16 - 25 August, 2014
Art galleries got a look in.
First was the Hayward Gallery at the Southbank Centre, to see the
gallery as much as anything. Which was just as well. “The Human
Factor surveys how artists over the past 25 years have reinvented
figurative sculpture.” What a load of rubbish it was. One exception
to my overall verdict was the impressive Ecce Homo, the first
sculpture to stand on the empty fourth plinth at Trafalgar Square.
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| Hayward Gallery |
Imagine my surprise at
seeing a cobalt blue rooster on the fourth plinth during this visit!
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| Blue rooster, Trafalgar Square |
The nearby skaters’ haunt
is apparently under threat. I hope it’s not lost to skaters. It’s
hard to see what else could be done with the space.
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| Skaters' haunt |
Next was the National
Portrait Gallery for a Virginia Woolf exhibition. This included some
very interesting material but, oh dear, too much crammed into too
small a space.
Elsewhere in the gallery was the current crop of BP
Portrait Prize finalists. This is the second time I’ve seen a
Portrait Prize show and again I was most impressed, far better than
Australia’s Archibalds which seem always to consist of people in a
smallish clique all painting each other. In the BP prize there was a
small number of artists who had painted members of their family, but
by and large the subjects had little or no connection to each other.
In fact, the winner was a portrait of a street person.
I also came
across a portrait of my daughter-in-law’s namesake, Emmeline
Pankhurst, in a display put together to commemorate the suffragette
movement.
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| Emmeline Pankhurst - leading suffragette |
Third was Tate Modern where
I thoroughly enjoyed an exhibition of Matisse’s cut-outs, a third
event that The Tablet alerted me to. Simple but effective.
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| Matisse Cut-Outs - at Tate Modern |
I had a quick squizz around
the rest of the gallery, very little of which I’d give tuppence
for. But there was a small collection of Russian propaganda posters
that caught my eye.
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| Propaganda, Russian style |
Because it was there (and
free!!), en route to my second ill-fated attempt to see the Chelsea
Physic garden, I popped into the Saatchi Gallery. Even less to my
taste than Tate Modern! On leaving, I asked for directions. The young
woman was (I’m guessing) Polish, but by way of Chicago, or so it
seemed. Like Chicagoans when I was there in 2011, it was as though
the words “Sorry, I don’t know” were forbidden to pass her
lips. She only sent me 180 degrees in the wrong direction!
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| This is art - Saatchi style |
