Today I went to Tate Modern, to get another fix of Giacometti before it closes on 10th September. One of the pleasures of revisiting an exhibition is being able to home in on the rooms or individual pieces you liked most the first time, without feeling the need to conscientiously work your way through every last display cabinet and faint pencil sketch. I like the array of heads on plinths that greet you as you enter the first room, the smallish trio of walking men, the large gesturing man, and especially the dog. If I could take just one piece home with me it would definitely be the dog. Though I rather like the Egyptian inspired woman standing between the gigantic wheels of her strange chariot.
Working through the temporary exhibitions in reverse closing date took me next to Fahrelnissa Zeid in the new extension. I can truthfully say that I had never heard of Fahrelnissa Zeid, but the posters looked lively, and half the point of paying up front to belong to a gallery is to reduce the marginal cost of entering exhibitions to zero, instead of having to decide if you want to pay £11.30 in order to discover whether you like Fahrelnissa Zeid. It turned out I did, a lot. She was an unlikely candidate to be an artist, born at the start of the twentieth century into a wealthy and aristocratic Ottoman family, and eventually married to a member of the Iraqi royal family who only escaped assassination by luck because he agreed to go on holiday with her that summer instead of making his usual visit home. She never even cooked a meal for herself until the age of 57 when he was sacked from his ambassadorial post following the coup, and even then she soon took to painting on the leftover bones. Most of her paintings were done on conventional canvases, and in the middle and to my eye the most appealing stage of her career they were large, colourful, very energetic abstracts. I would say she was an Abstract Expressionist, except that she didn't work as part of that movement. She trained in Europe, and I found echoes of Kandinsky and Klee, as well as Op art, plus influences from the Middle East, all pulled together into a vigorous and individual style. I really liked it. It is not a very large exhibition, and there were not very many people looking at it, and one of them sat on a bench scrolling through pictures on her phone all the time I was there. It runs until 8th October.
Then, as my brain was not quite full, I went to see Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, which runs until 22nd October. It has reviewed very well and I felt a bit mean leaving it until last, but I was more likely to be able to visit that one again if I liked it. It deals with weighty and often painful subjects, the treatment so often meted out to black Americans, how black artists responded, and how the white American art establishment responded to them, and it is a big exhibition. There is something of practically everything, 60s pop art, photography, conventional painting, sculptural assemblages referencing African art and fetish objects, conceptual art. Much of it is overtly political, some of the portraits could be taken at face value as portraits of people who just happen to be black.
There was nothing I coveted as much as I coveted Fahrenissa Zeid's small mixed media abstracts or her mysterious shimmering blue green square. As a visual experience it is not the most decorative exhibition. At the intellectual and historical level it packs a big and painful punch. I really liked some of the portraits as paintings, while I am always going to be irritated by an inner tyre encased in a pair of tights and hung on the wall whether they were assembled by an oppressed black artist or Louise Bourgeois. It did feel unfair to the artists to have tagged them on at the end of my day out when I might have been starting to flag, but juxtaposing the Soul of a Nation with my earlier viewing did leave me thinking about the point of art. Does it matter whether it is visually ravishing or carries a serious message? Is one better than the other? What, in fact, is art for? And is the message always the one the artist meant? One of the totemic objects in Soul of a Nation is a large wooden sculpture, shaped like a fist on one side and with two negro faces on the other. It is a very fine object, but reading the label and learning the identity of the shiny, dark brown timber the first thought that jumped into my mind was not anything to do with black power or identity but the slogan in defence of tropical rain forests, Mahogany is Murder.
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