It was raining lightly this morning when I got up. Looking at the electronic weather station I saw that we'd had 28.9mm of rain in the previous 24 hours (that's over an inch in old money, or more than 5% of our expected annual total). I'd been thinking I might go up to London to see some art exhibitions, unless the rain moved through unexpectedly quickly, and while it had rained a good deal in the night, it didn't look as though I was going to get a dry day to get on with the gardening, and the garden was going to be sodden anyway, so I thought I'd stick to Plan A.
The big tabby had a partridge last night. The Systems Administrator blocked the cat door so that he couldn't eat it in the hall, and when I went out to let the chickens into their run, I found that he'd eaten it on the doorstep. He'd left the wings, both legs (so I know it was a red legged partridge and not the rarer grey one) and, rather bizarrely, the head, which was sitting upright outside the front door like the head of John the Baptist upon a platter.
The A12 was blocked by rainwater at Kelvedon. I knew that from reading the news on the net before setting out, and the SA heard on the traffic report on R2. The electronic traffic news sign on the Colchester inner ring road didn't see fit to warn drivers of the delay, or alternatively let them know that the road was now clear, instead exhorting us to plan ahead for our journey during the Olympics. I have already planned ahead, my plan being that from mid July at the latest until after our holiday in September I don't intend to go anywhere near London.
The first leg of my art trip took me to Dulwich. I love the Dulwich Picture Gallery, a little gem designed by Sir John Soane and Britain's first purpose built art gallery. I like Dulwich, too, once I get there. It is reassuringly bourgeois and leafy. In general I don't like south of the river. The actual south bank is OK, along the stretch from Blackfriars Bridge past the Tate and the Royal Festival Hall and up to Hungerford Bridge, but I get twitchy as soon as I can't see the Thames and the north bank. Peckham makes me think of Alexei Sayle in a tight suit, and Damilola Taylor. Today everybody was very respectable, though the ticket inspectors on the train were hunting in pairs.
The Dulwich Picture Gallery has a nice cafe. When I went there on a sunny day not long after their Canaletto exhibition opened it was completely full, but today it wasn't, and I had a smoked salmon bagel and a pot of tea, then got on with the real business of the day, which was a show of Indian ragamala paintings, and a small assemblage of Van Dykes. Ragamalas are miniatures, painted to illustrate pieces of music called ragas. The pictures were tiny, detailed and jewel like in their colours and clarity, and we were encouraged to borrow one of the supply of magnifying glasses to examine them more closely. I did, and marvelled at the faces, clothes and jewels of the little people, and the animals and plants. I find Hindu mythology utterly baffling, when I have tried to read about it, so decided not to worry about why some gods were blue, and so on, and just enjoy the images. It is not a big exhibition, with a couple of dozen pictures in it, which is about the right number. My eyes and brain couldn't have coped with any more, and I was getting a stiff arm holding up the magnifying glass. It's lucky it wasn't busier, as only one person at a time could really examine each picture.
Van Dyke in Sicily is not a large exhibition either, and going into it from the Indian pictures you rather confusingly start in room 3 of three, and are confronted with half a dozen Saint Rosalias casting their eyes up to heaven as they intercede on behalf of Palermo in time of plague. Working my way back to the start, I found three splendid portraits, an early self-portrait, a merchant with magnificant curling moustaches, and Emanuel Philibert of Savoy in armour. In a coup de theatre the gallery had managed to borrow the original armour shown in the portrait, though by now the gilding has largely rubbed off and it does not look so gorgeous as it did in 1624. The room guide warned everyone coming in the front was that the armour was alarmed, but that you had to get very close to it to set it off, but coming in the back way via Saint Rosalia I escaped the warning. The armour is tiny, and Emanuel Philibert must have been a little chap, but he looks every inch the nobleman and governor, which he was, until dying of the plague only a few months after Van Dyke painted him. Then there are a couple of devotional portraits and a sketch and cut-down painting of a great woman artist in her old age, and the Rosalias. She was extremely pious and lived in a cave, and her bones were thought to be a defence against plague, though it doesn't sound as though they worked. I really like Van Dyke, and I liked this excursion into the Sicilian phase of his career, my only caveat being that there is an egregious misuse of the word 'decimated' in the introductory paragraph about the plague, and that the captions for some of the pictures are in a small font hung at hip level.
Both of these exhibitions are on until May 27th, so you have time to visit them, but not loads of time. If you are going all the trouble of getting yourself to Dulwich it's worth having a look at the gallery's permanent collection while you're there, as they have a fine set of Old Masters, some good eighteenth century English portraits, and some Dutch landscapes.
Rolling back into London Bridge station I debated whether to head home, and get a train ahead of the peak time ban on cheap day returns, or go to Tate Modern. I opted for the Tate, since I'm running out of time to see various things, and I thought I might as well get maximum value out of the train ticket. The SA is out tonight anyway for a curry (which should have been preceded by a cricket match, but rain stopped play for the second time in a fortnight). Tate Britain is showing the work of a Japanese artist I'd never heard of, until I heard about this exhibition, but is sounded interesting. Her name is Yayoi Kusama. She was born in 1929, worked in America in the 1960s, then returned to Japan, where after a few years she voluntarily admitted herself to a mental hospital, but continued to work. The booklet (I love it that the Tate gives its supporters a booklet with their free exhibition entry) says that she is perhaps Japan's best-know living artist, which proves that I know nothing about Japanese contemporary art. I found some of her work very interesting and beautiful, and some not, which wan't surprising. Some of her early monochrome paintings have an eerie calm that I could look at for a long time, and some of her late ones have a joyous vibrancy that reminded me strangely of the banks of brightly coloured late Hockneys in his recent show at the RA. My favourite thing was the Infinity Mirrored Room at the very end of the exhibition. Walls and ceiling are covered with mirrors, and strings of small globes hang from the ceiling, with a pathway for visitors to move through the room. Inside the globes are coloured lights, presumably LEDs, which change colour, interposed with brief periods of darkness. They turn red, yellow, pink, green, blue and green, and are reflected in the walls and ceiling, as are the viewers, so that one moment you see a dozen of yourself among a cheerful infinity of glowing yellow lights, then the lights turn yellow and green, or all blue, or blue and red. Mirrored installations, and indeed dots, are a recurring theme for Kasuma, who has experienced visual hallucinations since childhood, and the installation does indeed 'invite the viewer to suspend his or her sense of self and accompany Kusama on her ongoing journey of self-obliteration'. It is also quite extraordinarily pretty. You have until 5 June to catch this one, and it is worth seeing.
