Week 47: Willhell Sasnel + other stuff/Whitechapel Art Gallery

Hello all and how are you this grey Monday? Don’t know why I’m asking actually as really don’t care – I’m in a shit mood and that’s all I really want to know about.
Yesterday after eating half of brick lane (AVOID the paella not only did it taste shit it made me sick) I stumbled down to the Whitechapel art gallery to see whatever show it was they had on there at present. As it turned out it was Willhell Sasnel aka the most boring painter practising today? Discuss. Rumour has it he ‘Chronicle[s] the complex experience of life today.’ Wow, must have missed that one as all I saw were some quasi-picturesque images of cats and beach front houses. Apparently his work ‘attests to the continuous spellbinding power of painting.’ Really?? Must have escaped me as for the most part I saw a room full of some of the most mundane and insipid pieces of postcard crap I have encountered in quite some time. If he is holding the baton for contemporary painting no wonder the medium is approaching death – this may just be the last nail in the coffin. They looked like something you would buy ready framed from IKEA. Try and try and try as hard as I could the picture of a cat asleep on some boxes did not comment on or chronicle the complex experiences of life today, it looked like a birthday card. I literally couldn’t think of a single interesting thing to say about this pile of boring nothingness – and I actually like painting!! I really can’t be bothered to waste any more breath on this instantly forgettable pile of nothing so instead here is a picture from this show entitled ‘Tsunami’. Deep huh!?I am almost embarrassed for him. And there is a painting, taken directly from the photo that appeared in the paper, of a beautiful woman who was implicated in the Rwandan genocide of the 90s. That’s it really; the fact that she was beautiful yet implicated in genocide was the meaning behind this. And that it was a photo in the paper. Yes. Really. Talk about lightweight. Unfortunatly for you I can’t find an image of it. But here, as a final damning example (I hope) is a painting he has made from the Seurat bathers. He quite likes the original. That’s all. After this high of interwoven insightful contemporary pondering (?) I was put in such a bad mood I had to go and sit in the café for an hour or so, to calm down, it was just such an overwhelming artistic experience I couldn’t take anymore (?). Luckily here something fab happened – I actually managed to get into a book!! It has been MONTHS since I read a new novel. According to my book list in fact (yes I have a book list and I have started dating it) the last book I read was on the 9th September!!!!!!!!????!?!? I reread a few much loved kids books in between then and now but basically I have had the most awful reading block this Autumn and I HATE not being able to read – but anyway, I started something and have finished it and will soon start the next. Tres happy.

Upstairs they had some more stuff that I really couldn’t be bothered to look at by Sasnel (the name Willhell Sasnel actually pisses me off now) but they did have a room which is being used to display the Government Art Collection in new and exciting sorts of ways which I thought was quite fun and important to see this stuff as it’s us who bloody pays for it. This show was curated by the artists Cornelia Parker. Don’t know much about her but no great surprise there. The title of the show was Richard of York Gave Battle In Vain. Because the images she chose were arranged in color theme. I thought this had some incredibly clever deep meaning to it, then I read the pamphlet:

“I made an initial selection, chosen exhaustively from over 13,500 works. Hoping for potential connections to present themselves, I found myself arranging the selected images on my computer by hue. The title of the infamous American book Primary Colours: A Novel of Politics popped into my head and I wondered what would happen if you applied a kind of colour theory to the selection. Could I curate a political spectrum using art plucked from the somewhat charged diplomatic arena?”

So, there we go, not much to say about that is there!!?

She chose some nice pictures actually. Liked the below:

Eva Weinmayr
Grayson Perry David Dawson Bedwyr Williams Jen Southam

Rudolf Helmut Sauter

Edward Ardizzone

Kitaj

All in all a pretty unimpressive week culture-wise, may try for something a little more high brow next week!?

