A Gallery I Wish I’d Missed
I regretted going to the Musee D’Orsay, as I was tired after my walk and it wasn’t a gallery that was easy to visit, if you were in your sixties and showing the odd sign of wear and tear.
Compared to the Louvre, it was very second rate, with no working lifts and no escalators, and steps everywhere, which would make it probably a no-go for many.
In some ways if your compare it to the Louvre, the four Tates, the Royal Academy and the Louvre, the layout is very 1980s and the Musee D’Orsay desperately needs an update to bring it up to modern standards.
It also annoyed me that photography is not allowed, so I was unable to take pictures of the building, which was one of my reasons for going.
I also felt that the Sade exhibition was rather pretentious, long winded, cramped into a too small exhibition space and badly presented.
It certainly wasn’t good value at I think eleven euros with no senior discount.
The Tate At St. Ives
The Tate St. Ives is one of those buildings, like the Guggenheim in Bilbao, that make me want to get my camera out.
At the Guggenheim, I photographed the building as the light played with the building in the evening sun.
As these pictures show, the Tate all about the sea.
The Tate is a building totally suited to its surroundings.
Ruin Lust At The Tate Britain
I saw this exhibition at Tate Britain, when I went to see the Richard Deacon exhibition a few days ago.
Today, Ruin Lust is reviewed in the Standard by their respected art critic, Brian Sewell. He says this.
But what is? Any ordinary bloke unwise enough to chance £10 on this exhibition will depart baffled and bewildered.
And he continues in the sane vein.
The Guardian describes it as a brilliant, but bonkers exhibition.
The Times calls it a fetishist take on property porn and gives it two stars.
I actually thought that both exhibitions, had a touch of the emporer’s new clothes about them.
Changing Trains At Liverpool
To get from Birmingham to Preston, I took a London Midland train to Liverpool, from where I got a local service to Lancashire’s County Town.
The first train was excellent, as one of the pictures shows. It cost me £24.10 in First, but I had a big table to myself. I’ve used the company before when travelling between Liverpool and Birmingham and I prefer them to Virgin for that route.
Liverpool is a good interchange, as the station is close to Liverpool’s magnificent Civic Buildings. You can also walk down to the Mersey and then get a train back from St. James’s Street. I know that I know Liverpool well, but it must be the only city in England, where the iconic sites can be reached by walking downhill. But then it seems that few city centre stations are close to the shops and attractions. Some like Leeds and Nottingham mean an uphill walk.
On this trip, I’d picked up some sandwiches in Birmingham New Street Station, so all I did was visit the Walker Art Gallery or the National Gallery of the North, as it is sometimes called. We need more attractions like this, close to major interchange railway stations.
The poor part of the trip, was the train from Liverpool to Preston. it was one of Northern Rail’s Class 156, which after the two other trains of the day, was a real drop in standards.
My Exhibition List
This is a list of exhibitions, that I might want to go to or I have gone and enjoyed. Most are in London.
British Museum – The Mostyn Tompion Clock – Ends 2nd February 2014
British Museum – Vikings – Ends 22nd June 2014
London Museum – Cheapside Hoard – Ends 27th April 2014
National Maritime Museum – Turner & The Sea – Ends 24th April 2014
PayneShurvill – Circulation – Peter Newman – Ends 18th January 2014
Royal Academy – Australia – Ends 8th December 2013
Royal Academy – Daumier – Ends 26th January 2014
Science Museum – Collider – Ends 6th May 2014
A Preview Of The New Tate Britain
I went to the Members Preview of the upgraded Tate Britain. I have called it the New Britain deliberately!
These pictures don’t do the new building of the art justice.
It was also an absolute pleasure to wander round some galleries and examine the paintings and sculpture virtually alone.
But then that pleasure, is one you get from being a member of the Tate. I also found myself in a similar situation at the British Museum at a Members Party.
A Cafe In Liverpool
Liverpool generally doesn’t do boring and there is nothing boring about this cafe.
A Cafe In Liverpool
It is actually in the Victoria Building of Liverpool University, which gave red brick universities, their name.
But the interior is a superb example of Victorian excess, in what is now the Victoria Gallery and Museum.
I particularly liked the clock.
The Clock
The food and drink is not too bad either.
Exploring Oslo
The hotel I was in, wasn’t bad, but it was in the wrong position, as the web site said it was ten minutes from the centre. I assumed that was walking, but it was by car or taxi and there wasn’t any Metro station nearby. However I took a bus to the centre and friendly young lady, told me to get off at the National Theatre.
Norwegian National Theatre
It was a good place to start, as a lot of the museums and other places to see are around that area. There was also a customer service centre, where I was able to buy a 24-hour ticket for the trains, trams, buses and ferries. It is also a station from which you get the train to the airport.
One thing about Norwegian and Swedish for that matter, is that a lot of the words can be guessed. For instance the stop for the Nation Theatre is Nationaltheatret. At least the Norwegian National Theatre is more centrally placed than ours in London.
From the theatre, I walked around for an hour or so, until I got to the National Gallery, as I wanted to see the Munch paintings.
Norwegian National Gallery
At the moment there is a celebration of Edvard Munch, so I bought a ticket for the two venues at both the National Gallery and the Munch Museum.
Chagall At The Tate Liverpool
I’d gone to the Tate Liverpool to see the Chagall exhibition.
Chagall At The Tate Liverpool
I found it very enlightening and it showed me how little I know about art and especially artists like Marc Chagall. But don’t take my word for it, that it is good, read this report from the Telegraph. It starts like this.
Forty years ago, Marc Chagall was one of the uncontested masters of modern art. Living out his old age on the Cote d’Azur, immersed in his magic-realist memories of the old Russian-Jewish world, Chagall seemed fully the equal – well, almost the equal – of his sometime Riviera neighbours Picasso and Matisse.
Since then his critical stock has inexorably declined. He’s come to be seen as a whimsical fellow-traveller of Modernism who produced an overabundance of self-consciously poetic and rather sugary images. His trademark flying postmen, mooning lovers and bearded violinists have come to seem questionable in their sincerity, never mind their artistic quality.
This exhibition, the largest Chagall show in Britain for 15 years, gives us the chance to look again at this long derided figure and decide whether he should be reinstated as a major 20th- century figure or left quietly in his corner.
I think that it is definitely a must-see exhibition and unless you saw it in Zurich earlier, you’ll have to travel to Liverpool. Someone said to me, that they’ll catch the exhibition when it comes to London. It won’t and it’ll probably be many years before an exhibition of this scope is mounted again.
So go and decide, where you think Chagall should be placed in the history of art. i liked the exhibition a lot, and his work to me, is almost a progression of the various styles of art through the twentieth century. Just like any great artist, Chagall seemed to be a complex person, who the more you look at his work, the more you see in it.
A Station With Twin Clocks
Is Liverpool Lime Street station, one of the few where you are greeted two large clocks?
But then Liverpool loves its big clocks and seems to have more than most cities.
I went to the Second City today, to see two unique exhibitions; the revealing of the floor in St. George’s Hall and the Marc Chagall exhibition at the Tate Liverpool.
The Anonymous Widower 