As I was there, and I couldn't get a train for another hour and a half, I wandered into Alighiero Boetti. The first room included objects like a roll of cardboard, and I began to nurse hostile feelings towards Boetii, though I liked the two illuminated red and white signs either side of a doorway which came on alternately, one saying Ping and the other Pong, but two rooms on came to some bits I really liked. Boetti was interested in maps, and politics, and came up with the idea of colouring in countries on a map with their national flag, but doing it a lot of times and on a grand scale. As politics move on and national boundaries and symbols change, so do the maps. Boetti drew up what he wanted, in terms of choosing which map projection to use and specifying the latest flags, then handed the whole project over to Afghan embroiderers, who made his ideas into huge embroideries. The end results were sometimes unexpected, as in the time when one world map came back with pink seas. Afghanistan is a land-locked country, the embroiderers had a lot of pink thread, and the idea of the sea didn't occur to them. I've always liked textiles and maps, and thought that these were completely wonderful, though I gather the Italian avant-guard art establishment wasn't immediately convinced at the time. In the next room a set of kilims were made using one hundred squares, arranged in a ten by ten grid, each square divided into one hundred smaller squares. One of the hundred larger squares had one black small square and ninety-nine white, the next two black, and so on. Boetti left it to the discretion of his kilim makers to choose their arrangements of large and small squares. The results, arranged within colourful borders, were almost infinitely varied, rhythmic and subtle. I really liked the kilims. Then there's lots more stuff, some quite interesting, some not, but it's worth going just for the maps and the carpets.
I'd love to hear Grayson Perry's or David Hockney's views on Boetti's textile works. Both of them believe that it is important for the artist to have physically made their work. Boetti's textiles don't even use studio assistants working under his supervision, but crafts people in a different continent, and he gave them guiding principles, but a lot of discretion about how they interpreted them. My hunch is that Perry and Hockney wouldn't mind, in Boetti's case.
I didn't go to see Damian Hirst, and I don't think I'll bother. I know you shouldn't condemn something without seeing it (although actually we do that all the time. Most right-minded liberals are against murder, torture, or cannibalism without having personally tried them first, and concluded that they are a Bad Idea). I think Damian Hirst is a Bad Idea, and I am going to vote with my feet.
Showing posts with label Tate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Tate. Show all posts
Thursday, 3 May 2012
Friday, 9 December 2011
watching pictures and people
I abandoned the garden, and went to look at Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern. It's good to go and be cosmopolitan for the day, once in a while. I still love the City, though it is less and less my place. Buildings I knew are demolished and new ones erupt, and restaurants and wine bars where I was once wined and dined by stockbrokers, or met friends, or went out for after-work drinks with my esteemed colleagues, cease to be or are transmuted into something else. I don't wear the uniform any more. I used to have a briefcase, blue leather, handmade in Ireland and bought in Liberty, and was allowed into the offices and the livery halls, when I had an appointment or was on the list of names for the meeting. Nowadays I look at it from the outside.
I love the Members' Room at Tate Britain. It is right at the top of the building, with a fabulous view over the river to Saint Pauls, and is not generally full. It appeals to cultured solitaries like me, young mothers with toddlers, friends on a day out, and people with laptops doing some sort of work, or filling in the time between meetings. Two elderly ladies behind me in the queue for coffee (staff a bit slow today noticing that they had customers) were having a stately argument as one tried to pick up the whole tab, and the other insisted that she was paying for herself, and threatened her friend that 'otherwise I won't come out with you again'. A young chap with a laptop called someone up as he waited for his 1.00pm business meeting. He already had a bottle of beer on the go, and proposed meeting them at 3.30pm for draught prosecco. 'I love prosecco' he told them. He was upset that somebody else had sent him a clumsily worded e-mail, and said it might sound odd, but he really preferred not to do business with people like that. I thought that in these hard times his business must be going well for him to be able to be so picky. He tried to tell the person on the phone about Winston Churchill's remark that he didn't have time to write a short letter, and was obliged to send a long one, but the line can't have been very good, because he had to repeat it about four times, and I don't think they had heard of Winston Churchill, and he forgot the punchline about the long letter.
Gerhard Richter is a major German artist. He addresses serious themes including Germany's wartime past, and the nature of perception. Some of his pictures are large soft focus painted versions of photographs, which I find physically difficult to look at, and would be fascinated to know if they have a similar effect on other people. As the crystalline lenses of my eyes have lost elasticity (middle age), I need separate glasses for reading and seeing, which is fine when I settle down to either read or see, but cumbersome in situations where I need to switch between the two. Looking at Gerhard Richter's out-of-focus pictures I had the uneasy sensation that I was wearing the wrong glasses, and my eyes struggled to compensate.
