But Is It Art??

I’m a Friend of the Tate - wouldn’t say it was a deep friendship but about 5/6 times a year I (plus guest) get to go to an evening viewing of their latest exhibition. It can be a thoroughly enjoyable evening; the Degas and Stanley Spencer exhibition viewings particularly stick in my mind as they had the right combination of exhibition, guest and people watching.

This past Tuesday evening was the Albers & Moholy-Nagy exhibition at Tate Modern. I’d heard of neither but the art was the stuff I like - quite modernist, stuff I’d like in my flat. Modernist art does have tendency to take itself a bit seriously. For example, the description in Room 11 starts, “Colour had been dropped from the Bauhaus [a German arts school] curriculum in 1928”. How does an arts school not teach colour?? The final room contained numerous paintings of squares of different colours. Apparently this was the artist’s signature series, which he spent 26 years (!) continuing, and is known as Homage to the Square (er?). I liked the art, but it’s the sort of stuff I look at and think ‘I could do that‘ - perhaps that's why I like it. In modernist exhibitions the very first painting should be a still-life, by the artist, of a bowl of fruit thus ’proving’ they can draw - after that fair enough I say.

Thursday evening was Gothic Nightmares at Tate Britain. As someone whose entire knowledge of Greek mythology is drawn from watching Xena: Warrior Princess (which I don’t think is 100% reliable) I don’t feel I fully appreciated some of the works. However, I got the Biblical and Shakespearean references so all was not lost. Some of the works were pretty dark but a least it looked like something; no two slightly different coloured lines on a square here.

Both exhibitions are worth a nose - but what I really like about the evening viewings is the people watching. The modernist evening was complete with people wearing berets and others speaking French. The Gothic one was a bit strange in that in one room, rather than admire the art, one women really loved the Tate wallpaper so much she actually stroked it…….