art in the east end

I went yesterday to the Whitechapel Art Gallery, in yet another case of catching something I wanted to see which was going to end soon.  If I made New Year’s resolutions then my one for 2012 ought to have been to get more organised.  I’d promised my uncle that I’d go to my aunt’s lunchtime recital, so I went to Whitechapel via Wesley’s chapel.  The concert started with a piece for cello and piano by a contemporary of Brahms called Albert Dietrich, who used to be famous in his day but has sunk almost without trace.  Unfortunately the concert organiser had omitted to copy the copious notes my uncle had prepared, so the audience left no wiser about Dietrich than they were at the beginning, apart from having heard his Sonata in C major.  Then there was some Faure.  My aunt did not think the Dietrich went so well as it had at the run-through, and my uncle was preoccupied because my aunt was unhappy, and cross that his programme notes had got lost, so the effort I'd made to travel up to town went largely unappreciated by my relations.

I knew that bits of the East End were now very trendy, with prices to match (a far cry from the days when my grandfather grew up there), but I hadn’t seen it for myself, until cutting through from Wesley’s chapel to Whitechapel High Street via the Commercial Road.  Blimey, there are some posh shops and eateries round the back of Spitalfields.  The trendy bits seem to pop up among the unreconstructed areas like currants in a bun, so one minute I was walking past uber-cool clothes shops and delis, and the next minute back in the Tower Hamlets that is the most derived borough in the country.

The Whitechapel Gallery is a lovely art gallery.  I’ve said so before.  It is a very nice, quiet, soothing space.  I feel good just being in the building.  It has the best art gallery café I know.  Lemon polenta cake yesterday, yummy (I love the slight grittiness).  The main draw for me was the third selection of works from the Government Art Collection (I missed part two), this time chosen by Simon Schama.  The Government has managed to acquire an eclectic set of art, and the current offering has everything from a neon installation to a portrait of Admiral Nelson after his victory at the battle of the Nile.  My favourite thing in the room was probably Grayson Perry’s Map of an Englishman.  Drawn in the style of a Tudor map, from a distance it looks just like the real thing, showing an island with estuaries, mountains, and trees.  There are pictures of little buildings and towns, and the whole thing looks very English, until you read the captions and find that the regions are called Normal, Myth, Posh and Guru, the seas off the coast called Paranoia, Anorexia Nervosa, and Schizophrenia, and the names of the buildings and towns are all states of mind or human behaviours.  It was funny and clever and I’d have liked to buy the poster, but there weren’t any.  Goodness knows if it’s Art, but who cares?

The Government Art Collection exhibition (which only takes up one room, it’s not big) comes with a chunky free booklet, telling you something about Simon Schama’s thought-processes in making his selection, and a bit about each individual work, including where each one is normally hung, a detail that gives an extra layer of interest to the show.  In the Cabinet Office they go in for modern, conceptual pieces (though they do also have Lord Nelson).  A Howard Hodgkin oil painting titled Mud on the Nile normally lives in our ambassador’s residence in Cairo, while the Government Office for the East of England in Cambridge has to make do with a giant colour photograph of allotments in Ely.  It’s great fun. You have until 26 February to see it, then twelve works from number 10 Downing Street, selected by number 10 staff, go on show from 9 March.

The other thing I particularly wanted to catch was a meta-exhibition, a show about a show the Whitechapel did in 1961 of Rothko’s work.  I went to the Rothko exhibition at the Tate a while back and loved it.  I went twice, and if only I’d still been working in the City I’d have gone every week.  Nothing much seems to be happening in those huge canvases, and yet everything is happening.  I could look at them for hours.  There is just one smallish Rothko at the current Whitechapel show, a red and black one, plus photographs of visitors to the original 1961 exhibition, looking grave and absorbed and wearing amazing 1960s hairstyles and spectacles.  There are letters between Rothko and various UK artists and gallery directors discussing the arrangements for that show, a visit Rothko made to the UK, the Tate’s first purchase of a Rothko, and his subsequent gift to them of the Seagram murals.  Rothko was very particular about how his paintings should be hung, at what height from the floor, against what shade of white paint, and how they should be lit, suffuse moderately bright ambient light please and definitely no spot lights.  He rejected the claim by one friend and admirer that his great canvases were like great calm windows in a cathedral, saying that on the contrary they were full of rage and turmoil.  Three months after making his gift to the Tate he killed himself.

There were some other things on as well, but by then I was very tired and not in the mood, so I gave up.  I was able to go straight home instead of hanging around London for another hour and three quarters, because the new railway company on the Colchester line is so far following the example of their predecessor, and lifting the evening restrictions on cheap day travel for half term week.  A friend discovered this wrinkle in the ticketing system a couple of years ago, and it makes a huge difference.  My train home was not full when it left Liverpool Street, and while I see that season ticket holders who have to make the journey every day should get priority for seats during the rush hour, I wish the train company would take a less sweeping view of when the rush hour is.  Normally I can’t get any train home between 4.15pm and 6.44pm.  A quarter past four is too early.  It really limits how much the day-tripper can fit into their trip to town, and most office workers don’t leave their desks for at least another three quarters of an hour after that.  The alternative of hanging around London until quarter to seven can be utterly dismal.  Fine on a sunny summer’s day, when you can sit outside with a book, OK if you are with somebody, miserable on a chilly day in February when you are tired and at the tail end of a cold.

last chance to see

Once again I have managed to leave it until the eleventh hour before going to see various exhibitions which I've wanted to visit since learning that they were going to be on.  I put this down to lack of organisation, plus being busy doing other stuff, plus having a cold which meant that for several weeks I didn't have the energy to drag myself as far as London.  The bad news is that any of you who make it to the end of the blog and think you'd like to see any of these exhibitions doesn't have very long to do it.

