Started off with bacon sandwiches at the Madeira Café (http://www.madeiralondon.co.uk/), unusually crowded this Tuesday morning. Over Lambeth Bridge and so back up river to the Tate to make our way through the Barlow constructions first seen on or around 14th April, on which my opinion has stayed the same. Not without interest but perhaps not quite what one expects to find in the Duveen Sculpture Gallery, in which I dimly remember seeing the marble statuary of yesteryear. I wonder what Duveen, the Saatchi of his day, would have made of it.
Pushed on into the folk art to find an eclectic mixture of stuff, in all shapes and sizes.
There was a lot of splendid quilting, mostly quite unlike anything I have seen before and some of it involving a prodigious amount of work, a lot of it by servicemen. It seems that the War Department (or perhaps the War Office, heritage variations of our present Ministry of Defence) encouraged the chaps to soak up the time they spent waiting doing this sort of thing, rather than soaking up the booze. The quilt illustrated is about eight feet square and was made by our chaps in the Crimea during the war there (the mid 19th century one that is), with the illustration being lifted from the Tate's web site. It usually lives in Tunbridge Wells and it would interesting to know how it wound up there. Why not Aldershot?
A room full of ships' figureheads, only a few of which were busty ladies. The largest one, maybe 12 feet high, came from a ship built in India and, when the ship was broken up, was presented to a retiring admiral, presumably to decorate his garden in Surrey. Would I need planning permission to erect the thing in our front garden?
A room full of copies of old master paintings executed in needlework. They were very clever and were the work of one Mary Linwood (1755-1845) who made a lot of money out of it in her day, despite being excluded from the newly invented Royal Academy of Arts on the grounds that copies of old masters did not constitute mastery, did not exhibit the originality deemed necessary in proper Art. The book of the show includes some solemn tut-tutting about this, but I think the excluders were right. The copies are curious but they are not art.
A lot of shop signs which I did not find very interesting; for that sort of thing one might be better off in Paris. Or in Norwich: a lot of the stuff on show at the Tate came from the Castle Museum at Norwich, a fine example of a provincial museum, one which we have visited once or twice ourselves and which is also known for its world class collection of teapots. See http://www.museums.norfolk.gov.uk/Visit_Us/Norwich_Castle/index.htm.
I was amused by a picture of Hammersmith Bridge on a boat race day, with people perched all along the suspension cables. They had clearly never heard of health and safety and I dare say a reasonable number fell off and hurt themselves. And lots of other stuff - but if you want to see it, you need to get a move on as the show closes in a couple of days.
Lunch in the members room upstairs, pleasantly quiet and taken with a pleasant half bottle of Gavi di Gavi (bottle labelled entirely in Italian, not a speck of English. Very cool) but let down by the poor quality of the bread.
Back home, being invited to comment on our visit and having fought my way into the Tate's Facebook page (being slightly put off along the way by a confusingly presented prompt for my password. Was someone trying to steal it? How can you be sure that someone asking for your password is who they purport to be?), I found various rather acid comments about the lack of representativeness (or should I say representativity?) of the show, comments which I thought were rather unfair. Folk art is a huge and grey area, out in the suburbs of art proper, and in a show such as this one cannot expect more than a taster, a few bits and bobs. Thinking back on it, I associate to folk music; attractive at first acquaintance but with nothing like the staying power of real music: one quickly tires of it.
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