ALL the Art

Yesterday we viewed what I believe the English refer to as a metric crap-ton of art. We went to the Tate Britain, which showcases British art from the last 500 years, and then we took a ferry over to the Tate Modern. Below are photos, mostly from the Tate website, of our favorite pieces. I realize it's a little silly to include images that are available to everyone on the internet in a travel blog, but cell phone photos of paintings are simply terrible. The Tate's photos can't replace seeing the pieces in person either, but at least they were taken with a real camera. To give you a taste of our museum experience:

From the Tate Britain:

The Arrival, Christopher Richard Wynne Nevinson, c.1913

The Artist's Brother Harry Holding An Apple, Mark Gertier, 1913
And Harry is very much enjoying it.

Night Raid on Portsmouth Docks, Richard Eurich, 1941.
"Almost every night from September 1940 to May 1941 German aircraft dropped bombs on London and Britain's major industrial cities, naval ports, and such history towns as Bath and Exeter. Great swathes of metropolitan Britain were destroyed or damaged and over 40,000 people were killed. Artists were dispatched by the Ministry of Information to record the effects and experience of the Blitz. Their works served to bolster an image of a stoical Britain withstanding the enemy onslaught. Richard Eurich's depiction of the naval docks of Portsmouth is especially emotive as in the centre of the conflagration stands HMS Victory, the ship on which Admiral Nelson led the British fleet when it triumphed over the French at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805."

 There was a lovely Joseph Wright of Derby collection. He was really into light, science, and art, which made for some beautiful works. Our favorite was An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, which depicted an experiment by Robert Boyle in which he placed a cockatoo in an air pump and then deprived it of air while a large group of people (including terrified children) looked on:

1768. Image from Wikipedia.

The Tate Britain also had a large JMW Turner collection. He used to have a lot of paintings in progress at once; when he had a color that he needed on multiple paintings, he would go through and add that color to each painting before moving onto the next color.

Self-Portrait, Joseph Mallord William Turner, 1799.
Jon enjoys this because it reminds him of a character from a video game (Edgeworth from Phoenix Wright).

From the Tate Modern:

Clarinet and Bottle of Rum on a Mantelpiece, Georges Braque, 1911
"A clarinet lies on a mantelpiece at the centre of this playful work. In front of it stands a bottle with the characters RHU, the first three letters of the French word for rum. The word Valse (Waltz) introduces the idea of dancing, reinforcing the theme of music evoked by the clarinet and suggestions of treble and bass clefs. The scrolled form in the lower right-hand corner could stand for either the bracket of the mantelpiece of the head of an instrument." Hannah's favorite.

Recreation of First Public Demonstration of Auto Destructive Art, Gustav Metzger, 1960 (remade 2004, 2015)
Originally, Metzger painted with acid on nylon and presented found objects (fabric and paper waste in a plastic bag) for the Temple Gallery. Critic Jasia Reichardt wrote, "Although auto-destruction rejects the idea of art lasting for posterity, it introduces a completely fresh element--time--into a purely visual medium."

Black Square with Blue, Ellsworth Kelly, 1970.
This is actually one of our cell phone pics; we like it better than the website's photo. We want this in our living room!

A Bigger Splash, David Hockney, 1967
(Also our picture, the website photo's colors were too washed out.)

0 through 9, Jasper Johns, 1961.
Jon's favorite--he bought a print!

Anabasis I, William Tucker, 1964.
Jon's favorite sculpture. You can't quite tell from the photo, but the top piece is translucent.

Star Dancer, Marcel Marien, 1991.
That is an actual starfish with a doll shoe on its foot! I love it.
Jon's alternate (and superior) title is Marcel the Starfish with Shoe On.

We also really enjoyed Nicholas Hlobo's work. He's a South African artist who explores themes of gender and sexuality in his work, often contrasting feminine and masculine imagery. His sculptures often use rubber inner tubes, lace, ribbon, and organza. Our favorite work started with a tea stain on watercolor paper:

Macaleni Iintozomlambo, 2010. This is a much better photo than the one we took, but you still obviously don't get the full effect of the texture and dimension.

I made an art too! I call it The Millennium Bridge and St. Paul's Cathedral As Seen From a Balcony at the Tate Modern on a Cloudy Evening. 

Portrait of the Artist's Wife Hannah in Poor Lighting. Jonathan Adams, 2015.

We also watched a 2010 short film called Blindly, by Polish artist Artur Zmijewski. It documented a painting workshop with visually impaired participants. The work that they created was often on enormous sheets of paper taped to the ground, and they did a lot of painting without a brush--using only their hands and feet. It made visual art into a very tactile experience.

There was one exhibit called My Bed by Tracey Ermin. In the center of the room stood a bed, surrounded by layers of odds and ends--vodka bottles, tampons, small stuffed animals, newspapers, etc. The piece was inspired by a breakdown that the artist suffered in 1998; after sleeping for four straight days, she got up from her bed, surveyed the room, and decided that her environment belonged in the gallery. It was a fascinating piece, but a bit difficult to examine carefully. The bed was surrounded by a rectangle that kept its spectators at a safe distance, and there was also a guard in the room keeping watch. However, in addition to these precautions, if you got too close to the boundaries of the piece, an alarm went off. If the guard was near you when that happened, she'd flatly tell you, "Don't get too close to the bars." There were so many tiny details that you'd want to take in, but museum rules prevented you from doing so. Seemed a bit excessive to me.

Today, we were on our way to dinner in Leicester Square when we realized that our chosen restaurant did not open for another hour. We decided to kill part of the time by visiting the National Gallery, making it our third art museum trip of the weekend. This museum has lots of Very Famous Artists, and so it was much more crowded, particularly in the rooms with Monet and Van Gogh. When we were in the Tate museums, I felt out of place and a little embarrassed to be taking photos of the paintings, but at the National Gallery we were some of the only people who didn't have our phones out to record the experience. I prefer less shoving and a little more quiet contemplation in my museum visits, so if you're in London and can only go to one art museum, I would recommend one of the Tates rather than the National Gallery.

We didn't spend much time at the National Gallery, but of what we saw this Manet piece was my favorite:

Woman with a Cat, c.1880

This is a portrait of Manet's wife Suzanne Leenhoff with the family cat, Zizi. It is considered unfinished--Manet may have been working on it when he died. I love the broad brush strokes, and I also enjoy that she seems to be saying, "Ugh with this damn cat on my lap again."

So there you have it! All the art.

xo

Hannah