It's a big exhibition. There are some abstracts, and some messing about with sheets of glass (regular readers will know what I think about that sort of thing). I don't grudge spending the morning there, instead of weeding, but I didn't emerge loving Gerhard Richter. Viewed as a sensory experience, his palette didn't do it for me. That is a matter of subjective, personal taste, but there it is. When Paul Klee painted a little square canvas only about 30cm by 30cm, made up of tiny coloured squares, Klee's colours made me so happy that I wanted to laugh, and then steal the painting so that I could look at it every day for the rest of my life. When Gerhard Richter painted a large square canvas made of lots of coloured squares, it didn't make me any happier than the paint chart said to have inspired it. Wrong colours (personally speaking). The political paintings were interesting, but if you really want to explore those sorts of ideas, words are better. (I'm reading Robert Fisk's history of the Middle East at the moment, The Great War for Civilisation. It is grim but fascinating. I'm up to page 657, and conveying the same range of facts and emotions using pictures would require an art gallery the size of Tokyo).
I had thought I might look at Rothko's Seagram murals, but they have been put into storage to make way for the forthcoming Damian Hirst show, and won't be on display again until that's over, which isn't until next September. Apparently some of the works are so heavy the Tate is having to reinforce the floor. Rothko displaced by a charlatan shark-pickler. How depressing.
Then I went to see The First Actresses at The National Portrait Gallery, which was great fun. The National Portrait Gallery does these small exhibitions very well, placing the pictures in an historic context, and so while gazing at the Gainsboroughs I learnt odd snippets of social history. The romantic and sex lives of the most popular eighteenth century actresses were scrutinised every bit as keenly as Sienna Miller's is today, and their dresses were copied. Some actresses on retiring from the stage succeeded as novelists and playwrights. Others married into the aristocracy. Richard Brinsley Sheridan forbade his wife to have any further involvement with the stage following their marriage, and her portrait gives no clue as to her past profession. Sarah Siddons looks a forbidding creature, but I suppose she was a tragic actress.
I'd been wondering whether I even wanted to see the Leonardo exhibition, on the grounds that the ratio of visitors to paintings would be too high, but the question has been taken out of my hands, as I read in the papers days ago that all advance tickets were sold for the entire run of the show, and today there were no buy-on-the-day tickets available. Never mind. I remember the Vermeer exhibition several years ago, where the main thing I saw was the backs of other people's necks, or the corners of paintings with other people's faces in front of most of the canvas. When the Systems Administrator and I were on holiday in The Netherlands we made a special trip to den Hague, to visit the excellent Mauritshuis, where we had Vermeer's View of Delft all to ourselves. Not even the security guard could be bothered to come and join us.
I love the Members' Room at Tate Britain. It is right at the top of the building, with a fabulous view over the river to Saint Pauls, and is not generally full. It appeals to cultured solitaries like me, young mothers with toddlers, friends on a day out, and people with laptops doing some sort of work, or filling in the time between meetings. Two elderly ladies behind me in the queue for coffee (staff a bit slow today noticing that they had customers) were having a stately argument as one tried to pick up the whole tab, and the other insisted that she was paying for herself, and threatened her friend that 'otherwise I won't come out with you again'. A young chap with a laptop called someone up as he waited for his 1.00pm business meeting. He already had a bottle of beer on the go, and proposed meeting them at 3.30pm for draught prosecco. 'I love prosecco' he told them. He was upset that somebody else had sent him a clumsily worded e-mail, and said it might sound odd, but he really preferred not to do business with people like that. I thought that in these hard times his business must be going well for him to be able to be so picky. He tried to tell the person on the phone about Winston Churchill's remark that he didn't have time to write a short letter, and was obliged to send a long one, but the line can't have been very good, because he had to repeat it about four times, and I don't think they had heard of Winston Churchill, and he forgot the punchline about the long letter.
Gerhard Richter is a major German artist. He addresses serious themes including Germany's wartime past, and the nature of perception. Some of his pictures are large soft focus painted versions of photographs, which I find physically difficult to look at, and would be fascinated to know if they have a similar effect on other people. As the crystalline lenses of my eyes have lost elasticity (middle age), I need separate glasses for reading and seeing, which is fine when I settle down to either read or see, but cumbersome in situations where I need to switch between the two. Looking at Gerhard Richter's out-of-focus pictures I had the uneasy sensation that I was wearing the wrong glasses, and my eyes struggled to compensate.
It's a big exhibition. There are some abstracts, and some messing about with sheets of glass (regular readers will know what I think about that sort of thing). I don't grudge spending the morning there, instead of weeding, but I didn't emerge loving Gerhard Richter. Viewed as a sensory experience, his palette didn't do it for me. That is a matter of subjective, personal taste, but there it is. When Paul Klee painted a little square canvas only about 30cm by 30cm, made up of tiny coloured squares, Klee's colours made me so happy that I wanted to laugh, and then steal the painting so that I could look at it every day for the rest of my life. When Gerhard Richter painted a large square canvas made of lots of coloured squares, it didn't make me any happier than the paint chart said to have inspired it. Wrong colours (personally speaking). The political paintings were interesting, but if you really want to explore those sorts of ideas, words are better. (I'm reading Robert Fisk's history of the Middle East at the moment, The Great War for Civilisation. It is grim but fascinating. I'm up to page 657, and conveying the same range of facts and emotions using pictures would require an art gallery the size of Tokyo).
I had thought I might look at Rothko's Seagram murals, but they have been put into storage to make way for the forthcoming Damian Hirst show, and won't be on display again until that's over, which isn't until next September. Apparently some of the works are so heavy the Tate is having to reinforce the floor. Rothko displaced by a charlatan shark-pickler. How depressing.
Then I went to see The First Actresses at The National Portrait Gallery, which was great fun. The National Portrait Gallery does these small exhibitions very well, placing the pictures in an historic context, and so while gazing at the Gainsboroughs I learnt odd snippets of social history. The romantic and sex lives of the most popular eighteenth century actresses were scrutinised every bit as keenly as Sienna Miller's is today, and their dresses were copied. Some actresses on retiring from the stage succeeded as novelists and playwrights. Others married into the aristocracy. Richard Brinsley Sheridan forbade his wife to have any further involvement with the stage following their marriage, and her portrait gives no clue as to her past profession. Sarah Siddons looks a forbidding creature, but I suppose she was a tragic actress.
