Tate Modern

Making the rounds of London's free museums, we hit two today. The first was the Tate Modern which is housed in a former factory on the south bank of the Thames:

Inside looks pretty much like a factory, too, except that a huge amount of the space is empty. I don't want to know what their annual heating costs are:

A slightly more cheerful and lively part of the museum:

Since I don't find modern art reliably attractive or even comprehensible, I find a good tour guide is essential for a modern art museum. We went on two tours.

TOUR 1: SURREALISM

Paul Delvaux's Sleeping Venus was painted in 1944 in Brussels while the city was being bombed by Germany. He later explained that the goals was to express the anguish of the moment. He chose a sleeping Venus as the subject because it formed such a stark contrast with that anguish, making the painting all the more poignant. When this painting was exhibited in 1946 in NYC, it was deemed obscene by the US government and seized.

Salvador Dali's Mountain Lake (1938) depicts a lake that Dali's parents used to visit to find comfort after the death of their first child (who was also named Salvador). The lake is shaped like a fish. Interestingly, in this photo of the painting, it looks more like a fish than a lake. But in the museum, where the colors appeared much darker, it looked more like a lake than a fish. The disconnected phone hanging in the foreground apparently alludes to the negotiations between Chamberlain and Hitler over the German annexation of the Sudetenland.

Max Ernst's Forest and Dove, 1927, depicts the artist as a bird trapped in a simultaneously enchanting and menacing forest. Apparently, Max Ernst pioneered three painting techniques: frottage, grattage, and decalomania. Frottage is the fancy word for the technique used in pencil rubbings. Grattage is the technique of layering paint thickly and then scraping away top layers to reveal colors underneath (essentially what we called "scratch art" in grade school). Decalomania is the technique of blobbing ink on a paper and then folding the paper in half to create two symmetrical blobs. I'm proud to say that I mastered all three techniques in nursery school. What a prodigy!

TOUR 2: MUSEUM HIGHLIGHTS

Henri Matisse's Portrait of Greta Moll, 1908. I'm guessing I like Matisse so much because I grew up south of Baltimore, home to the fabulous Cone Collection.

Bridget Riley is an artist who experiments with optical illusion. This painting is simply a series of black-and-white wavy lines. But the experience of looking at it (warning: may induce a headache) is difficult to explain. To begin, the lines simply will not hold still. They vibrate, no matter how hard one tries to hold them still nor how long you look. In addition, in the presence of the original painting, one has the illusion of color in the apparent troughs of the waves. The painting is entitled "Fall" and was completed in 1963.