Week 46: Two Temple Palce/William Morris: Story, Memory, Myth

Morning all. Today I am wearing very red lipstick as it’s grey and drizzly outside and I need cheering up – every little helps etc. (It’s not a Tesco lipstick, its Lancôme, although I did hear that Marks and Spencer’s makeup is made by Chanel, so there you go). Luckily the weather this weekend, as you probably know, was blazingly glorious and my lipstick wasn’t required to brighten up any cultural pursuing. Phew. I actually wasn’t quite sure if I would have time to fit in a pursuit at all this weekend as I spent most of it out of London. However, I managed to do a quick gallery search using my very useful Timeout iPhone app on the train on the way back in and came across a fabulous newly opened space which I am now uber uber excited about, namely because it was high Victoriana and FREE!! None of this bullshit £15 crap for a mediocre exhibition which would just put me into a bad mood before I even got in:

Two Temple Place, formally known as the Astor House, only opened last month and rather brilliantly is now going to be a space to show off a variety of publicly owned art from regional collections around the UK. This is very exciting for me as it is somewhat connected to aspects of my job, and here I am going to encourage you once again to look at the BBC Your Paintings website which showcases all of the oil paintings in public collections across the whole UK. (They are about to have 100,000 on there but will be more added over the next year): http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/. It’s honestly a really great site and well worth checking out, I’m not just saying that because I was involved in aspects of it!

Their first exhibition is William Morris: Story, Memory, Myth, which I will go into detail about in a minute – first we need to talk about this building. MY GOD, this place is cool. I mean cool if you like high high Victorian Gothic, which admittedly may not be to everyone’s tastes (fools) but is basically my idea of pure architectural heaven: Astor House, as it was formally known, was built by the great American tycoon William Waldorf Astor as his London offices. He was later known as Lord Astor, the granting of his peerage reputedly causing much scandal as he essentially bought it through massive amounts of right-on Victoriana philanthropy, benefitting amongst many many others something called the Women's Memorial to Queen Victoria. Bet they were a bunch of laughs. His son was the great newspaper mogul of the next generation having been gifted various publications as birthday presents over the years along with entire recreation Tudor Villages. Anyway this guy was known as the richest man in America and also the landlord of New York because he owned most of it and was also, obviously, famed for such enterprises as the Waldorf hotel. His family had made their money in fur trading but, and here I must quote the rather vague Wikipedia article re his relocation because it made me piss myself laughing;

‘In response to a family feud which developed with his aunt […] in 1891 over matters of standing in high society, Astor moved to Great Britain with his family’.

How great is that?? Matters of standing in High Society?? One can only imagine… all very Edith Wharton nay? Anyway clearly in a big old piss he spent a few years travelling round Europe working in various diplomatic and governmental roles including a few years spent in Italy where he reportedly developed his passion for art and collecting. When he eventually settled in England, buying such stately piles as Hever castle, home to Anne Boleyn, he set about building the ultimate Victorian town house and with seemingly unlimited sources of capital and enthusiasm he engaged some of the most celebrated architects and craftsman of the day. Clever old William.

He hired the celebrated Gothic Revival architect John Loughborough Pearson who was something of a star at this point (the house was completed in 1895) and also the various skills of craftsman such as the sculptors William Silver Frith, George Frampton and Nathaniel Hitch. Basically elaborate is not the word – every element of this building, interior, exterior and roof, is covered in some sort of decoration. The exterior is made of Portman stone and covered in fabulous carvings. The portico is designed by Frith and much is made of the iron statues on either side showing small cherubian like boys representing the new exciting age of telecommunications. Inside there is the most incredibly ornate mahogany staircase carved by Thomas Nicholls which depicts characters from Astors favorite novel The Three Musketeers (good choice). Around the top of the stairs is a finely carved frieze depicting eighty-two characters from Shakespeare’s Othello, Henry VIII, Anthony & Cleopatra and Macbeth. Around the hall are carved ebony statues, again by Nichols, showing favorite figures from American literature such as characters from The Last of the Mohicans, The Scarlet Letter and Rip Van Winkle. In other rooms of the house there is even more intricate carving by Frampton including panels (which were exhibited at the Royal Academy) depicting 9 heroines of the Arthurian Legends. How amazingly Victoriana is all this? This guy clearly loved pot boiler style historical literature, something the 19th century did oh so well, so he decides to have his entire house covered in his favorite characters from them – I mean there are even characters from Ivanhoe – the ultimate Victorian Historical novel! Basically this guy was the ultimate Victorian client – he wanted the whole world under one roof and he didn’t give a fuck about money, taste, period, public opinion – anything!! I LOVE him.
This incredible mishmash of historical and literary sources and architectural styles has to be the most brilliant place to stage an exhibition of William Morris. As the intro on the gallery website states: ‘The inaugural exhibition looks at how William Morris told stories through pattern and poetry. It will examine the tales that were most important to him, such as the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, Norse saga, Arthurian legend and Greek myth.’ So pretty perfect space for it then. I thought this could all be summed up well by some text at the very beginning of the show quoting Ford Madox Brown. I paraphrase massively here as can’t remember what he exactly said but it was something along the lines of Morris’s inspiration being unchanging; the things that interested him as a child continued to inspire him throughout his life, the stories and myths of childhood serving him right up to death. Which seems to be the same for Astor who’s childhood literary loves clearly stayed with him in an extremely palpable way throughout maturity and old age. Sums up a large amount of the 19th century really – it was an era of childhood nostalgia in the face of blinding modernity and very serious adult concerns. They were basically a race of overgrown teenage girls. Which is why I love them.

