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So I catch a tube, walk 500 metres and end up in the Cafe Nerd about 200 metres from Victoria. Smart. I'd decided I'd need a coffee (and to finish reading the book) before going to the Tate, and I've not found a coffee place convenient for Pimlico yet, so I thought I'd reverse the usual route, go to St James's, do Oxfam and then Tate Britain. Except it looks quicker to do it straight from Victoria. Useful.
Oxfam yielded a haul of three more Shakespeares, and I'm wondering if I do have Henry V. I suspect so.
The downside is that Turner and the Masters was packed. The point of the exhibition is to relate Turner's output to both earlier painters - Rembrandt, Titian and so forth - and his contemporaries and competitors. Presumably the catalogue would suggest whether he was doing this to show off or to make money - you wanna Rembrandt, I can paint you one... There are peculiar things like stealing other painter's ideas for the RA Summer Exhibition, or adding a red buoy to a painting to make Constable look over the top. On the other hand, to my taste, the originals all looked better. Impressive quasi-classical landscapes, but still not doing it for me. Some of the later ones, where he begins to blur the painting and becomes more abstract work better for me.
Then I went to the Turner 2009 Exhibition - installations by Lucy Skaer (a chair, a picture of a whale, a half hidden whale skeleton), Richard Wright (a gold leaf paisley pattern, to be painted over after the exhibition), Enrico David (distorted humans with balloon-shaped heads or long arms, Lamentables would hate it) and Richard Hjorns (a powdered aeroplane, shaped plastic and squished brain). Wright won, but I preferred David.
There were a couple of Artist Rooms - a boat by Ian Hamilton Finlay and a Gilbert and George set. The latter came with a warning that the pictures had sexual content - I wonder what the policy is on this? They clearly don't warn about every nude - perhaps just gay ones?
There's a rehang of room 9, which is now devoted to the Sublime. There's some really good stuff in there, but badly lit. Some canvases are almost black, so aren't visible under a sheen of daylight at the wrong angle. I could have done without the Pre-Raphs, but good to see at least one Joseph Wright of Derby.
The Victoria line was curiously quite, but that softened me up for tubes into and out of the West End, where I picked up a few Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and Imagination volumes - May Sinclair, Richard Marsh, Amelia B. Edwards and H.D. Everett. It's agood list, and I hope to pick up volumes which Oxford WC don't cover. The tube south was hellish - and I considered going down to Kennington to come back up, but the District (the Circle wasn't even a spiral) Line was thankfully deserted. Good timing - a coffee and back to base.
Oxfam yielded a haul of three more Shakespeares, and I'm wondering if I do have Henry V. I suspect so.
The downside is that Turner and the Masters was packed. The point of the exhibition is to relate Turner's output to both earlier painters - Rembrandt, Titian and so forth - and his contemporaries and competitors. Presumably the catalogue would suggest whether he was doing this to show off or to make money - you wanna Rembrandt, I can paint you one... There are peculiar things like stealing other painter's ideas for the RA Summer Exhibition, or adding a red buoy to a painting to make Constable look over the top. On the other hand, to my taste, the originals all looked better. Impressive quasi-classical landscapes, but still not doing it for me. Some of the later ones, where he begins to blur the painting and becomes more abstract work better for me.
Then I went to the Turner 2009 Exhibition - installations by Lucy Skaer (a chair, a picture of a whale, a half hidden whale skeleton), Richard Wright (a gold leaf paisley pattern, to be painted over after the exhibition), Enrico David (distorted humans with balloon-shaped heads or long arms, Lamentables would hate it) and Richard Hjorns (a powdered aeroplane, shaped plastic and squished brain). Wright won, but I preferred David.
There were a couple of Artist Rooms - a boat by Ian Hamilton Finlay and a Gilbert and George set. The latter came with a warning that the pictures had sexual content - I wonder what the policy is on this? They clearly don't warn about every nude - perhaps just gay ones?
There's a rehang of room 9, which is now devoted to the Sublime. There's some really good stuff in there, but badly lit. Some canvases are almost black, so aren't visible under a sheen of daylight at the wrong angle. I could have done without the Pre-Raphs, but good to see at least one Joseph Wright of Derby.
The Victoria line was curiously quite, but that softened me up for tubes into and out of the West End, where I picked up a few Wordsworth Tales of Mystery and Imagination volumes - May Sinclair, Richard Marsh, Amelia B. Edwards and H.D. Everett. It's agood list, and I hope to pick up volumes which Oxford WC don't cover. The tube south was hellish - and I considered going down to Kennington to come back up, but the District (the Circle wasn't even a spiral) Line was thankfully deserted. Good timing - a coffee and back to base.
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