a day out

I met some of my former colleagues for lunch today in London.  I'd wondered whether I'd have the heart to go, or if it would be in some way disrespectful, but decided that I had and it wouldn't be. Cutting myself off from my friends was not going to help, indeed if anything I rather fancied a few hours off before plunging back into matters of funeral arrangements, helping my mother sort out my father's possessions, and the intricacies of Probate.  If the lunch hadn't already been in my diary I certainly wouldn't have been emailing around trying to arrange one, but it was fixed about three months ago and had already been rescheduled once.

My friends received my news with an appropriate mixture of sympathy and aplomb.  That is one advantage of being at the upper end of middle age, if not the younger end of being old.  People have seen and done bereavement before.  When the Systems Administrator's father died during the SA's first year at university many of his fellow students had absolutely no idea what to say and tried to avoid the subject entirely.  Mind you, so did some of the tutors.

After lunch I went to have a look at Matisse in the studio at the Royal Academy.  The RA is part way through a refurbishment, and the ladies loo has moved and been enlarged and upgraded since my last visit, while the ticket desk is temporarily located in a portacabin in the courtyard, the very short queue presided over by a woman managing to sow confusion about how to queue where there was none before.  The Matisse exhibition is tucked away up in the Sackler Gallery and is not very big, and has consequently sometimes been very crowded.  When the wife of one of my lunch companions went a couple of months back it was rammed, and a notice today said Friends of the Royal Academy were required to book.  This is one of the principal reasons why I am no longer a Friend.

Today it was not especially busy.  The conceit of the exhibition is to show some of the objects Matisse collected in his life and incorporated into his art, alongside some of the artworks they featured in or inspired, and gigantic photographs of his splendidly curated house and studio.  I enjoyed it, apart from the fact that I am still absolutely knackered, since I like Matisse anyway, and seeing some of his original source material had a definite charm.  I am not convinced that Matisse had any truck with the peculiarly Western distinction between Fine and Decorative art, indeed, I think his interiors should count as part of his body of work.

After Matisse I didn't feel up to iconic images of flags, targets, numbers, maps and light bulbs, and gave Jasper Johns a miss.  The Matisse is worth catching, but it is only on now until the twelfth of November.