The first room of the show dealt mainly with Morris’s collaborative tapestry and embroidery work with Burne-Jones – my favorite Pre-Raphaelite. Yay! Together they were obsessed with the work of Chaucer, as everyone pretty much was at this time. They illustrated books of his work and there was a very fine example of Burne-Jones stained glass depicting some of the major characters. I’ve never actually read any Chaucer so can’t really comment a huge amount on this. This room also contained some beautiful but rather weird tapestries that illustrated a text both Morris and Burne-Jones found huge inspiration from called Roman de la Rose (Romance of the Rose). This was a medieval French text that was believed to have been translated by Chaucer himself which is probably how Morris and Burne-Jones became familiar with it. What immediately struck me about the work inspired by this tale was there undeniable similarities to the work Burne-Jones made around the sleeping beauty story or as he called it the Briar Rose and in fact I believe the tapestries and works in this series were often subtitled Briar Rose. Here, like in the sleeping beauty series, a tangle of suffocating rose brambles seems to encase and imprison the medieval style figures set within. It is used as an intense decorative background pattern but also communicates a sense of timelessness and imprisonment. The story is an allegory of the medieval ideals of courtly love (I think I am going to start trying this – it’s basically like an extreme version of The Rules) where some guy stumbles across a secret heavenly style garden and glimpses a bed of roses in some fountain of love and sets about to try and pick them, or conquer love, with various allegories of love and the vices helping and hindering him along the way. Various tapestries were designed and made for various country house commissions but unfortunately they seem to have faded quite a lot. The three or four on show here are still impressive in terms of the texture and density of the embroidery which gives a kind of focus-less pattern like quality to the pieces.

Above the stairs were examples of Morris’s fabric designs. This was very interesting indeed as it went into some depth about the concepts behind Morris’s decorative inventions. He believed that creating textile patterns was part of a long historical dialogue going back thousands of years. Through using the traditional motifs of flowers, plants and animals he was engaging in the historical legacy of generations of craftsman who used the same motifs to create meaning and a narrative of design which transcends the individual identity of the artist and craftsman. Morris admired cultures that had a long aural or craft tradition, passing down skills as well as stories and myths throughout the generations to create a longevity of cultural identity. If you know what I mean. He also employed symbols and motifs which had personal resonance for him such as the use of the Thames as a theme, a river he felt a great connection to both personally and professionally.

One of these story telling cultures that he so admired was the Norse tradition of aural history. He was so obsessed with one particular tale called The Story of the Sigurd the Volsung that he actually learnt how to speak Icelandic or whatever it’s called so that he could translate and illustrate the tales – now that’s impressive!! However, the exhibition also dedicated a room to his and Burne-Jones’s tile work including a lot of pieces with sleeping beauty and other children’s fairy tales as subject matter. This, the exhibition text argued, was notable as even through an age of literature and news artists such as Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites returned to childhood fairytales time and time again, to escape the somewhat terrifying march of modernity which they all rallied against so strongly. Other large and glorious tapestries were on show upstairs executed by either the Royal Society of needlework or Morris’s own design firms but the pieces I really enjoyed were the incredibly beautiful etchings by Burne-Jones for an abandoned project to illustrate Morris’s ‘great storybook’ The Earthly Paradise. This work is again perfectly in tune with the theme of the building and therefore high Victoriana in general i.e. the collation of multiple historical sources and inspirations bound together in one book. The stories were bound together by a narrative about a group of medieval wanderers who, thwarted in their search for a land of everlasting life discover instead a surviving colony of Greeks with whom they exchange stories. Thus even though many of the stories and legends in the book date from much more ancient sources the entire tale has a feel of the medieval about it. Morris and Burne-Jones wished to illustrate each tale from this and on display were a series of etchings to illustrate the Cupid and Psyche myth which although I believe were never printed clearly provided inspiration for Burne-Jones in terms of subject and composition in other, later works. Really beautiful stuff.
I could go on for another 4 pages about all the fabulous things in this show but I need to do some work today so instead I recommend you all visit this amazingly exiting new space – it’s free!!!

