EASTER IN ENGLAND / LONDON AND ITS MUSUEMS, MARCH 24th - APRIL 1st, 2005

Frank loves visiting art museums and this was one of London’s main attractions for him. I enjoy museums too, within limits. I have an affliction, or perhaps it’s more of a syndrome, brought on by MUSEUM OVERLOAD. It’s not pretty. So my rule is museums are limited to one a day. And Frank, in order not to forego my companionship, has learned to comply with this. So here we were in London with scores of museums to choose from and three days available for visiting.

The first choice was a no-brainer. The Tate Modern has only been around since 2000 so we had never been there. It’s housed in a former power station, not so very attractive on the outside but well suited for its purpose on the inside.


                                                                              
A gray day and an ugly building, but at least the trees were in bloom.
                                                                              
And of course, they have a world class collection of modern art of the past 100 years. Plenty of Impressionists, Expressionists, Pop Art, Dadaists, etc. to admire, mostly arranged according to topic instead of by artist or chronologically, e.g. Utopia, Inner Worlds, Modern Life. I guess that’s as good a way as any to organize a museum.

I don’t like a lot of very modern art, or it may be that I just don’t get the point. When we went to the Guggenheim in New York I really felt like they were pulling my leg. I wish someone who understood what modern art is all about would take me by the hand some day and explain it to me. There was currently a big exhibition of Beuys and he is a case in point. I just don’t get it. However, there were a few very modern pieces that I liked very much. One work by Tony Cragg covered a whole wall and was called Britain seen from the North . There was the silhouette of a man on the left looking at a map of England lying on its side so that north was left and not up. (I hope that makes sense. If not, click on the link and have a look at it. Do it anyway because it's neat.) The map itself was formed of hundreds of objects that the artist had found in the streets – bottle tops, a child’s boot, chewing gum, pieces of glass, cigarette packages, a comb, etc. From a distance it looked entirely different from the close up view.

The other piece I really liked was Scrapheap Services by Michael Landy, a whole room with a big machine for grinding up superfluous people – the elderly, the unemployed, the mentally ill. Little cutout figures lay on the floor all over the room and in a pile under the spout of the grinder. The explanation was that the artist was making a commentary on the politics of Maggie Thatcher. As you can guess, I can relate to art with a political message. I had more difficulties with Dali’s Lobster Telephone but at least you can have a lot of fun interpreting it. And then there is Yves Klein and his work IKB 79, 79th in a series of 194 blue monochrome canvases. He even patented the color. And he sold them at different prices because essentially they were all different, just not to the eye. Okaaaay.


                                                                            
This is a view of the Millineum Bridge from the Tate Modern.
It's fun to stroll across the Thames. That's St. Paul's in the background.

                               The second museum we decided to visit, mainly because it was so easily accessible and we had never been there either, was The National Gallery, which is right on Trafalgar Square. They had a special Caravaggio exhibition in one wing that Frank would really like to have seen but you had to get there very early or the tickets were already sold out. I was much more interested in seeing the permanent collection and in the end that’s what we did. The National Gallery has a fantastic website where you can view almost all of the pictures in their vast collection and read about the picture itself and the artist. If you have a free hour or two visit it and browse through the museum. (The Tate also has almost everything available on their site, but it’s a lot more difficult to navigate.) We spent several hours there with audio equipment hung around our necks and earphones on our heads. Whenever you wanted to learn more about a picture all you had to do was punch a number into the device and an art expert would tell you all about the picture and the cultural background. Having read and seen Girl with a Pearl Earring we made a point of seeing the two Vermeers. Two doesn’t sound like much, but there are only about thirty still in existence. The museum and the audio equipment are free, they only ask for a donation. Needles to say, we spent hours wandering around until our legs were about to give out.

Our friend Pam from California highly recommended the Victoria and Albert Museum to us, so that was our choice on our last day in London. Wow, a museum where they let you take pictures! And such fun things to photograph! The huge building is full of some rather strange collections. I think Albert decided to clean out the attics of all the royal palaces in Britain and then put the objects in some kind of order. There was a huge room or two filled with silver things and I found the perfect gift for Frank’s next birthday, don’t you agree?


It's big enough to be a baby's bathtub and at first I thought it might be used for christenings.
No, it's a WINE COOLER! For all that champagne you need for any party.

                                       
And then there was this chair, which Frank liked a lot.
                                                                                                             
                                                                                                               
                                                                                                               
Wouldn't this look lovely in our living room?
                                                                                                               

                                                                                                             
                                                                                                             
But my prize for the ugliest piece of furniture goes to this one.
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
                                                                              
Somehow I can't imagine a room where this would look good. (It has doors which you can't tell in this picture.)
                                                                              
They had a whole section on fashion with a lot of interesting clothes on display. How about this for your next ball?

                                                                              
I wonder how you would pack something like this, or climb into a coach. I guess you'd be limited to wearing it in your home palace.
                                                                              But I guess my favourite object was this one, Tippo’s Tiger, from the end of the 18th century, carved in wood for the Sultan of Mysore (love that name!). It even has a music (!?!) device that sounds like tiger roars and British colonial soldier moans.

                                                                            
I guess I'm just a sucker for art with a political message.
                                                                              So what else did we do while we were in London? We strolled through Covent Gardens, went to Border’s bookstore, took a long walk through Hyde Park and admired the London Eye, but only from below. I could never have talked Frank into going on it with me and the lines were too long anyway.

                                                                              
I bet the view is fantastic.
                                                                              
And then, on our very last evening (before the last morning when we had to get up at 4:30 am to get to the airport) we went to a concert in the Royal Festival Hall (Queen Elizabeth Hall) and heard the Tokyo String Quartet play Mozart’s String Quartet in B flat major, KV589, Takemitsu’s A Way A Lone (written in 1980 especially for this quartet) and Beethoven’s String Quartet in E flat major Op. 127.

                                                                              
Frank was happy! And I enjoyed it too.
                                                                              
I think I will have a much easier time in the future convincing Frank that we should visit England again!