Janie and I had a super day at the Tate Modern, primarily for the members’ preview of the Pierre Bonnard exhibition.
It runs until 6 May 2019, so you have plenty of time to get to see this exhibition if you are looking at this article reasonably fresh. And in our opinion it really is well worth seeing. Comprehensive coverage of the work of this wonderful artist from the first half of the 20th century.
They let you take pictures at the Tate Modern these days and Janie most certainly went for it:
The painter of happiness, he was known as. We weren’t quite so sure about Pierre Bonnard’s personal life, which seemed to get complicated (to say the least) at times and resulted in the suicide of one of his mistresses – not so much happiness there – it might have been a better deal to be his dog:
But if you ignored artists of his generation because of doubts regarding their personal lives, you wouldn’t see much 19th or even 20th century art.
Here is a lovely little video about the exhibition:
If that video doesn’t make you want to see the exhibition…it’s not an exhibition for you!
We spent longer in that exhibition than normal, because it was so good, so we decided to get some refreshment next. The main members cafe was heaving with people (I suppose it was a preview day), so we went into the new extension to try the cafe in there – which hadn’t even opened when we went for the members early look at that building.
We were surprised to find that this new cafe is named Granville-Grossman Members Room, after Renee Granville-Grossman, a major benefactor to the Tate. She and her late husband were clients of Janie’s for many years. There we ate some lunch in far quieter surroundings than the heaving main members cafe.
After that, we returned to the main building to take a quick look at the Anni Albers exhibition which closes in a few days time.
Tate Modern has a new offering for members – opening a couple of hours earlier on Saturdays and Sundays for members only. Great idea.
We plugged for the Sunday, which was a sensible slot for us…
…except I should have thought to shift our Boston Manor tennis court back by an hour…
…I’ll get that right next time.
Meanwhile, London is almost a pleasure to drive through at 8:00 on a Sunday morning…and places to park when you get there.
Rather a stunning carpet on arrival at the Tate Modern
Quite a lot of members milling around the exhibition, but not crowded the way the public slots for the Picasso exhibition are likely to be. A real members’ benefit, for those of us willing to get up early on the weekend. The show is really popular, btw – you’ll need to book if you want to get in for a regular slot.
There are lots of top notch pieces on display in this show. It is mostly the story of Picasso’s miraculous year, 1932. You do get to see a few works from other periods, but not many.
Plenty of variety in Picasso’s work during 1932 and lots of interesting stuff about his life at that time too.
These days the Tate allows punters to take pictures of some but not all the works. Not quite sure how they decide what is and isn’t allowed. Janie nearly always wants to take home the book of the show if she likes a show (as she did in this case)…but still on this occasion she took some pictures as well…perhaps for your benefit, dear reader/viewer. They certainly make fine eye candy for the blog piece.
In the end, it occurred to both of us that four exhibitions in one day is overdoing it at our age…actually WAS overdoing it even when we were younger and less discerning.
So, we resolved to visit the Tate galleries on our Wednesday off (I was so tempted to use the headline “Tate-à-Tate”), then to take in the two smaller exhibitions at the Royal Academy a couple of days later, by taking advantage of late Friday opening.
We enjoyed all four exhibitions, but the highlight for us was undoubtedly the first one we saw; Modigliani.
Just in case any Ogblog readers remain confused, I have embedded the trailer for the wonderful Modigliani exhibition below:
We both really loved this exhibition. Not only does it show a superb selection of Modigliani’s work, but you get some real insight into his working world, from his early days in Paris to the end of Modigliani’s relatively short and tragic life.
A tip for anyone planning to go to this exhibition; do make sure you bagsy a (free) ticket for the Modigliani virtual reality studio: The Ochre Atelier. Both Janie and I thoroughly enjoyed that experience. You feel that you are sitting in Modigliani’s studio from three different angles. You can’t quite smell the smouldering Gitanes in the ashtray, but you do sense the breeze coming in through the window.
Impressionists In London – French Artists In Exile 1870 to 1904
We had the car with us, making it a surprisingly short hop from the Tate Modern to the Tate Britain, via Lambeth Bridge.
This exhibition has been somewhat maligned by the critics, but we enjoyed enough of it to justify the visit.
Many of my old school friends, for example, will appreciate the scenes from suburban London where the French artist refugees seemed to congregate for a while; doing some interesting impressions of 1870s Upper Norwood, Sydenham, Lordship Lane and the like – Sarf London Ooh La La?
