Monday October 9 was yet another sunny, warm day. High 25C.
We started our day with a coffee at Monmouth Coffee, located just outside Borough Market. The Market is closed on Monday but most of the cafés and stores on the adjoining streets are open.
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| Outside Monmouth Coffee |
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| Lovely café with very highly rated coffee |
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| Making my cortado with oat milk (as an aside, no one charges extra for oat milk as they do in Canada) |
We then started our walk to the Tate Modern along the Thames.
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| Outside of the Tate Modern |
There were three temporary exhibits on at the Tate. We decided to see Capturing the Moment, which explores the dynamic relationship between contemporary painting and photography.
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| Poster for the exhibit |
We entered through the Turbine Hall, where a commissioned piece by El Anatsui (b. 1944) was about to officially open on October 10. There was a quote on the wall from El Anatsui which read: Act 1: The Red Moon. The Turbine Hall reminds me of a ship. I was thinking about motion and the idea of the red sail. This work addresses a history of encounter and the movement of ideas and people.
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Setting Sail in the Turbine Hall
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| Backside of the Red Sail |
We then went to see the
Capturing the Moment exhibit.
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Poster, Photo by Andreas Gursky, May Day IV, 2000)
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The arrival of photography changed the course of painting forever. The exhibit explored the dynamic relationship between the two media through some of the most iconic artworks of recent times. It explored how artists have turned to painting and photography to capture moments in time. The exhibit opened with a quote from Susan Sontag:
The painter constructs, the photographer discloses. The paintings and photographs in this exhibit definitely blur those lines.
There were eight rooms in the exhibit, exploring different themes. Room 1 was entitled: Painting in the Time of Photography. It explored the view that 'in the 20th century photography could offer a much more convincing representation of reality than painted canvas. Therefore, painters developed new styles in response to this challenge, particularly when exploring the human figure. Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon used the human form to expose the visceral reality of the self'. While Freud preferred to paint from real life, Bacon draws from photographic material. Picasso also challenged notions of painterly representation to develop cubism, where in his portraits, he collapses multiple perspectives into one single moment in time. Alice Neel and Dorothea Lange aim to depict the social realities of their time through emotionally charged portraits.
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| Lucian Freud (1922-2011), Boy Smoking, 1950-1. Freud created intense and unsettling portraits by sitting uncomfortably near his subject while painting, in sessions that sometimes lasted up to eight hours. The style in this painting is typical of German new objectivity, an art movement of the 1920s and 30s which sought 'unsentimental' depictions of reality. |
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| Lucian Freud, The Painter's Mother IV, 1973. This portrait belongs to a series of 18 which Freud made of his mother, Lucie, after the death of his father in 1970. |
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Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Head of a Woman, 1938. The model for this painting is photographer and artist Dora Mara (1906-1997). In 1935, she met Picasso, who painted her numerous times. Maar was commissioned by an art journal to document the progress of Picasso's anti-war painting Guernica.
She observed the work was 'like an immense photograph... absolutely modern'. |
There was a quote from Alice Neel on the wall:
I paint my time using the people as evidence.
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| Alice Neel, Puerto Rican Boys on 108th Street, 1955 |
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Dorothea Lange, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California 1936. The commentary noted that when the sitter Florence Owens Thompson was later identified in 1978, she stated: 'I wish she hadn't taken my picture...[Lange] didn't ask my name. She said she wouldn't sell the pictures.
She said she'd send me a copy. She never did." |
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| Pablo Picasso, Weeping Woman, 1937. This painting is based on an image of a woman holding her dead child. Picasso also included this theme in his anti-war mural, Guernica. Both works were painted during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), in response to the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica in April 1937 by Nazi Germany. The model for Weeping Woman is Dora Maar. |
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| Francis Bacon (1909-1992), Three Studies for Portrait of Lucian Freud, 1965. Both Freud and Bacon sat for each other on multiple occasions. Bacon painted Freud 14 times from 1964-71, working from photographs rather than real life. His portraits powerfully convey the complexities of the human psyche. |
Room 2, Tensions, had commentary which noted that while photographers grapple with the mechanics of the camera, painters continue to work with the surface of the canvas and the texture of paint.