Week 45: this post has been taken down on account of everyone thinking I'm high

:-(

Week 44: John Martin: Apocalypse/Tate Britain

Hello all and apologies right away for my long-time absence from blog land – I can tell you’re just inconsolable about that… I have been uber busy moving house, attending weddings and in general being very very broke. Actually, the financial implications of cultural pursuing will now be discussed at length as this weekend I was expected to pay £14 to go and see an exhibition at the fucking Tate Britain - £14??????? Luckily, as the dirty hippy on the ticket desk pointed out I could pay £12.75 if I didn’t want to ‘make a donation’. I think £12.75 is quite enough of a fucking donation thank you very much, as I said to the slightly surprised looking meathead. It’s bloody disgusting is what I is, they know full well most people would be shamed into paying the full amount or wouldn’t read the small print – if they want to make a donation they bloody well can but they should leave their visitors out of it. Was most annoyed. The main problem is that after paying £12.75, let alone £14, you start to go round the exhibition thinking ‘was this worth it?’, which is not the way I want to be when going to see a show and, although I had been looking forward to it for ages and it was in general quite good it meant that I came away thinking, no, that probably wasn’t worth it. As we all know the Tate can’t hang for shit which usually I wouldn’t mind about, but after the major financial investment I made (and I really really need some new shoes for winter mind) it just didn’t deliver the goods. I think for £14 you really need to pull something pretty special out of your arse and let’s face it, with their incomparably shit lighting and bonkers heating system you never, ever will. Not impressed Tate, not impressed at all.

The show in question was John Martin: Apocalypse. And did I mention they expect you to pay £14 to get in?? Bloody criminal. I love love love John Martin, he was so of his age. For example, something I didn’t know about until I went to see this was that he was heavily involved in designing transport and SEWEGE systems for London – transport and sewage!!! Is there any greater Victorian diversion!!?? All he needed to do was build a few grave yards and maybe exploit some parlour maids and he was the personification of the age!! = He was widely derided for bowing to popular tastes, he created hysterical visions of impending doom, he mass marketed his art work and toured his paintings around the world like a spooky carnival side show and most of all he believed in the power of SIZE. This man WAS the 19th century!!! Actually I have often had cause to ponder the question of magnitude when looking at his stuff and this exhibition really solidified my belief that, frankly, size does matter. Nudge nudge wink wink.

The first room of the show deals with his early, smaller works and quite frankly they sucked. It was only when he started experimenting with apocalyptic scenes on a grand scale that his stuff really gets good. His first impressive work is Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion, now that’s a title. Hmm now it’s been quite a few days since I saw the show but I THINK this was his first painting produced specifically for the Royal Academy which is why it has this slightly unusual vertical composition and such a striking palette – the walls of the RA were green so this red painting was bound to stand out. Now, that is what I call a man with a plan – a man in control, someone who knew what he was doing. To be honest the work surrounding it just looked rubbish in comparison. This marks the beginning of a distinct trend; if they are small, or bright, they just aren’t any good. It seems to be only when he embraces darkness and doom that he is any good –if there is a subject involving the Garden of Eden, or even trees, then it’s bound to be a gut-wrenchingly horrific piece of work. See below:

Martin was someone only comfortable in the Sublime, for domestic idylls go elsewhere which, when the century progressed, the Victorians clearly did. I admire that, this was a man who understood shock and awe, he was a showman, as the popularity of his touring exhibitions demonstrate, and that is why he was initially so roundly embraced, and then so quickly dropped. If you want emotional subtlety or human insight then you better wait a few years.

