two exhibitions

I went gallery visiting today.  Once again my choice of what to see was slightly determined by what finishes soonest.  The V&A's The Fabric of India and the National Portrait Gallery's Giacometti: Pure Presence both end on 10th January.  We won't have any trains between Christmas and the New Year, so I thought that if I didn't want to end up squeezing into the final week I'd better go this side of Christmas.  That's not to say I wanted to see them more than the Dutch paintings at the Queen's Gallery or Liotard at the RA, but I've got slightly longer to get organised with the other two.  Indian textiles and Swiss existentialism make a reasonable pairing, as it happens, being so different that I'm not likely to muddle one with the other in my memory afterwards.

I love textiles.  They could easily have been my thing, if I hadn't settled on gardening, and India has produced some brilliant examples.  The show is very sensibly organised, starting with an introduction to some traditional techniques of weaving, printing, dying and embroidery, and going on to examples of all of them applied across a wide range of clothing and furnishings.  The historic skill of the Indians in adapting their output to the tastes of different export markets is explored, and then the threat posed to their industry in the nineteenth century by cheap imports from Britain's mechanised factories, leading to the politicisation of home produced fabric and the Nehru jacket.  The final section is on contemporary work.

There are a lot of beautiful things, my favourites being the vegetable dyed woven silks, though some of the wrap around dress-cum-jackets are pretty good.  Indeed, they'd adapt well to contemporary Western boho style.  Boho may have gone out of high fashion after its Sienna Miller heyday, but those of us who bought our first Monsoon dress in the 1970s will probably never totally abandon the look.

The Giacometti exhibition focuses on the paintings, drawings and sculptures he made of his family and friends, so there are very few of the stick insect figures that I'd immediately associate with the name.  The works are strange and compelling, though I found the curator's attempts to explain what they are about strayed perilously close to pseud's corner, with the added irritation that they were all mounted slightly too far up the wall for a short person wearing varifocals to read without getting a crick in their neck.  I'm still not sure what they were about, and they are certainly not decorative or pretty, but if the ghastly bronzes on sale every year at the Chelsea Flower Show are at one end of a scale, Giacometti's bronzes are at the other end.  Interesting.  Vital.  True.

I thought about trying to take in the Taylor Wessing photographic portrait competition as well, but decided that was enough for one day and my brain was full.