Cricket loving friends, d’autre part, should love the impressions of 1870s cricket, from Tissot (surely not an Impressionist) hanging out with the I Zingari lot in St John’s Wood to Pisarro’s wonderfully impressionistic crickety park scenes.
In fact, there were quite a lot of Pisarro works on various subjects, probably worth the visit alone. Monet’s foggy London scenes are also well worth seeing if you have never seen them before – as it happens we had seen them before but were very happy to see them again.
Jasper Johns – “Something Resembling Truth”
This was a far more interesting exhibition than I expected. I had a few key images in my head for Johns (flags, numbers…) and didn’t realise the diversity of his work when you see a full tilt retrospective, which this undoubtedly is.
It’s patchy; Janie and I both enjoyed some but not all of the works, but there was plenty to enjoy and I (for one) was very pleasantly surprised by the quality of the work and variety of styles. A lesser-known middle period in the 1980s, for example, yielded interesting work to my eyes.
Dalí / Duchamp
Janie and I both love Dalí’s better works and many of those were on show in this exhibition. Duchamp’s art, we felt, was less interesting. Marcel Duchamp was clearly a very interesting thinker, but perhaps not such an interesting artist.
Well worth a look at this exhibition, though, with a good selection of artefacts and photographs as well as art works.
Further, with the Jasper Johns and the Dalí / Duchamp exhibitions located next to each other, it really does make sense to see both in one go, unless you are very short of time and/or have an aversion to seeing two shows in one go.
We had a mixed juice (or non-alcy cocktail) in the RA members bar after the shows, served by a comedy combination of competent barman and clueless waiter.
Here are some link terms to reviews of the four exhibitions:
But don’t take the experts’ words for it – we’ve all had enough of experts after all. Janie and I thought all of the exhibitions were worth seeing, but if you can only see one of these exhibitions, for us it would have be the Modigliani.
Now that Daisy is a member of the Royal Academy and the Tate, it is even easier for us to take in a few exhibitions in one outing, even those in which we might only have a passing interest.
Giacometti most certainly does not fall into the “passing interest” category – he is one of my favourite sculptors – Daisy’s too (perhaps to a lesser extent). So we planned our trip around the members’ evening showing of the Giacometti exhibition.
I had fancied seeing the Wolfang Tillmans some weeks/months ago, but perhaps not to the extent of making a special trip for it. So I was really pleased when the Giacometti invite informed us that the Wolfgang Tillmans would also be showing on that members’ evening.
Thus our plan was hatched – take the afternoon off, have a bite of lunch together at the town residence, mosey along to the Royal Academy for America After The Fall, scoot down to the Tate Modern and take in the other two exhibitions, shoot back to the town residence to pick up Dumbo (my Suzuki Jimny), then escape London to the calm of the country residence (W3) with some shawarmas.
The plan worked perfectly.
I think we both enjoyed America After The Fall more than we expected to. I had forgotten how much I like Grant Wood’s work as well as Edward Hopper’s and there were several fine examples from each of them. Plenty of other interesting pieces too, along with some rather grim and ordinary work from that difficult 1930’s period.
With some time on our hands and the members’ bar and garden at our disposal, we took some juice in the garden of the bar. We were lucky to get a garden table and celebrated our good fortune with a double-selfie:
Daisy and Ged RA, RA, RA!
Then we braved the rush hour for three stops of the Jubilee to the Tate Modern, arriving pretty much spot on members’ opening time, 18:45. This precision of time keeping does not come naturally to Daisy and I must admit to a bit more luck than judgement on my part too – I don’t pay my time pieces much heed on an afternoon off.
That got me thinking about a suitable song for Giacometti. Initially I decided that Cézanne was an easier name for parody, but then I had the thought:
Hit the road, Giac,
Ometti come back no more, no more, no more, no more,
Hit the road, Giac,
Ometti come back no more…
So that was it – I had Ray Charles stuck in my head for the rest of the day:
But I digress.
The Giacometti exhibition was everything we wanted it to be. Comprehensive, interesting information about Giacometti’s life and the diversity of his work, lots of our favourite pieces to see and some new favourites to squirrel away in our minds. We particularly enjoyed the documentary film. made late in his life, showing Giacometti paint the interviewer and then talk about the meticulous way he formed his sculpture’s eyes and faces.