Saying this the text did keep harking on about the influence of Turner and Lorraine and although his airy light works for the most part made me want to vomit he made a pretty good stab at the Lorraine light trick – god I’m so obsessed with this how did he do it how did he do it?? How did he distil light like that??? No-one else has come close but snaps to John here as he did make a pretty good attempt. Turner on the other hand always makes me want to rip out my eyes with boredom.

It’s when you move into the 2nd room of the exhibition that you really start to see why he was so popular – he was the Chicken Little of his day, when you see his work on mass the sky is literally falling in. It’s for this reason surely that he was so popular? – peoples of the 19th century were obsessed with their own oblivion right?? They had a passion for all things macabre and their infatuation with death; death of themselves, death of the past, death of history, death of morals, left them living in this constant state of fearful anticipation. The world was changing, the comfortable sameness was slipping away, no wonder they were so fucking freaked out and why images like this seem to so perfectly sum up this strange window of time, this beginning of so much and end of so much more. This FEAR of the unknown!

From this point on Martin had pretty much found his feet and we start getting the massive apocalyptic style canvases with lots of lightening and the sky falling in. Architectural elements are often included, especially in the early works, along with tiny groups of harried looking figures. It’s this balance between the monumental and the micro that defines his work from this era and if I was going to be all clever I would talk about the Romantic idea of the individual here, but I can’t be bothered and would end up sounding like an ignorant ponce and I do enough of that already frankly.

A large part of the show focussed on the print work Martin did when his large scale paintings started to wane in popularity – he was broke and needed to utilise the huge popular appeal of his images. Once again he was proving himself to be the ultimate artist of the age, producing varying prices of prints in various sizes and quality of finish. He created print versions of his most successful paintings and sometimes original art works specifically for printing but he also received the highly lucrative commission to illustrate Milton’s Paradise Lost. He was active in both mezzotint and lithograph and my god he was good. The Paradise Lost series are particularly beautiful, and really capitalises on his use of darkness and light to great effect. Once again the lighter images are markedly less successful but it was in general a real revelation.


Throughout the exhibition I kept hearing insanely loud squealing and crashing noises which were intensely annoying. Especially in the room nearest. I couldn’t work out what all the commotion was about but it turns out the Tate were ‘trying something new’ and had decided to recreate, in a trendy new context, the touring exhibitions of The Last Judgement Triptych. To quote the Tate website:

“From the time of Martin’s death in 1854 until the 1870s the pictures were continually on tour in a paying exhibition that travelled to galleries, theatres, music halls and commercial and civic spaces all over the country. They were promoted relentlessly, with special ticket offers, accompanying lectures, evening viewings by gaslight, and breathlessly excited advertising campaigns. In 1856-7 the paintings were on display in New York, and in 1878-9 they travelled as far as Australia. It was claimed that as many as eight million people had seen the pictures around the world”

For a laugh they have commissioned some trendy lighting company to recreate one of the events that promoted the touring show with gas lights and spooky music to dramatise the images. Taking it one step further in this new version they have projected things like lightning onto the canvases or highlighting certain parts in red to make them look more dramatic and scary etc – it was all very good fun actually, I approve, maybe made up for the insane entrance price and nice to see them contextualising the pieces.

That’s about all I can remember of the show although I was impressed with the little pamphlet you get on admission – usually it’s just the wall text regurgitated and a map but they had tried out something new, again, which was to show the influence of Martin on later artists, poets and film makers. Although I have to say that I don’t think all disaster movies can be said to be directly influenced by Martins work – I mean god if you’re going to visualise the end of the world or alien invasions or whatever wouldn’t you come up with similar images? I don’t think you can say that Martin defined disaster imagery forever more, but maybe he did and his images are just so deeply ingrained on my subconscious that I find it impossible to visualise hell in any other way? Anyway, good fun had by all and probably very appropriate viewing for a Halloween weekend. Stay classy xxx

Week 43: Highpoint/Barbican/Guildhall - Open House!!

I’m back – tadahhh!!!

