Tate Modern Free Galleries
I took a trip round the galleries of Tate Modern last week to see what new works were on display, or what old ones had been moved to a new place – here are a few examples of both:
Modigliani, his lover Jeanne Hebuterne
Not really any problem of identification here – but great painting, I’m sure you will agree.
Mary Martin – bit of a contrast to the Modigliani; but I love the colour and a handy little shelf for toothpaste or razor if you chose to hang it in the bathroom….
William Gear
Hope I’ve got this up the right way – I think I have. I like the jaggedness of the images; looks like a tangle of tumbling bodies; fall of angels maybe? I didn’t get the title…
Karel Appel
This is an old one in a new place – it used to be in the old Surrealism room. for some reason. The colours don’t seem to me to be typical Appel; more like his old CoBrA colleague Constant (one of whose works is next to this one).
Jackson Pollock
I remember seeing this in the Pollock exhibition at Tate Liverpool a few years ago; it’s quite late Pollock, I think, with representation creeping back. I probably said then that I can see a chameleon hiding, not very well, in the trees…
Helen Frankenthaler
There is a Frankenthaler room at the moment, six or seven pictures; a couple of examples below, the first one with her characteristic staining process, the second much later, from the 80s, I believe.
Dora Maar
This is a huge exhibition, surprising number of rooms unfolding before you with Maar’s many and varied works, organised into subject sections: street photography from London, Paris and Barcelona; Surrealism; World War 2; Picasso’s influence (some of P’s paintings, notably the weeping woman’s head) as well as a few of Maar’s own paintings; some abstract photos; camera-less photos – and so on.
To be candid, it does appear that everything she ever produced has been excavated from the studio, museums, collections and the garden shed, framed tastefully and displayed here. And, to be fair, a lot of this is brilliant – for example, the pictures below and the street stuff. In fact, it’s a little strange to be complaining about there being too much in an exhibition; you don’t have to look at all of it (but of course you do, if you’re a completist like me – can’t break away until you’ve walked past them all and then gone back through to the way in).
Another one of my fantastic female backs – see also Ginger Rogers in Swing Time, Kitaj’s Marynka Smoking.
..and another great back – although the star head sort of distracts the eye. My carping shouldn’t put the prospective visitor off; it’s well worth one visit, or two, if you’ve got Tate membership and don’t have to shell out every time.
The cover of my Penguin Modern Classics copy of Forster’s novel. The painting is Interior, by Edward Le Bas, and it’s in the collection of Tate Britain. Looks a bit Scottish Colourist to me…
As for the book, I found it irritatingly flowery, with little facetious homilies to the reader (reminded me of George Eliot in that respect, especially Silas Marner); and there’s that odd thing that Forster shares with Virginia Woolf, of killing off characters suddenly and rather perfunctorily. I’d remembered that Bast died when a bookcase fell on him – but not that it was precipitated by Charles Wilcox’s sword attack. I should have written “spoiler alert”, of course, but I wanted to avoid cliche.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
It’s good to have Larry David, Houellebecq’s American soul brother, back. Pity that the sonorous Funkhouser (Bob Einstein) has passed on. A public safety function in the first episode too, warning of the dangers of talcum powder.
Blackpaint pictures to finish:
Adrian with big legs
Imogen with long leg
Blackpaint
8.02.20
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