I'd been wondering whether I even wanted to see the Leonardo exhibition, on the grounds that the ratio of visitors to paintings would be too high, but the question has been taken out of my hands, as I read in the papers days ago that all advance tickets were sold for the entire run of the show, and today there were no buy-on-the-day tickets available. Never mind. I remember the Vermeer exhibition several years ago, where the main thing I saw was the backs of other people's necks, or the corners of paintings with other people's faces in front of most of the canvas. When the Systems Administrator and I were on holiday in The Netherlands we made a special trip to den Hague, to visit the excellent Mauritshuis, where we had Vermeer's View of Delft all to ourselves. Not even the security guard could be bothered to come and join us.
Thursday, 1 September 2011
last chance to see: part 2
After the Whitechapel Gallery I went to Tate Britain, taking the District line from the handily located Aldgate East tube station and walking down from Westminster. This works fine as long it's not raining (hard) and you enjoy a bit of a walk, and you get a nice view of the Houses of Parliament (and the tourists, and the rather depressing anti-terrorist barriers now ringing parliament).
The show I went to see at Tate Britain also finishes on 4th September, so you have even less time to see it. However, acting as a spoiler for my own post I would say that you may not necessarily want to. They are showing The Vorticists: Manifesto for a modern world. Even after going to the exhibition I am not too sure what The Vorticists stood for, which you could say suggests that it was not a very well curated exhibition, though in fairness to the Tate, my eyesight in dim light is not what it was and I had forgotten my reading glasses and didn't bother to try and read all the little labels. The cheerleader for Vorticism was Ezra Pound, who must be forgiven much because of his role in bringing Eliot's poetry to the world. I think The Vorticists believed in the future, energy, virility, modernity and the power of the machine, though apparently they got very cross when people confused them with Futurists. They brought out their magazine Blast, just before the Great War started, and then in 1915 brought out the second issue, but by then people had other things on their minds, and one of The Vorticists' brightest and most shining talents was killed in the trenches, and Blast folded.
I find most of The Vorticists' aesthetic ugly and rather tiresome. Think drawings of piles of girders that have been accidentally dropped from a crane, and a muddy palette, and you are more or less there. However, the Royal Academy included some sculptures by some of their members in a show it did a couple of years back, and there were a couple of those that I wanted to see again, and thought they would probably feature in the Tate exhibition. They are by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was killed in 1915, and they are very beautiful. Both carved out of stone, neither very big. One is of a girl singing. She stands on chunky legs in a vaguely suggested dress, and I'm sure we are looking at the influence of African art on Western sculpture. Her arms are behind her back, one twisted round to hold her long plait. Her head is slightly tipped back and tilted to one side, her mouth open, her eyes mysterious. It is piecingly sad, all the sorrow of Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse locked into a little lump of stone. I should love to possess it. The other sculpture is of a kneeling faun, that looks self-possessed, wary and strangely lively.
Apart from those there were a few prints I liked, some semi-abstract black and white little pictures of northern scenes, and an etching and a pastel drawing of marching troops. I have Tate membership, so found it worth nipping in just to look at the two sculptures, but I wouldn't want to shell out £14 or make a special trip to London just to see that exhibition. You get a booklet, but having read it I'm really none the wiser, and as the R.A. showed the more famous pieces in this exhibition quite recently I'm not entirely sure why the Tate bothered. The lovely sculpture of the singing girl actually belongs to them, so in theory I ought to be able to go and see it any time, but I've never discovered where or whether it is on regular display. I think the Tate should put its entire catalogue on-line, together with the current location of every piece: room 17 Millbank, on loan to The National Trust at Montacute House, in a cupboard. We could then vote for which ones we'd like taken out of the cupboards and put on display (and maybe what should take their place in the cupboard).
I had a ginger beer in the cafe at Tate Britain. It is not so nice as the one at the Whitechapel, being in a cellar, noisy and rather hot. Postcards cost more, at 65p, though I didn't buy one.
Then I yomped up to Somerset House to visit The Courtauld, and had a cup of tea and a flapjack. Their cafe has an outside courtyard, which looked inviting, but it turned out that it was waitress service and they didn't have enough staff on duty, and I sat waiting for twenty minutes for the tea. Fortunately I wasn't in a hurry, but while I was sitting there a pigeon landed on my head.
The Courtauld has an exhibition running until 18th September of Toulouse Lautrec and Jane Avril. Lautrec was one of the first graphic artists I came to admire, and I have loved his posters since my early teens, so I was keen to catch that, and I was not disappointed. Their exhibitions are only ever small, and almost always well done. We got posters, paintings, preparatory sketches, lithographs, photographs of Jane Avril and her fellow dancers, all linked together with clear, useful text. The system at The Courtauld is that you have to pay to go in at all (it has gone up to £6) and that gives you access to both the temporary exhibition and the permanent collection.
My mother took me to London to see the Courtauld collection when I was in my teens, and I have been visiting intermittently ever since. It has moved since my first visit, and now occupies Somerset House, a fabulous eighteenth century building that would be worth a visit in its own right. The permanent collection is based on the private art collection of textile magnate Samuel Courtauld, and has been added to since. Samuel had a very good eye for a picture, and managed to pick up The Bar at the Folies Bergere, a couple of fabulous Van Gogh paintings, a nice collection of Cezanne, and two completely wonderful paintings by Gaugin, as well as a good handful of Gainsboroughs. The beauty of seeing these in their permanent home rather than an artist-themed temporary exhibition is that The Courtauld is so much less crowded. Gaugin at Tate Modern was a complete bunfight, whereas there were times yesterday afternoon when I had these two paintings virtually to myself, so much that I was able to sit down on the floor in front of them and just contemplate.