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| Georg Baselitz (b. 1938), Orange Eater II, 1981. Baselitz began to paint figures upside-down in the late 1960s, insisting that viewers should concentrate on the lines and marks of the painting rather than its resemblance to reality. He described his visceral painterly technique and aggressive colour scheme as "boxing with both hands". |
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| Paula Rego (1935-2022), War, 2003. War is based on a newspaper photograph of Iraqi civilians in the aftermath of a bomb explosion during the Iraq War. 'Rego was shaken by the image of a mother carrying a baby. Here, she gives the figures mask-like rabbit heads. A disfigured children's toy on the ground makes the horror more intense'. |
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| Cecily Brown (b. 1969), Trouble in Paradise, 1999. This piece hovers between representation and abstraction. Brown was quoted as saying: I think that painting is a kind of alchemy. The paint is transformed into image and paint and image transform themselves into a third and new thing. I want to catch something in the act of becoming something else." |
Room 3 was entitled Painting into Photography, and featured a piece by Canadian Jeff Wall which explores the boundary between truth and fiction, challenging the traditional notion that photography faithfully records reality. A Sudden Gust of Wind captures what seems like an instant frozen in time. The photograph is, however, meticulously staged. It is based on a woodcut by Japanese painter and printmaker Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849). It took Wall over a year and more than 100 separate shots to complete.
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| Original Japanese woodblock colour print |
Jeff Wall (b. 1946), A Sudden Gust of Wind (after Hokusai), 1993
Room 4 was entitled: Photography as Painting in which the featured artists drew on the traditions of painting using the photographic image to propose new ways of looking.
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Louise Lawler (b. 1947), Splash 2006. This photo shows a painting by Roy Lichtenstein
in storage at the Art Institute of Chicago. |
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| Candida Höfer (b. 1944), Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen I, 2001. One of Höfer's works recording libraries across Europe and North America. Here she features the library in the Abbey of Saint Gall, Switzerland. |
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| Thomas Struth (b. 1954), Basilica de Montreale, Palermo, 1998 |
Room 5 featured Hiroshi Sugimoto's
Seascapes which capture the infinite: a universal image of the sea that has been encountered throughout generations. The series comprises 220 black and white photographs developed over 30 years in different locations across the world.
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| Hiroshi Sugimoto (b. 1948), Tyrrhenian Sea, 1994 |
Room 6 was entitled:
Capturing History in which the artists Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal engage with history, media and memory by making paintings which are copies of photographs.
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| Gerhard Richter (b. 1932), Two Candles, 1982. |
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| Gerhard Richter, Aunt Marianne, 1965. Aunt Marianne was painted from a family snapshot, as part of a larger series of black and white photo-paintings. It shows a four month old Richter with his young maternal aunt, who was later murdred by the Nazi eugenics programme in Dresden during WWII. The work has a hazy, smudged look, like a blurred frame from a film reel. |
Room 7 was entitled: Convergence, where artists experimented with the medium of painting incorporating screen printing and photographic sources.
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| John Currin (b. 1962), Thanksgiving, 2003. All three figures are based on the artist Rachel Feinstein, who was married to Currin. |
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| Peter Doig (b. 1959), Canoe Lake, 1997-98. This painting is based on a still photograph Doig took from the horror film Friday the 13th, 1980. |
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| Njideka Akunyili Crosby (b. 1983), Predecessors, 2013. Akunyili Crosby creates her multi-layered work from family photographs and personal memorabilia mixed with cut-outs from Nigerian popular magazines and newspapers. |
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| David Hockney (b. 1937), Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), 1972. The composition is based on a series of photographs Hockney took in preparation for the work. |
Room 8 was entitled: Towards the Digital addressing new media and painting.