I was quite cultured this weekend as it was the fabulous Open House London, something I almost always miss but managed to be quite organised about this time round. How popular has this got lately?? I remember a few years ago no one seemed to even know it existed but this weekend the entire city seemed to be open house crazy – you should have seen the area around the Guildhall on Sunday; there were about 20 large walking tours starting off every 30 seconds or so and literally millions of people milling round the streets was amazing and very different to the usual weekend in the city experience which is more like a ghost town. Anyway I’m very glad this has become more and more popular although it does make it harder to get into things – half of it seemed to be booked up weeks ago. And before I go any further can I just say how incredibly impressed I am by all the hundreds of people who must have given up their time to organise and carry out the tours for free. The 2 I went on were absolutely brilliant, both proper job architectural historians and stuff – amazing, so thanks to them and everyone else involved.

Anyway, to the actual cultural experiences:

My boss (who is a big architecture buff) had been organised and booked herself onto about 15 tours which she then had to cancel due to a dodgy knee playing up again (which by the way I’m pretty sure was my fault) so I managed to nab her booking on Saturday morning for Highpoint in Highgate, a building about 10 mins walk from me which I have always wanted to see inside. I was going to do lots of research about this before writing my blog but frankly I have neither time nor inclination so I’m just going to make some stuff up and elaborate a bit from Wikipedia. Ahh, I love Wikipedia. Hmm so have just had a quick look on Wikipedia and its all a bit confusing as they differentiate between Architect, Structural Designer and Construction but I’m going for: ‘this building was designed by the Russian born architect Lubetkin’ who was, clearly, influenced by the great god Corbusier.

Highpoint was originally designed to be social housing for the white collar workers of the industrialist (I think) Sigmund Gestetner. By the time it was finished though as per usual these lot had been totally forgotten and it went to the great and the glitterati as always. Built in the mid 30s it is one of the finest examples of the International style – I think, is that true? I don’t know – I’m not totally sure of the difference between Modernism and the International Style. I do know that it’s definitely not Deco. The poor tour guide had to spend about 10 minutes explaining how Modernism really really wasn’t Deco to this bat shit stupid art student who was on the tour. She was very very good, very patient but eventually this idiot Hoxton twat obviously just wouldn’t get it and the poor women concluded with ‘I think Lubetkin would turn in his grave to hear you say this building had Deco influences’. Hahahahaha. Anyway, she was amazing, lived in the building and was dressed in full on ‘I’m an architect don’t you bloody know so fuck off’ costume of long shapeless black silk sack dress, black boots, architect glasses and abundant architect red hair stuffed into very architect black hat. She was fucking fabulous and v knowledgeable. Anyway, it really is a truly incredibly building and we got to look round 2 of the flats!!!! It’s so fun to be able to look round all these rich arty peoples houses. One a 2 bed and one a three bed and my god those places are nice –the 2 bed had a lot of the original features such as the gorgeous gorgeous concertina windows which stretch across the whole main room of all the flats and can be opened all the way across. They also had the original bathroom and kitchen fittings which is really important as obviously being Modernist these elements were designed as thoroughly as any other part of the building and are all fabulous. The 3 bedroom one we looked around didn’t have original features although they had recreated a lot including things like the original door handles and cork flooring but my god those people must have been RICH. They had commissioned a bookcase to be a cross section of the building for example – so yeah they had a fair amount of artistic clash floating round clearly. I have actually managed to find a picture of the bookshelf although looks like they have redesigned the flat since this was taken!! We also got to look at the beautiful gardens and most stunningly I think the lobby/foyer which must be the ultimate Modernist space, so so startlingly, arrestingly beautiful:

They talked a lot about the journey through the building and how much that was focussed on as part of the architectural design. I think I may start applying this to my day to day life.

We also had a quick look in the foyer of Highpoint 2 which is next door to Highpoint 1 and build a few years later. This is a much more luxurious space apparently and the flats are all duplex with lifts leading up directly into each like you’re always in Pretty Woman – amazing!! But it wasn’t nearly nearly as nice as the foyer for Highpoint 1 even though it’s much plusher. It’s funny how all my Open House visits seemed to revolve around class and social housing, maybe that’s an element always present in architectural design. I guess my weekend was a tour of different forms of middle class architecture for different purposes though.

