Hello!! Annoyingly despite the lateness of this blog I did in fact get this weeks cultural pursuit done well within time, I just didn’t have time to then actually write about it as buggered off on holiday soon after (following weeks holiday blog to follow!). However, as coincidence would have it I don’t have an awful lot to say about this weeks pursuit anyway. I managed to squeeze in to the last Friday opening of the Masterpieces of the Uffizi: Italian Renaissance Drawings exhibition at the British Museum, for the princely sum of £12, and although I guess I am glad I went I wouldn’t be over enthusiastic with my recommendations to others, which is lucky considering the show is now over. For one thing it was SO packed that it was basically impossible to see the pictures and in general not a fun viewing experience. If you go to a show of, lets say Banksy, it doesn’t really matter if the place is crowded as frankly you can have one glance over peoples heads and you’re done. However, a show like this, where everything is on tiny scraps of half faded paper, you really need to stand close and have a good old view and that just wasn’t possible half the time. The British Museum, being the British Museum and stuck with a god awful exhibition space, organised the whole thing round a sort of spiral going inwards, so everyone was literally queuing along the walls to be able to shuffle past each piece. It was vile and not something I am prepared to do, especially when I just don’t care all that much. Cut to me running over every part of the exhibition in random order just trying to duck in where I saw a free space. This was fine but meant I didn’t really have the appropriate and intended viewing experience and lost the chronological development, which I assume was one of the curatorial schemes. This wasn’t the end of the world but a frantic hopping approach isn’t really ideal in any gallery and certainly didn’t work here. Also that exhibition space is just so awful it kills almost any exhibition I have been to see there. I just don’t understand why they have raped the old reading room like that, previously one of the most beautiful indoor spaces in the whole of London. I use to go there when I was at uni, especially in the first year when I lived close by, and was able to sit there and do work. Admittedly most of the time was spent frowning at the stupid tourists who would come in to make too much noise but all in all it was fabulous – and frankly a good opportunity to feel superior to other people, especially tourists, who clearly weren’t privileged enough to use such a high brow space. I mean for gods sake Marx use to work there!! Now however they have turned it into an exhibition space which means you can’t see the fabulous room at all and instead are forced to go to an impossible to curate dungeon-like place where you spend the whole time walking round in circles, feeling claustrophobic, not knowing where you are going, missing things and in general feeling like this would be much better in a SQUARE room. I understand space is always an issue but if that’s the reason then I’m sure they could find another room somewhere which is currently full of old pots no one cares about or something. Or that STUPID thing in the back entrance way which has now been there for over 9 years and is just some crap bit of community artwork made out of pills and wool and some shit and has absolutely no conceivable reason for being there. You could have got the whole exhibition in that space, saved the reading room for what it should be, and binned that mangy piece of crap that has no relation to anything and is always ignored,. Why is it there???
Anyway back to the exhibition; I don’t know much about the Renaissance other than the obvious stuff I learnt in A-level History (yeah thanks for that 3 years of art history degree). But I always like a nice bit of drawing, as most people do, and this stuff was damn old. Stuff that stood out for me, a week and a half later, were the Head of a Woman by Verrocchio, which as you can see is really rather lovely:
Also this landscape by da Vinci from 1473 which according to the label is the first landscape in Western Art, which I think you will agree is pretty exciting – although debateable surely??
Da Vinci in general had a good show, particularly interesting was the drawing he did for a tank, which frankly wouldn’t have worked at all:
They split the exhibition geographically, going around via Florence, Rome, Venice etc to show the different artistic developments in different parts of Italy and this worked quite well I felt, especially with the above which was an attempt by Leonardo to impress the Milanese court, who were v v military minded.
Other highlights were the Cartoon for St George by Michelangelo from 1504-ish, which is rather good:
There were several other very beautiful images but I don’t know what any of them were and frankly haven’t got time to do the research, so this is a particularly useless blog, but I hope you enjoy the images I HAVE managed to find!! One thing I will say though is that this exhibition was meant to be the triumphant once in a lifetime unification of the collections of the Uffizi and the BM – but frankly most of the drawings that I particularly liked were in the BM anyway, and typically those were the only ones that they had postcards for, a major part of any gallery trip in my world. Berlin blog to follow x
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