THE TATE MODERN

In a couple of hours our rental car will be arriving at the hotel and we'll be off to the country.  My mind is preoccupied with worries about driving on the left (though I did this for many years, and have rented cars in the UK many times before), finding routes and destinations and so on.  I'm in no frame of mind, then, to start playing art critic, much though we enjoyed seeing the two big shows we saw yesterday at the Tate Modern.

First, though, a pleasant wake-up in our hotel room, and the unaccustomed luxury of enjoying a good cup of hot tea and bowls of cereal delivered to our door.  By mid-morning, we were ready to head out, and found the convenient Oyster card and the Tube an easy way to make the trip from Kensington to Blackfriars...

... and we strolled along the embankment for a good long block to the Millennium Bridge and across to the massive old industrial building...

... (seen here, from a distance, to the right) that was converted some years ago to hugely expand the Tate's gallery space.  My International Art Critics press card gained me access, but Ellie did not get the free ride she sometimes does.  We thought the entry fee pretty steep at over $20 per person per show, but then everything over here seems expensive to us...

Awaiting the appointed time for a planned tryst with our long-time blogging friend, Jean, we got a start before lunch on Sonia Delaunay--a magnificent, expansive exhibition that covered the whole, remarkable range of this remarkable woman's work.  A good forty-five minutes with the early work, then off to meet Jean, who had thoughtfully reserved a window table for us in the Tate cafe...

We sat for a good long while, playing catch-up over an excellent lunch and a glass of wine, watching the crowds beside the river and the children happily chasing pigeons on the lawn.  Wonderful, to reconnect with someone who seems like an old friend, even though we have met only once before, and have corresponded with only infrequently.  Was a time when we followed each other's blog on an almost daily basis, but Jean--an excellent writer and photographer--left hers behind some time ago, and has not yet started a new one.

Our friend joined us as we completed our tour of the Sonia Delaunay show.  (Please check out the Tate website for images of this and the Dumas show...)  Without playing the art critic, I'll just say that I loved the energy and persistence of her work, her exhaustive investigation of color and geometric shape, her refusal to be restricted simply to painting but to expand her vision to include design--particularly her fabulous materials and clothes.  She was supposedly on the geometric side of the rivalry between "lyrical" and geometric abstraction, but I found her work to be lyrical in its insistence on its rhythmic quality, and in the absence of any of the hard edges that, for me, define geometric abstraction.  All her "lines" are frayed, blurred, uncertain, bleeding, vulnerable, and it's in those lines that I find the more profound appeal of her work.

A view from the Tate Modern

We said goodbye to Jean after Delaunay.  She wisely decided to leave Marlene Dumas to another afternoon--an opportunity we won't have.  It involved a big switch in consciousness to move from one to the next, but the Dumas show proved to be as extensive and as substantial as the Delaunay.  An amazing body of work, concentrating almost exclusively (my auto correct--sometimes unwittingly wise--wanted me to say "explosively"!) on the human body, the human head, the human face.  My regular readers will know of my own attachment to the body, so it will come as no surprise that I found Dumas's work immensely moving and appealing.  Famously, she is unafraid of the dark side of the human experience, nor of the social, racial and political issues that divide us human beings, where her art unites us, revealing the something of the sameness of the physical and meta-physical DNA that unites our constantly conflicting species.  Technically, too, I admired Dumas's mastery of both oil and watercolor.  It's an impressive show.

Our eyes and minds were sated with art by the time we completed the Dumas exhibition, and we decided against further exploration of the other riches of the Tate Modern.  Instead, we wandered across the river and up the hill to St. Paul's Cathedral...

See it here?

... where we caught the tail end of a choral Evensong.  Emerging into the late afternoon and unsure how to spend the rest of it, I had the thought that Ellie might enjoy the ride back to the west part of town on the top deck of a London bus.  We caught the number 11, climbed up the stairs, and thoroughly enjoyed the tour down Ludgate Hill and the Strand to Trafalgar Square, up Whitehall to the Houses of Parliament and down Victoria Street, past the station and into Pimlico, descending finally when the bus reached Sloane Square.

We crossed the square--with memories of the Royal Court Theatre in the fifties, premiering plays by the likes of Samuel Beckett, John Osborne and Harold Pinter--and found a small restaurant, Canvas, tucked away on a side street, where we stopped for a nice dinner served by a charmingly attentive wait-staff in a relaxing atmosphere, with quiet jazz and easy rock music playing in the background.  Emerging into the twilight, we walked the rest of the way up Sloane Street and past elegant Belgravia residences to our hotel, ready for a good night's sleep before leaving London.