parisThe walk over was amazing. The Tate Modern is smack on the Southbank, and we stuck to the waterfront for most of it. We had been enjoying sun that had lasted since Friday. The great thing about London weather is that I’m so much more appreciative of the sun when it finally shows itself.
Walking along the riverbank, there are fabulous views of St. Pauls across the water. I have yet to go to St. Pauls (the churches of London are represented in my rambles by Westminster Cathedral and Westminster Abby thus far,) but my friend said that the interior was gorgeous, and while it cost eight pounds to go in, you could get a good feel for it by just standing in the foyer. I put St. Pauls on my mental to-do list, but I have to say I always get a funny feeling visiting churches as tourist destinations. I think it’s mostly atheist anxiety, but there’s something that makes me uneasy about reducing places of worship to a pleasant afternoon and pretty architecture.
St. Pauls and Black Friars Bridge from the South
I have no such qualms, however, about marveling at the architecture of a museum, and the Tate is an impressive structure. I’m not a big fan of Modern Art, but the building itself made the trip worth it. It’s a massive brick structure that reminds me of an old warehouse. While not exactly ornate, it conveys a sense of gravitas that actually had me excited to see the works it sheltered.
The actual exhibition that we were going to see was called Jungles in Paris, and was a collection of late 19th century paintings by French artist Henri Rousseau. As the title suggests, Rousseau’s main interest was in portraying dream like images of the jungle and the tropics. I recognized a couple of the images from the jackets of Anne Rice novels that I used to stock at the bookstore in Baltimore where I worked two summers ago, but other than that I was unfamiliar with Rousseau and his work. I have to say I found the show diverting, but not moving. This may not be the fault of Rousseau, however, but the fact that it was Sunday, and the exhibit was crammed to the gills. It was difficult to get a good look at the paintings because of the sheer volume of people who decided to spend their Sunday at the Tate. To add to this, a large proportion of my fellow art lovers were children. To be fair, they were for the most part well behaved, but there was something so incongruent about seeing kids running around a modern art museum. I could understand taking a child of six or seven, but there were so many two and three year olds there that I had to wonder what the parents expected them to get out of it.
“Look,” I heard one woman say to her not more than three year old son, “Doesn’t that tiger remind you of the film we saw?”
“No,” replied the boy. At first I thought maybe he was a fan of the Jungle Book or Tarzan, but she was pointing to a graphic painting of a tiger eating an antelope; the last image I expected to resemble the dancing bears and panthers of my youth.
After the Rousseau we tried to see the rest of the museum, but found that our tolerance for experimental film and blank canvases was limited. The weather had turned cold when we got back outside, and we ducked into a coffee shop for over priced lattes and reflections. Afterwards, we both had work to do and went back to our respective flats where I settled down to an evening of Moll Flanders.
Despite the crowdedness and the pretension the Tate was fun. I’ll have to go back on a weekday when it’s less crowded. Until then, Defoe consumes me.
Crowd at the Rousseau Show
Art Installation at the Tate Modern