The gallery has rehung some of the permanent collection since the last time I was there, in a way that actually makes more sense. There is now a room of Renaissance art, a room devoted to Rubens and the Baroque, another for eighteenth century art, and all of the Cezannes have been gathered together into a little room of their own instead of being dotted throughout the building. There are also more seats than there used to be (though not in front of the Gaugin). These themed rooms include some good paintings on loan. The collection is too large to all be on display at once, and some Bloomsbury set paintings that I rather like have disappeared from show, but it's interesting to go there and find something new on successive visits.
Postcards at The Courtauld are even more expensive, at 70p, but overall it is a wonderful gallery, and considerably better value than The Vorticists. If it isn't on your list of places to call in when visiting London then I would say add it (but maybe get tea in Pret a Manger).
The show I went to see at Tate Britain also finishes on 4th September, so you have even less time to see it. However, acting as a spoiler for my own post I would say that you may not necessarily want to. They are showing The Vorticists: Manifesto for a modern world. Even after going to the exhibition I am not too sure what The Vorticists stood for, which you could say suggests that it was not a very well curated exhibition, though in fairness to the Tate, my eyesight in dim light is not what it was and I had forgotten my reading glasses and didn't bother to try and read all the little labels. The cheerleader for Vorticism was Ezra Pound, who must be forgiven much because of his role in bringing Eliot's poetry to the world. I think The Vorticists believed in the future, energy, virility, modernity and the power of the machine, though apparently they got very cross when people confused them with Futurists. They brought out their magazine Blast, just before the Great War started, and then in 1915 brought out the second issue, but by then people had other things on their minds, and one of The Vorticists' brightest and most shining talents was killed in the trenches, and Blast folded.
I find most of The Vorticists' aesthetic ugly and rather tiresome. Think drawings of piles of girders that have been accidentally dropped from a crane, and a muddy palette, and you are more or less there. However, the Royal Academy included some sculptures by some of their members in a show it did a couple of years back, and there were a couple of those that I wanted to see again, and thought they would probably feature in the Tate exhibition. They are by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, who was killed in 1915, and they are very beautiful. Both carved out of stone, neither very big. One is of a girl singing. She stands on chunky legs in a vaguely suggested dress, and I'm sure we are looking at the influence of African art on Western sculpture. Her arms are behind her back, one twisted round to hold her long plait. Her head is slightly tipped back and tilted to one side, her mouth open, her eyes mysterious. It is piecingly sad, all the sorrow of Nina Simone and Amy Winehouse locked into a little lump of stone. I should love to possess it. The other sculpture is of a kneeling faun, that looks self-possessed, wary and strangely lively.
Apart from those there were a few prints I liked, some semi-abstract black and white little pictures of northern scenes, and an etching and a pastel drawing of marching troops. I have Tate membership, so found it worth nipping in just to look at the two sculptures, but I wouldn't want to shell out £14 or make a special trip to London just to see that exhibition. You get a booklet, but having read it I'm really none the wiser, and as the R.A. showed the more famous pieces in this exhibition quite recently I'm not entirely sure why the Tate bothered. The lovely sculpture of the singing girl actually belongs to them, so in theory I ought to be able to go and see it any time, but I've never discovered where or whether it is on regular display. I think the Tate should put its entire catalogue on-line, together with the current location of every piece: room 17 Millbank, on loan to The National Trust at Montacute House, in a cupboard. We could then vote for which ones we'd like taken out of the cupboards and put on display (and maybe what should take their place in the cupboard).
I had a ginger beer in the cafe at Tate Britain. It is not so nice as the one at the Whitechapel, being in a cellar, noisy and rather hot. Postcards cost more, at 65p, though I didn't buy one.
Then I yomped up to Somerset House to visit The Courtauld, and had a cup of tea and a flapjack. Their cafe has an outside courtyard, which looked inviting, but it turned out that it was waitress service and they didn't have enough staff on duty, and I sat waiting for twenty minutes for the tea. Fortunately I wasn't in a hurry, but while I was sitting there a pigeon landed on my head.
The Courtauld has an exhibition running until 18th September of Toulouse Lautrec and Jane Avril. Lautrec was one of the first graphic artists I came to admire, and I have loved his posters since my early teens, so I was keen to catch that, and I was not disappointed. Their exhibitions are only ever small, and almost always well done. We got posters, paintings, preparatory sketches, lithographs, photographs of Jane Avril and her fellow dancers, all linked together with clear, useful text. The system at The Courtauld is that you have to pay to go in at all (it has gone up to £6) and that gives you access to both the temporary exhibition and the permanent collection.
My mother took me to London to see the Courtauld collection when I was in my teens, and I have been visiting intermittently ever since. It has moved since my first visit, and now occupies Somerset House, a fabulous eighteenth century building that would be worth a visit in its own right. The permanent collection is based on the private art collection of textile magnate Samuel Courtauld, and has been added to since. Samuel had a very good eye for a picture, and managed to pick up The Bar at the Folies Bergere, a couple of fabulous Van Gogh paintings, a nice collection of Cezanne, and two completely wonderful paintings by Gaugin, as well as a good handful of Gainsboroughs. The beauty of seeing these in their permanent home rather than an artist-themed temporary exhibition is that The Courtauld is so much less crowded. Gaugin at Tate Modern was a complete bunfight, whereas there were times yesterday afternoon when I had these two paintings virtually to myself, so much that I was able to sit down on the floor in front of them and just contemplate.
The gallery has rehung some of the permanent collection since the last time I was there, in a way that actually makes more sense. There is now a room of Renaissance art, a room devoted to Rubens and the Baroque, another for eighteenth century art, and all of the Cezannes have been gathered together into a little room of their own instead of being dotted throughout the building. There are also more seats than there used to be (though not in front of the Gaugin). These themed rooms include some good paintings on loan. The collection is too large to all be on display at once, and some Bloomsbury set paintings that I rather like have disappeared from show, but it's interesting to go there and find something new on successive visits.