The Wolfgang Tillmans was a delicious dessert after the Giacometti. It is a very interesting exhibition. Mostly photographs of course, but some of the rooms were “littered” with articles and papers that interest him, many of them about the brain and how we form impressions from images and ideas. Some of his photographs are simply wonderful and awe-inspiring. He seems to be a very interesting man, too, although the scattering of papers and articles made me want to have a chat with him rather than simply look at his reading pile.
We quite liked the playback room for sound too, although Janie found it too loud (as did I to some extent) but it was interesting to hear recorded sound at studio quality. We’re used to decent quality at home these days, but often forget how much higher quality is possible in recording, which I imagine is the intention of that work.
I’m rambling again. Three exhibitions, all three well worth catching if you can, especially the Giacometti, which is really special. We had a great outing.
An appointment to view the Robert Rauschenberg arranged a long time ago, as Janie takes advantage of her Tate membership so we can see the exhibition on a members’ evening.
Janie came to the Z/Yen office to meet me. We then walked from Lothbury to the Tate Modern across Southwark Bridge – a pleasant 20 minutes or so walk when the weather is good, which it was.
We got to the Tate ahead of the special evening opening hours, so we went to the members’ bar and had a small “glass of” each to sustain ourselves for the exhibition.
When we staggered down the stairs to go to the Rauschenberg, we first encountered the entrance for the Wilfredo Lam, which the Tate had also opened up for the evening to enable members to see both exhibitions out of hours. “Why not?” we thought and gave the Wilfredo Lam a quick once-over. We’d seen a fair smattering of his works in Cuba and remembered that he wasn’t exactly our favourite. A bit austere. “Picasso-lite” I described it – probably not an entirely original comment.
Then the Rauschenberg, the real purpose of our visit. Both of us had seen some of his stuff before and liked it, but neither of us had seen much and we both knew little about him.
We both like his use of colour and some of the earlier, experimental works are interesting. I didn’t much like the transfer drawings but clearly this technique was a step on the path towards his astonishing silkscreen work, which we both find very pleasing and interesting.
The later work is a bit hit and miss. Rauschenberg was bound to be fascinated by the use of digital imaging as part of his work in later years, yet somehow I think the cruder, analogue methods produce more interesting work in his genre.
As a Tate Modernista, Janie gets invited to previews and we are keen to take advantage of those when we are able. For that reason, we had booked out this particular afternoon, which also turned out to be the one date that worked for several Z/Yen alumni for a gathering.
It wasn’t complicated; we decided to combine both, making the timing of the Tate Modern visit fit nicely into that late afternoon slot.
It is an eclectic but fine collection; I very much enjoyed seeing the many Man Ray and André Kertész examples (I’ve long been a fan of theirs), but was also especially taken by the Dorothea Lange portraits, which I thought were especially good and with which I was not so familiar.
Then on to The Phoenix on Throgmorton Street, via the office. When we arrived, Linda was worried that it might just be we three, but I think she was just fretting a little because one or two people had to drop out at the last minute. Steph, Mary, Richard, Elisabeth and Christiano all turned up, which made a good size of group.
Janie and I didn’t stay all that long; Janie had booked early work for the next morning and was starting to struggle a little with a niggling abscess. So I took her home, cooked some pasta with one of Alistair Little’s ragus and put the wee bairn to bed early.
We booked the day off, primarily to see the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition at the Tate Modern.
I arranged to play real tennis in the morning and had also arranged to collect my new super-duper tennis racket when there, which Janie was very kindly buying for me as my birthday present. Janie and I ummed and ahhed about the logistics for the day, eventually landing on the idea that Janie would come to the flat and we’d go to Lord’s in Dumbo together. Janie quite enjoys sitting in the dedans gallery reading and/or watching the tennis. So that we did.
I had a hard game. We watched Chris playing with a very good player for a while after I showered and then went back to the flat for a quick bite of lunch before heading off by tube to the Tate Modern.
On arrival, we had a quick look at the Mona Hatoum exhibition before going to the O’Keeffe. As Janie is a member with a concession for a guest, we effectively have freedom of the place for all exhibitions.
Some of the Mona Hatoum pieces are very interesting, even stunning, but most of her work is quite stark. Janie described it as violent. Certainly dark.
The highlight of our visit was unquestionably the Georgia O’Keeffe. A rare chance to see her work and a huge one-off collection of it too. I particularly liked her more abstract pieces (both the early and late period abstracts). Janie liked the flower pictures as well as the abstracts – indeed Janie liked most of it. Incredible use of colour. The story of her development as an artist, under the wing of Alfred Stieglitz, is also interesting. Afterwards, I bought Janie a book oriented towards that aspect of O’Keeffe’s story.