I got so chilly on that bloody hill garden on Saturday morning that I ran home and got straight into bed (where I essentially stayed until going to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy that evening which by the way was beautifully shot, acted, written, made etc but was unbelievably boring – may be worth just reading the book I suspect) but I did make it out again on Sunday afternoon where I ran to the Guildhall and managed to pick up a ticket to a walking tour around the Barbican Estate. Yay me. I will go into the Barbican first. Our guide was a lovely architectural historian who lived there, lucky bugger. This time we didn’t get to go into any of the flats but we did get into some of the private garden/square things which was great and its always nice to walk round that part of London on a sunny autumnal afternoon looking at all the lovely angles and vistas created by the skyscrapers (well London’s version of skyscrapers). He didn’t dumb it down at all which was great and used lots of fancy architectural terms which I either didn’t know or had a vague memory of once knowing and then forgetting. I didnt realise that it was never intended to be council housing but rather affordable housing for a mix of social classes. He also made some really interesting points about the intentions and vision of Brutalism, something I have always rather detested, hence my lack of enthusiasm for the Barbican in the past. For example, although concrete is the name of the game the architects had always envisioned the space to be mitigated by the people living there. For example they wanted people to use their balconies to grow plants and flowers, thus ‘softening’ and domesticating the harsh sharp lines of concrete. I still think it looks like a multi-storey car park with or without the pot plants though, and not in a good way and I think it says A LOT that this building was created to be inward looking – the outside seeming impenetrable and uninviting.



It was fun looking round the tree filled squares which can only be accessed by residents – the guide went into some detail about how the architects had created these spaces to evoke the private squares of West London, which I think again says a lot. He also went into some depth about the socialist intentions of communal living and a multi-use urban space. This was very appropriate considering my tour of Highpoint the day before which was also infused with the socialist utopian ideas of the early part of the 20th century.

Last and by no means least; The Guildhall, although I was busy trying to track down my sister and get to my Barbican tour quickly so only got to run through and didn’t really find out anything about the actual building or design. It was great to have a look round though – it felt a bit like I was in Moria from the Lord of the Rings in some kind of endless complex of grand underground halls from various periods – seemingly never ending and for god knows what function. Anyway there was some fab glass work, painting and other stuff and it will be number one on my list for next year!! Sorry not much in-depth analysis and insight in this weeks blog oh well but hey 25 mins to write all the above not bad huh? HUH!!?!?

Week 42: Lautrec, Altarpieces and More - Courtauld and National Gallery

Hello all and welcome back to my blog which I missed last week on account of not being arsed to do anything cultural – oops. This week I did quite a number of culturally related activities, however they all took place yesterday and I was rather hungover and out of it and to be honest didn’t quite catch the crest of any of the exhibition waves at any point alas. My cultural companion this week was the delightful Andrew, who I fear I have to apologies to for my slightly out of it countenance!

We started back in my old student stomping ground of the Courtauld Institute which, somewhat scarily I don’t think I’ve entered for about 6 years. It’s such a shame it always looks such a mess these days – all winter it’s the hideously tacky headache of the naff ice rink and in the summer it seems to be either a film venue, a gig venue, or a fashion week venue and the rest of the time given over to corporate hospitality. Is there any point ever that you’re actually able to hang round in the beautiful be-fountained courtyard as in days of old??

The show, which closes next weekend, was Toulouse Lautrec and Jane Avril – Beyond the Moulin Rouge. I am very fond of Toulouse Lautrec and have been for many years, not to be too enormous a teenage girl stereotype but I actually did my A-Level art coursework on his Japanese influences – ahhh! I suppose since those days I have slightly abandoned him, when you come up against Manet and Degas I guess he does get rather cast in the shade but actually this exhibition, small as it was, totally re-awoke my love of him, he really was very good. As well as the famous one in the Courtauld the show had an impressive array of loans from across the UK and the states in a variety of mediums as you know it’s not all poster poster poster with old Toulouse I hear.
The standalone star of the show was definitely the large and incredibly rich oil painting At the Moulin Rouge which I have seen in reproduction but never in the flesh where it is a totally different and jaw dropping experience. When you think of Lautrec, or I suppose when I think of him, one naturally thinks of his strong graphic poster style or his sketchy textured painting style. This piece however was very highly worked with a decidedly choreographed composition (ok well clearly most compositions are well choreographed but you get what I mean!) and was somehow more surprising to me than the other works in the show. It has an incredible seedy air to it; the viewer is drawn towards the conspiratorial group in the centre yet at the same time repelled, turned away at the door perhaps by the sickly and haunting looking woman in the foreground. You’re not quite sure if she is accosting you or turning you out, probably because you are in no way going to be cool enough to hang round with the crème de la crème of avant garde Paris sitting in the centre. The central group, like the majority of the figures in the painting, are portraits of people who frequented or worked at the Moulin Rouge, I could list them but I can’t be arsed. They look engrossed yet somehow disjointed from each other, tightly knit in the same social circle yet you get the impression that each of the protagonists is in someway separate, caught up in their individual cares and concerns. In this group Avril has her back to us, showing us her elaborate coiffure, her high neck richly trimmed coat, and not much else. It seems to be the way Lautrec preferred to depict his favourite model; detached, unapproachable and unknown.