Postcards at The Courtauld are even more expensive, at 70p, but overall it is a wonderful gallery, and considerably better value than The Vorticists. If it isn't on your list of places to call in when visiting London then I would say add it (but maybe get tea in Pret a Manger).
Friday, 18 March 2011
two exhibitions
It was drizzling this morning when I got up, and the forecast was for rain, so I went up to London to look at some art. I'd managed to miss the exhibition I wanted to see at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, as I haven't been up for weeks, so I chose today's entertainments on the basis of picking the two things on the list of shows I'd like to see that ended soonest. It was raining properly by the time I got to Liverpool Street, but not windy, and I like London in the rain as long as it isn't driving horizontally, so I yomped down to Tate Modern, taking a short detour into St Pauls churchyard to look at a large magnolia that was just coming into bloom, and over the bouncy bridge. The Thames was on the flood, looking ominous and full of strange back eddies as the natural flow of the river ran against the tide.
Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist. I'd never heard of him until the Tate retrospective came along, but it's good to try new things, and the papers I'd read about him had sounded quite enthusiastic. The exhibition was a mixed bag. There were some good bits, and then there were some other bits. Actually quite a lot of other bits. My favourite room, which really was good, was the one that dealt with death. The artist had got hold of an entire human skull somehow, which he had painstakingly painted with a strictly geometric checkerboard pattern of black and white, carrying it over the different planes and angles which distorted the checkerboard to harlequin diamonds. It looked unexpectedly jaunty, and I presumed it referenced the Mexican day of the dead, as well as being a very elegantly executed feat of draughtsmanship. The skull was good. The best bit was the headlines from New York Times that lined the walls, stripped of the names of their subjects. These read like something by Evelyn Waugh, dozens of lives compressed into five or six words that managed to be both touching and ludicrous.
I didn't find the rest of the show so much fun. There were some pictures based on circles, that looked like the bastard offspring of a Mandelbrot fractal and the BBC i-player animated doodle. There was an extra sized chessboard with nothing but knights on it, which was quite amusing, but not very. There was a large room full of photographs of yellow scooters, generated by hiring a common make of scooter and driving around looking for other identical (stationary) scooters, then parking next to each scooter and photographing the two scooters together. Look, after I got a Skoda Fabia I began to notice how many other Skoda Fabias there were on the road, but I didn't call that art. Likewise, squeezing a lump of a malleable substance with your legs and elbows so as to leave the imprint of your body on the lump doesn't make it art, or if it does then on that basis the flan case I made the other weekend was art. Then there was the room full of bits of shredded tyres, collected by the artist from the side of the road in Mexico and arranged by him in a special way. They were tyres. They blew. Please explain why putting them in rows in a converted power station next to the Thames makes them art (I am beginning to feel like Francis Bacon dismissing parterres with the observation that you may see as good in tarts). There was a Citroen DS cut down the middle and very neatly reassembled with its central third missing, which was clever, but seemed like a waste of a rather nice classic car, and I'm not sure what message it was supposed to give me. And the white cardboard box placed casually on the floor, which echoed the shape of the gallery room. Seriously, that's what the blurb on the wall said. I've had a shoebox on the floor next to my desk for weeks, because I am too disorganised to put it away. It is being promoted to art forthwith. Then there was the room with lines strung across it, from which hung bits of grey fabric that from a distance looked like dishcloths hung up to dry. They turned out to be fluff from Mexican laundromats, which the artist had collected. They are supposed to make you think about the transitory nature of life. Or something. And the ceiling fan with loo paper stuck to it. I don't know how you negotiate to earn a living sticking loo paper to ceiling fans and hanging up gunk out of washing machines, instead of lifting several times your own body weight in compost in a day, in between trying to be unfailingly helpful and polite to people a sizeable minority of whom appear to be either deaf, terminally indecisive, or moderately dotty, but I should say that Gabriel Orozco is a sharp operator. Whether he will be remembered in four hundred years as fondly as we remember Rembrandt van Rijn is another question. I don't think so (but what do I know. They laughed at the Impressionists at the time).
I walked on to the Royal Academy. The south bank had a wistful out of season air, with few people, and the book stalls under the bridge by the national film theatre all shut up. I bought a Big Issue from a vendor on the Hungerford Bridge, not so much because I wanted a wet magazine as because nobody else was stopping. He spoke in the accents of Eastern Europe. Lettuce picking and mushroom farming can't have worked out for him. Somebody else then stopped, and asked the vendor if he had change before giving him a bank note and assuring him that it was a Scottish note but it was legal tender.
The first room of the Modern British Sculpture exhibition at the RA was really promising. There was a full scale model of the Cenotaph. I've only seen it from a distance in the middle of the road, and on the TV, and even with Charlie Gilmour swinging from it for scale I hadn't realised how big it was. And there were some photos of plaster models Epstein did for the BMA. The second room had sculptures from different civilisations in prehistoric times interposed with modern works, and was great fun. I loved the forepart of a running leopard from 350BC and the Eric Gill relief of nude girl with hair, and torso of a very flighty girl with more hair, and several other things, and began to feel warm and happy and that this was more like it. Room 3 had a monumental Epstein Adam (with enormous genitalia) and a small sly Henry Moore serpent, and something I've never seen before, which was a sign on the wall about the hessian covered bench, which was a copy of a bench at some earlier exhibition and we were invited to sit on it. In the next room we took a leap back to the nineteenth century, with queen Victoria sitting in a vast and rumpled dress under a crown-cum-canopy, looking not at all amused, and three other figures which I think I was supposed to compare and contrast. One was Lord Frederic Leighton's 1877 take on a muscular nude athlete wrestling with a python, the next a twentieth century muscular, nude and very shiny Adam, with tiny genitalia and no phallic python, who might as well have been from 1877, and the third was Genghis Khan, represented as a purple plastic teepee with bat wings. That was bit odd but I could cope. Then there were some very beautiful Chinese plain celadon and cream ceramics from between 600 and 1100, unbelievably thin and delicate and strangely modern (which I had seen before in the excellent new ceramics room at the British Museum, but they are so beautiful I could look at them any number of times). On the other side of the room were some twentieth century British pots, chunkier but some good strong plain shapes, though I'm not sure I could tell the difference between them and the pots everybody seemed to have in their houses in my village in east Devon in the 1960s (it was quite an arty village). And there was Barbara Hepworth's Pelagos, which I love. I first saw it when the Tate was only at Millbank, then it was briefly in Tate Modern and I saw it there, before moving to Tate St Ives, which is fair enough, and I saw it there, so I was very pleased it had come to London, as it's a long way to St Ives. In the next room was a large Barbara Hepworth abstract scupture, a bronze wedge with a hole near the top, which was perfect. The surface was pitted and mottled in a thousand shades of green and grey and the shape was subtle and absolutely right, the thickness of the piece varying across it like the fin of a submarine or the head of a whale, and the hole in exactly the right place. Its companion in the room was a Henry Moore reclining figure, and we were meant to contrast the abstract and figurative approaches to sculpture, but what would have been more illuminating would have been to get half a dozen of the lifeless abstract Hepworth rip-offs that get marketed as garden ornaments, and explain why the real thing was so much better.