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Lorna Simpson (b. 1960, USA), Then &Now, 2016. Made by screenprinting found photographic imagery onto clayboard panels, with black ink added by hand. "The work appropriates an iconic photograph taken during clashes between Black residents and police in Detroit in 1967. The title suggests a dialogue between past and present, connecting the events of 1967 to the present where police brutality towards Black citizens continues". |
It was a great exhibit. Lots to think about. The interplay of photography and painting and the blurring of the lines of the two media in the 20th and 21st century was examined in a most interesting fashion.
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| View from the Tate Modern- looking across at St. Paul's Cathedral |
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| Looking east |
We then walked along the river until we got to the Waterloo bridge. We decided to wander back in the Covent Gardens area before coming back on the bridge to the National Theatre (at the foot of the Waterloo bridge) for a 7:30 p.m. play.
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| Crossing the bridge in the sun (we haven't worn our leather jackets since we got to London) |
We stopped at Chestnut Bakery on Floral Street for a late lunch. I read afterwards that they had won an award for the best croissant in the UK in 2023.
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| Lovely location at one end of Floral Street |
They had a number of flatbreads on the menu. All of the flatbread dough is made fresh in house every day and every flatbread is made fresh to order in a clay oven! We shared a delicious Chestnut Manoushe with dukka, tomato and cucumber.
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| Delicious flatbread |
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| Inside the bakery |
We stopped to pick up a treat from a small Swedish bakery we passed on a very narrow street. Lots of lingonberry jam. Still on a bit of a Nordic kick.
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Outside the bakery
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Lots of jam and Swedish treats
We stopped by Foyles, the wonderful bookstore with five floors on Charing Cross. It was bought by Waterstones, the other large English bookseller, in 2018. So great to visit bookstores in London with 90% books and not filled with other merchandise.
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| Looking down from the café on the 5th floor--- such a wonderful bookstore |
We got to the National Theatre a bit early and just hung outside. We are seeing T
he Father and the Assassin by Anupama Chandrasekhar, one of India's most exciting playwrights. It had a critically acclaimed run in 2022, and was back at the National for another run. The play traces the life of Nathuram Godse, a journalist, and the man who murdered Mahatma Gandhi. It follows his life over 30 years during India's fight for independence: from a devout follower of Gandhi, through to his radicalization and the assassination in Delhi in 1948. The play explores themes of oppression and extremism.
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| Poster for the play outside the National Theatre |
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| Stage before the performance |
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| Full house on a Monday |
It was a brilliant play, providing a fascinating political history of India prior to independence and up to the murder of Gandhi in 1948. Nathuram Godse was born to parents so traumatized by the deaths of three baby sons that they raised him as a girl to regain the favour of the goddess who might otherwise take him too. The playwright suggests that this early emasculation sent him on a quest for identity and purpose that led him first to Gandhi's unifying movement of peaceful resistance and then to the divisive politics of Vinayak Savarkar, who built the foundations of Hindu nationalism. The play dealt with the development of Gandhi's philosophy and early non-violent demonstrations, featured debates between Gandhi and Nehru, and then the sudden grant of independence in 1947, the partition of British India into Pakistan and India and the ensuing violence.
Godse was a member of a right-wing Hindu paramilitary organization as well as a member of a right-wing Hindu Nationalist political party when he assassinated Gandhi on January 30, 1948. Godse considered Gandhi to have been too accommodating to Pakistan during the partition of India in 1947 and disagreed with Gandhi's philosophy of non-violence towards Muslims. The ending is very powerful, with an inflammatory speech by Godse after he was hung for the murder in November 1949. The play is a story of division and whipped-up animosities that has its roots in colonialism and is repeating itself throughout the world today. Shades of Donald Trump as well.
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| Curtain call-- Hiran Abeysekera who played Godse being applauded by the rest of the cast |
We both learned a lot about 20th century Indian history and politics. The production was superb, with a rotating stage and the use of 19 actors to conjure up crowds for demonstrations and the massacre that followed independence.
We walked back to the apartment for a late bite to eat, a glass of wine and some tea. A great day of art and theatre!
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