Lautrecs single depictions of Avril seems to continue this theme. Nowhere does she ever seem to be smiling; rather she is always distant and seemingly in her own world.


The only time she doesn’t have this far away look in her eyes is when she is depicted dancing. However, even here she has an unnerving look about her. I didn’t really know much about her before the exhibition and assumed she was just the bog standard high kicking eye brow raising Moulin Rouge style dancer of the day but I was apparently wrong. Avrils fame, which was certainly bolstered by Lautrec yet at the same time independent of him, was linked to her notorious past where she was, for a time, put in a sanatorium style place because of a nervous breakdown or something. The popular press of the day loved to associate her jerky, dangerous dancing style with that of the hysterical woman, a theme close to the heart of the 19th century. This was a reputation which Avril, consciously or subconsciously, allowed to flourish and I can imagine it was the dangerous nature of her dance and her personality that attracted the avant garde of Paris at the time. The underground, unknown and seedy nature of the Moulin Rouge and its famous clientele is where the attraction lay no doubt, the thin line between the elite and the degenerate walked on a daily basis. Lautrecs own illness, mental and physical, was perhaps what attracted him so much to this particular woman. This is well represented in the below work.

One of the few works on display not depicting Avril was this work of the dancer La Goulue. One of the more risqué performers she was famed for wearing highly controversial see-through dresses for her dances. Here she is depicted in one such plunging outfit standing between her sister and her lover. She is grotesque and looks like one of the ugly sisters in Disney’s Cinderella. She stares at the viewer in a direct and slightly terrifying way. It seems this mix of the exotic, the repulsive, and the sexually deviant is what enticed the crowds of late 19th century Paris.

After we had done with the Courtauld we wondered up to the National Gallery to see the show Devotion by Design; Italian altarpieces before 1500. I didn’t expect an awful lot from this as it’s just a reorganisation of pieces already in the collection and we assumed it would be in one of the small rooms they use to show free exhibitions in the main section of the gallery near the central foyer place. However, they had actually spent some cash on it and it was situated in the main exhibition space in the basement of the Sainsbury wing. I imagine I have moaned about this place before as it really is one of the worst exhibition spaces in London, which says a lot as my god there are some awful spaces in the main museums, I name the British Museum and the V&A as top offenders. However, like the Relics show currently on at the BM, the curators had embraced the dark claustrophobic gloom of the space and used it to their advantage – low lighting, purple walls and choral music helped create a really quite immersive experience. The central room was particularly fine with those clever pretend spluttering candles and a cross arranged in front of one altarpiece and the room around it arranged to resemble a haunting church to give the viewer a different experience to the usual National Gallery renaissance displays. The show went into some detail about the commercial nature of altarpiece production as well as the techniques and processes involved but to be honest by that point I had reached my information absorption limit and instead I just enjoyed looking at some familiar pieces afresh in a new context.
We also had a very quick look around another free show there called Forests, Rocks and Torrents; Norwegian and Swiss Landscapes from the Lunde collections. I’m assuming said Lunde collection, wherever that may be, are having some sort of refit or flooding problem and asked the NG to take some of their crap off their hands for a bit so it doesn’t get damp or something because my god this show was pointlessly dull. I thought maybe they would be some Romantic landscapes, and you know I like a bit of the sublime as much as the next person, but there was decidedly no sublime here, no sublime at all:


Cheerio folks xx