Then it began to go downhill. There was an Anthony Caro exploration of horizontals and verticals, which was made of flat bits of metal and long bits of metal welded together and painted, which looked vaguely like the half assembled beginning of some bizarre machine tool, but it was red and very shiny. If you accidentally stepped over the demarcation line around it the attendant leapt at you anxiously. There were coloured perspex rectangles strung together, which you were allowed to walk among without a guard warning you off, and I did wonder what the conceptual difference was between them and the Mexican laundromat fluff, apart from the fact that the perpex was coloured and more interactive. Then there was the Damien Hirst abandoned barbecue and white plastic furniture in a perspex box, full of live flies. Look, I know that food goes off and that flies will breed in it given half a chance. I have a fridge and a vegetable peelings bin. There was half an apple and half a pear, stuck together and suspended from the ceiling. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to people that no, their pear tree will not pollinate their apple, and no, nor will their plum tree, yes, they do need two apples. Two different apples. I'm not sure what the artist's point was there, but I think I'm ahead of him. And there was the line of white chalk stones. I think this was meant to make us think about landscapes, or remind us they exist. And the pile of bricks stacked up (inside a white line, naturally) and the row of painted metal bars lined up. I've got a pile of left-over engineering bricks stacked outside the shed, and a pile of planks waiting to be used in the decking. They Are Not Art. When I got to the perspex coffee table with 2000 maltesers in plastic bags on top and a skateboard-like construction underneath I lost all patience, if not the will to live, so I probably didn't give the last room the attention it deserved. This had a lot of page 3 models stuck up on one wall, and a lot of newspaper clippings about sculpture on the opposite wall, but I couldn't be bothered to work out what the point was, apart from the fact that art might be very subjective.
If you want to go and see these for yourself these are the details.
Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern
Modern British Sculpture at the RA
I've got a season ticket to both galleries, and it was too wet to garden anyway, and each exhibition had a few beautiful or thought-provoking things in it, so I wouldn't say I grudged the day out, but I did have to wade through a lot of what I rather suspect was pretentious guff.
Gabriel Orozco is a Mexican artist. I'd never heard of him until the Tate retrospective came along, but it's good to try new things, and the papers I'd read about him had sounded quite enthusiastic. The exhibition was a mixed bag. There were some good bits, and then there were some other bits. Actually quite a lot of other bits. My favourite room, which really was good, was the one that dealt with death. The artist had got hold of an entire human skull somehow, which he had painstakingly painted with a strictly geometric checkerboard pattern of black and white, carrying it over the different planes and angles which distorted the checkerboard to harlequin diamonds. It looked unexpectedly jaunty, and I presumed it referenced the Mexican day of the dead, as well as being a very elegantly executed feat of draughtsmanship. The skull was good. The best bit was the headlines from New York Times that lined the walls, stripped of the names of their subjects. These read like something by Evelyn Waugh, dozens of lives compressed into five or six words that managed to be both touching and ludicrous.
I didn't find the rest of the show so much fun. There were some pictures based on circles, that looked like the bastard offspring of a Mandelbrot fractal and the BBC i-player animated doodle. There was an extra sized chessboard with nothing but knights on it, which was quite amusing, but not very. There was a large room full of photographs of yellow scooters, generated by hiring a common make of scooter and driving around looking for other identical (stationary) scooters, then parking next to each scooter and photographing the two scooters together. Look, after I got a Skoda Fabia I began to notice how many other Skoda Fabias there were on the road, but I didn't call that art. Likewise, squeezing a lump of a malleable substance with your legs and elbows so as to leave the imprint of your body on the lump doesn't make it art, or if it does then on that basis the flan case I made the other weekend was art. Then there was the room full of bits of shredded tyres, collected by the artist from the side of the road in Mexico and arranged by him in a special way. They were tyres. They blew. Please explain why putting them in rows in a converted power station next to the Thames makes them art (I am beginning to feel like Francis Bacon dismissing parterres with the observation that you may see as good in tarts). There was a Citroen DS cut down the middle and very neatly reassembled with its central third missing, which was clever, but seemed like a waste of a rather nice classic car, and I'm not sure what message it was supposed to give me. And the white cardboard box placed casually on the floor, which echoed the shape of the gallery room. Seriously, that's what the blurb on the wall said. I've had a shoebox on the floor next to my desk for weeks, because I am too disorganised to put it away. It is being promoted to art forthwith. Then there was the room with lines strung across it, from which hung bits of grey fabric that from a distance looked like dishcloths hung up to dry. They turned out to be fluff from Mexican laundromats, which the artist had collected. They are supposed to make you think about the transitory nature of life. Or something. And the ceiling fan with loo paper stuck to it. I don't know how you negotiate to earn a living sticking loo paper to ceiling fans and hanging up gunk out of washing machines, instead of lifting several times your own body weight in compost in a day, in between trying to be unfailingly helpful and polite to people a sizeable minority of whom appear to be either deaf, terminally indecisive, or moderately dotty, but I should say that Gabriel Orozco is a sharp operator. Whether he will be remembered in four hundred years as fondly as we remember Rembrandt van Rijn is another question. I don't think so (but what do I know. They laughed at the Impressionists at the time).