First off was the Whitechapel Gallery.  I only went there for the first time last year, to my shame, because it is a lovely gallery.  It is no more than a ten to fifteen minute walk from Liverpool Street Station, down Middlesex Street and up Whitechapel High Street (which is mostly being demolished at the moment so it is quite difficult to find a street name sign to reassure you that you have got the right road).  Or for those who don't fancy a quarter of an hour walk through the East End, there is an entrance to Aldgate East tube station right next door to the gallery.

Whitechapel Gallery is based in what was originally the Passmore Edwards library, converted in 1901 to a gallery 'to bring great art to the people of the East End of London'.  It's a fair bet that my grandfather would have known it, being brought up in Whitechapel and dedicated to self-improvement through education.  It occupies an Arts and Crafts building by Charles Harrison Townsend, with some later additions, and the whole thing adds up to a nice, light, airy network of exhibition spaces plus the obligatory cafe and bookshop.

Current exhibitions I wanted to see were, firstly, selections from the Government Art Collection, subtitled At Work, which finishes on 4 September.  Seven people who have all worked with art from the government collection in one capacity or another have picked some favourites, or at least pieces they thought the rest of us should see.  This is interesting on several levels.  It means we can look at paintings and artworks that are normally tucked away inside UK embassies around the world, or Number 10 Downing Street, or other places where you and I are unlikely to encounter them.  It is interesting to discover what the government has been spending taxpayers' money on.  And it is fascinating to see who chooses what.  You get a booklet with this exhibition, and the various curators say how the artworks provided a talking point at times of stress during difficult negotiations and eased international diplomacy on its way, but we'll have to take their word for that (I always find magazine adverts rather risible that promise that the solar powered musical frog fountain or whatever it is will 'provide a talking point'.  When I used to work in offices with artworks I found the main use of the art was to provide something else to think about during really boring meetings.  Anyway).

The Government has been collecting quite a wide range of stuff on our behalf.  Some you would expect, such as paintings of crowned heads of Europe through the centuries, but in the show there is also, for example, a Bridget Riley (chosen by the Chief of the Intelligence Service) and a Lowry (chosen by Samantha Cameron).  What, if anything, does it tell us about Nick Clegg that one of his choices is an enigmatic early 1970s acrylic of a thermos flask on a rug in an ambiguous empty landscape?  Amother of his choices is a photograph of Lucien Freud painting the Queen, which left me wondering why she has her handbag with her, when Freud is only painting her head?  It can't be that she needs it to keep her keys, purse and mobile phone.  Hankie, maybe, or habit.  Lord Boateng chose, among others, a lively Edward Burra drawing of people in a New York jazz club from the late 1920s, which I really liked.  The good news is that, if you like the idea of Government Art but don't have time to get to this selection, there will be further exhibitions over the next year.

Next up was a collection of black and white photographs of people and scenes around the East End, from an exhibition originally staged in 1972.  If you are interested in London, and people, this is a fascinating slice of recent history.  Again, it shuts on 4 September.  On until 16 September is a career retrospective of a German photographer called Thomas Struth.  I had never heard of him until this show came along, despite the fact that his career to date spans over thirty years.  The first thing that strikes you about his pictures is that they are very, very large.  Apparently they are printed directly on to perspex: I have no idea how difficult that is to do.  Once you get over the shock of them being so large, you realise they are interesting irrespective of scale (or at least I thought so).  Downstairs are landscapes, pictures of people looking at art, and gigantic or complex industrial objects.  Upstairs are family groups from many parts of the world, photographed in their homes.  Struth left it to them to decide where in their house or garden to be pictured, and how to arrange themselves, with the one proviso that they must look at the camera.  He was struck by the similarities in families from different continents and cultures.  That is interesting, as is the way that in large groups people indicate extra degrees of closeness by touching certain family members, and the fact that so many of them close their bodies off with folded arms or legs, even as they look at the camera.  Then there are really giant photos of lush vegetation from around the world.  Also large coloured cityscapes, and smaller black and white city shots from the early seventies, the latter with virtually no people in them.  It is all strange, and interesting, and sticks in your mind (or at least mine).

The Struth exhibition costs £8.50 to go in, and was not very busy when I was there.  The others are free and were more crowded, though not unpleasantly so.  There is a very nice cafe, only accessible via the Struth exhibition for some reason.  It has a mirror along one side with a quite good shaggy dog story etched on it about Stephen Speilberg and Stanley Kubrick, and serves good cake (lemon polenta today, chocolate muffin the last time I was there, yummy), and has natural light and attractive bent plywood chairs.  There is a very good bookshop, assuming you are in the market for art books, which I wasn't, but it is the sort of independent bookshop that deserves to exist.  Its postcards were the cheapest of the three galleries I visited (50p).

And the other two galleries will have to wait until tomorrow, because it's getting late and I'm tired and want something to eat.