I wasn’t much taken by the Bhupen Khakhar work. Some of the later works were quite interesting and I like the colours he used, but most of the work seemed very crude to me (artistically I mean, although also, as it happens, in terms of subject matter). Still, glad we took the time to see it.
Then we went to have a look at the Mark Rothko Seagram Murals, which we hadn’t seen before. Neither of us felt the contemplative spirituality promised. But again, glad I have seen them now.
Finally, we went across to the Switch House in search of the macaws (which we missed out on last time) only to be disappointed again. The owners have now withdrawn the macaws temporarily because they don’t seem happy being looked at by lots of people…probably not a great idea to exhibit them at the most visited modern art museum in the world, then.
After doing Shakespeare’s Globe, we thought that 15:00ish would be a good time to see the New Tate – after the lunchtime crowd and before the “knock off work a little early” crowd. We were right; a bit of a queue, but not too bad.
We started at the bottom and worked our way up slowly, having been warned that the lifts would be a long wait. At the very bottom, a few small exhibitions in The Tanks, such as a weird video room where you lie on cushions and look at videos of naked young women screaming and shouting. Another was supposed to react to the noises we made but seemed unresponsive to our noises. Also down there, a musical event (see picture above) of musical instruments powered by air tanks and other geeky-looking gadgetry.
Then we wended our way up, having a quick look at the new exhibits. We were a bit disappointed that we couldn’t see the macaws in the Brazilian exhibit for “animal welfare” reasons, which clearly don’t extend to keeping the birds cooped up regularly per se.
We were especially taken by one exhibit with “lie down in a cage” potential – in my case because I liked the idea of a lie down at that stage; in Janie’s case because she saw it as a big-time photo opportunity.
Well comfy
Not so easy to get in and out of though
Grrr
Then we carried on to the top, taking a quick look at the restaurant (which looked a bit “uti” for its price) and then the stunning viewing gallery.
One view
Another view
View From The Top
After the Tate, we went on to one of Helen Baker’s Mousse wine tastings. This one was fairly impromptu and well-timed for us as her place is just around the corner from the Tate Modern.
It was mostly roses: Les Mille Vignes Rose 2014 and Domaine Malmont Rose 2015. But actually the highlight was a most unusual white: Les Mille Vignes Muscat Sec 2014 – the most interesting dry muscat I have ever tasted.
As usual some really nice interesting people there – mostly the firm of architects who work in the building. Naturally the conversation turned to the referendum at times. We were unquestionably in with an in crowd.
This was one of those coincidental days that worked out ever so well. Janie and I had run out of steam on our previous visit to the Tate Modern (to see The World Goes Pop) but wanted to see the Alexander Calder exhibition properly. We had a booked a day off for 23 November, as we had arranged to spend the weekend in Bristol with Hil, Chris and the family, so that day seemed a suitable date for the Calder.
Meanwhile, Helen Baker at Mousse Wine invited us, at relatively short notice, to a wine tasting that very evening, just around the corner from the Tate Modern.
So, on the day, we enjoyed a decent game of tennis in the morning, a light lunch and then off to the Tate Modern.
This was Janie’s first (and my second) Mousse tasting. Not only does Helen put on a very interesting tasting but the small group of people she attracts are a pleasant, interesting bunch too.
By the time Janie had waded through the materials from Kim’s very generous membership birthday gifts, which included membership of the Tate, she realised that she/we had missed the previews of this exhibition but there was still one members evening left, so we arranged to meet at the tate Modern early evening.
Then to the office for a few hours to clear some stuff before wandering over the (formerly wobbly) bridge to the Tate. It all felt a bit different, doing the members evening thing. As it was relatively late in the exhibition, this members evening was not so crowded and really did feel like an opportunity to see a popular show in quieter circumstances.
It wasn’t quite as much fun as the stub makes out. Some elements were really good fun, but there was also a lot of agitprop art and swathes of grim as well as swathes of lighthearted, colourful stuff. As usual, we were quite selective, spending longer in rooms that interested us and skimming stuff that did less for us.
Janie bought me a couple of really snazzy ties in the Tate Modern shop that evening; these weren’t directly connected with the show but did have a sort-of pop art look about them. I have had more positive comments about those ties than any others in my collection, but sadly the Tate modern subsequently seems to have fallen out of love with ties.