I walked on to the Royal Academy. The south bank had a wistful out of season air, with few people, and the book stalls under the bridge by the national film theatre all shut up. I bought a Big Issue from a vendor on the Hungerford Bridge, not so much because I wanted a wet magazine as because nobody else was stopping. He spoke in the accents of Eastern Europe. Lettuce picking and mushroom farming can't have worked out for him. Somebody else then stopped, and asked the vendor if he had change before giving him a bank note and assuring him that it was a Scottish note but it was legal tender.
The first room of the Modern British Sculpture exhibition at the RA was really promising. There was a full scale model of the Cenotaph. I've only seen it from a distance in the middle of the road, and on the TV, and even with Charlie Gilmour swinging from it for scale I hadn't realised how big it was. And there were some photos of plaster models Epstein did for the BMA. The second room had sculptures from different civilisations in prehistoric times interposed with modern works, and was great fun. I loved the forepart of a running leopard from 350BC and the Eric Gill relief of nude girl with hair, and torso of a very flighty girl with more hair, and several other things, and began to feel warm and happy and that this was more like it. Room 3 had a monumental Epstein Adam (with enormous genitalia) and a small sly Henry Moore serpent, and something I've never seen before, which was a sign on the wall about the hessian covered bench, which was a copy of a bench at some earlier exhibition and we were invited to sit on it. In the next room we took a leap back to the nineteenth century, with queen Victoria sitting in a vast and rumpled dress under a crown-cum-canopy, looking not at all amused, and three other figures which I think I was supposed to compare and contrast. One was Lord Frederic Leighton's 1877 take on a muscular nude athlete wrestling with a python, the next a twentieth century muscular, nude and very shiny Adam, with tiny genitalia and no phallic python, who might as well have been from 1877, and the third was Genghis Khan, represented as a purple plastic teepee with bat wings. That was bit odd but I could cope. Then there were some very beautiful Chinese plain celadon and cream ceramics from between 600 and 1100, unbelievably thin and delicate and strangely modern (which I had seen before in the excellent new ceramics room at the British Museum, but they are so beautiful I could look at them any number of times). On the other side of the room were some twentieth century British pots, chunkier but some good strong plain shapes, though I'm not sure I could tell the difference between them and the pots everybody seemed to have in their houses in my village in east Devon in the 1960s (it was quite an arty village). And there was Barbara Hepworth's Pelagos, which I love. I first saw it when the Tate was only at Millbank, then it was briefly in Tate Modern and I saw it there, before moving to Tate St Ives, which is fair enough, and I saw it there, so I was very pleased it had come to London, as it's a long way to St Ives. In the next room was a large Barbara Hepworth abstract scupture, a bronze wedge with a hole near the top, which was perfect. The surface was pitted and mottled in a thousand shades of green and grey and the shape was subtle and absolutely right, the thickness of the piece varying across it like the fin of a submarine or the head of a whale, and the hole in exactly the right place. Its companion in the room was a Henry Moore reclining figure, and we were meant to contrast the abstract and figurative approaches to sculpture, but what would have been more illuminating would have been to get half a dozen of the lifeless abstract Hepworth rip-offs that get marketed as garden ornaments, and explain why the real thing was so much better.
Then it began to go downhill. There was an Anthony Caro exploration of horizontals and verticals, which was made of flat bits of metal and long bits of metal welded together and painted, which looked vaguely like the half assembled beginning of some bizarre machine tool, but it was red and very shiny. If you accidentally stepped over the demarcation line around it the attendant leapt at you anxiously. There were coloured perspex rectangles strung together, which you were allowed to walk among without a guard warning you off, and I did wonder what the conceptual difference was between them and the Mexican laundromat fluff, apart from the fact that the perpex was coloured and more interactive. Then there was the Damien Hirst abandoned barbecue and white plastic furniture in a perspex box, full of live flies. Look, I know that food goes off and that flies will breed in it given half a chance. I have a fridge and a vegetable peelings bin. There was half an apple and half a pear, stuck together and suspended from the ceiling. I've lost count of the number of times I've had to explain to people that no, their pear tree will not pollinate their apple, and no, nor will their plum tree, yes, they do need two apples. Two different apples. I'm not sure what the artist's point was there, but I think I'm ahead of him. And there was the line of white chalk stones. I think this was meant to make us think about landscapes, or remind us they exist. And the pile of bricks stacked up (inside a white line, naturally) and the row of painted metal bars lined up. I've got a pile of left-over engineering bricks stacked outside the shed, and a pile of planks waiting to be used in the decking. They Are Not Art. When I got to the perspex coffee table with 2000 maltesers in plastic bags on top and a skateboard-like construction underneath I lost all patience, if not the will to live, so I probably didn't give the last room the attention it deserved. This had a lot of page 3 models stuck up on one wall, and a lot of newspaper clippings about sculpture on the opposite wall, but I couldn't be bothered to work out what the point was, apart from the fact that art might be very subjective.
If you want to go and see these for yourself these are the details.
Gabriel Orozco at Tate Modern
Modern British Sculpture at the RA
I've got a season ticket to both galleries, and it was too wet to garden anyway, and each exhibition had a few beautiful or thought-provoking things in it, so I wouldn't say I grudged the day out, but I did have to wade through a lot of what I rather suspect was pretentious guff.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)