu epidemic when he was only twenty-eight.  The bad news at the Courtauld was that the little Braque I adored has gone.  It was not part of the Courtauld's own collection, but on loan, and I always feared that one day I'd go in and it would have disappeared, and so it has proved.

I walked from Liverpool Street to St Pancras, and thence to Piccadilly and back to Liverpool Street, and fear I might have overdone it.  After the cold, and the short days, I am not so fit as I thought I was, and my right leg started to give out on the return trip.  I'd have climbed on a bus if I'd seen one, but I think there was some sort of bus strike today, and anyway I think my Oyster card is out of credit.