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Tate Britain

May 23rd, 2006 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

For lunchtime today I completed the set of art galleries within easy reach of Waterloo by mainline rail by visiting Tate Britain.

I still find it hard to call the place 'Tate Britain' as I still think of it as The Tate Gallery, remembering the days before they opened the other three.   Mind you, I still think of the Forum as the Town & Country club and the Carling Hammersmith Apollo as the Hammersmith Odeon.

The last time I went to the Tate it was still the only one, and was still the focal point for ridicule directed at exhibits like the famous pile of bricks. I saw the bricks. Against my expectations I quite liked them, as well as those huge, black canvasses and the Andy Warhol pop art.

The majority of the modern art has now gone to the Tate Modern at Bankside of course, with the exception of some British modern artists. I suppose it makes some sense to put all the modern art in one place and British art in another, but I quite like museums and galleries where there is a wide variety and the prospect of a surprise around the corner.

A lot of Tate Britain is now the 'safe' work of Gainsborough, Stubbs, Constable and Hogarth. I was not very taken with Hogarth and Gainsborough; not really my sort of thing and managed to miss the room with all the Constables in.  Given the time constraints of a lunch hour I also gave the Turners a miss, deciding to make a special visit to that wing at a later date.

I did see a few of the more well-known works, like Waterhouse's Lady of Shallot and Millais' Ophelia, but my favourites from today had to be two paintings by Samuel Scott, who I had never heard of, which were views of the Thames painted in 1746. The best title has to be a painting by Joseph Highmore called "VII Pamela in the bedroom with Mrs. Jewkes and Mr B"  It sounds like a link to porn on an 18th Century website. Read the description of the painting and that first impression is not too far off.  That Mr. B sounds like a right nasty piece of work!

The ironic thing for me is that modern art is always so vilified but Turner is so revered, when so many of Turner's works are verging on the abstract.  A couple of his paintings were in the main part of the gallery and they stood out from the rest of the realistic, biscuit-tin lid paintings.

Before leaving the Tate I decided that, if I could be painted by any artist who ever lived, the last person I would want to paint me would be Lucien Freud!  I know he has talent, and his work is not without interest, but he does not like to flatter his subjects does he?

Just time for a reminiscence about the old tate gallery. The first time I went it was in 1978, I think. I had been to see Thin Lizzy the night before and had stayed in town so I decided to see the Dali exhibition before heading back home.  After looking around I went for some refreshments in the cafe downstairs and got talking to a couple I was sharing a table with. It turned out that the male half of the couple had actually marked one of my CSE exam papers – for Mass Media Studies. Small world.

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