Shocker: Darius visits museum

Today I visited the last of the museums in London that I plan to. I had contemplated visiting more, but it appears that a few that I would be interested are closed. This is fine; I’ll take it easier tomorrow, and my legs will thank me for it.

I structured my museum-visiting, throughout the trip, to visit two close museums; it happened that I visited more prestigious institutions first. So I wasn’t really expecting impressive things when I visited the Cortauld Gallery and National Portrait Gallery.

The Cortauld Gallery is curiously located. Sitting on the Strand, a street near the Thames that combines old government buildings, gleaming business high-rises and various holes-in-the-walls, the Gallery is withdrawn from the street.

The first thing that you see when you enter the building that the Gallery is housed in is a large courtyard dominated by a fountain in the center, ringed by metal tables. Then you search for the Gallery; some signs speak of a “Somerset House” while others speak of “Cortauld Gallery.” You figure it out in time; Cortauld Gallery is a small section of the large, grand building surrounding the courtyard. The grand building, it resembles Versailles in that it has two wings surrounding a central courtyard. Courtauld Gallery is located at the corner of the wing that is closest to the street. So after you realize the location of Cortauld Gallery within the complex, you then realize that you have to pay for entrance, not a ‘suggested donation’ like all the other British galleries you’ve been to. Nor does a ticket cover the whole gallery; you have to buy even more to access the special exhibitions. But you’ve come here for the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art, which is your favored period, so you pay up.

Let it be known that that decision was the right one; I’m very glad I paid up. There are some small rooms with Renaissance art that are merely OK, but the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist stuff is truly remarkable. Cortauld, blessed with both money and taste, assembled a great collection. This gallery is probably most accessible to the novice or casual art-watcher, as virtually every piece is a master’s. To name names: Degas (he has a whole room!), Monet (especially Antibes), Manet (a few that I’ve seen in textbooks, like the Card Players or A Bar at the Folies-Bergere), Cezanne, Seurat, Gaugin, Picasso, Van Gogh (including the one with his bandaged ear), and I’m probably forgetting a few, but there you go…The paintings that aren’t by highly famous artists are also quite good. While not quite as large as the more famous museum’s collections, the Cortauld’s collection more than makes up for it with the quality of its pieces.

After that, on a whim, I visited the National Portrait Gallery. When I read its description in a guidebook, I can’t say I was too enthused: it’s a collection of portraits of British worthies. The guidebook was not that interested, and it showed through in its writing. After visiting, I’m surprised as to why. Yes, I can see why the really old stuff is boring: who really cares about the ninth Earl of Shaftesbury? Most of the stuff before 1900 is inaccessible to anyone who isn’t a major art history buff or who doesn’t know British history (beyond platitudes, I mean. I learned about rotten boroughs and the Chartists, but I can’t say my knowledge is particularly deep.) But after 1900, two things happen. First, I began recognizing the subjects of the pictures (oh! Virginia Woolf! oh! Paul McCartney!). Second, even for the people I didn’t recognize, the art deepened and changed in an interesting way.

One of the most important recent conflicts in art history, to this uninformed mind, is the conflict between representing the subject as it is and expressing some deeper emotional truth via strange stuff (colors that aren’t there, or squares, or random splatters, etc.). But portraiture forces you to do both. If you weren’t representational, no one would recognize that you just painted something of Queen Elizabeth II; if you didn’t express some deeper emotional truth, then why not just look at the picture in the tabloids? So you have to mind both worlds, to great results; even though I didn’t recognize many of the subjects, they nonetheless projected great gravity and emotion. So I saw some very interesting portraits, including a man with so much energy that his limbs burst from the frame. The other, one of Harold Pinter, summed him up so well: it was a precise painting of his features, against eerie red sky and roiling green-gray sea.

So both of these museums were underappreciated, I felt, by those guidebooks and prestige. Here’s my museums power rankings:

1) British Museum
2) Cortauld
3) Tate Modern
4) Tate Britain
5) National Gallery
6) Victoria & Albert
7) National Portrait

To be clear, all of these museums are worth visiting; it’s just the order that I liked them in.

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Comparing the names of businesses in Britain to the names of businesses in the US is very interesting, although I won’t try and overinterpret my observations. In both countries, there are names from abstract concepts, i.e. SuperMart or Lilywhite’s (think Dick’s Sporting Goods) and the like. In the US, there are a lot of businesses named after individuals, i.e. Wegman’s or Ford’s or something like that. In Britain, I can only think of one or two business named after a single entity—Sainsbury’s, the supermarket chain, and a few other small businesses. The plurality of business names, especially the upscale ones, are after pairs of entities: Marks & Spencer, Hawes & Curtis, Crabtree & Evelyn (which I believe was originally British), and so on.


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Jaywalking and traffic are unusually easy in London. While the congestion is worse than a bad cold, I rarely hear car horns blown or expletives hurled. Jaywalking, too, is far easier due to a critical London innovation: the pedestrian island. Halfway through virtually every wide London street is an island where you can cool your heels. Hence you can jaywalk in easily-chewable stages. Furthermore, even if you screw up, drivers are unusually tolerant and observant (not that I’ve screwed up; this is merely my observation. Honest, really.)

The best summation of both of these phenomena is something I saw today: I was waiting at the Hyde Park Corner. London is a city so grand that its roundabouts are monuments: there’s a large, Roman-style triumphal arch with horses crowning it, surrounded by war monuments. At any rate, I was waiting there instead of jaywalking because traffic was unusually heavy; also it was a major intersection (on the other hand, I would estimate that I jaywalk the majority of the time I don’t have the light). Anyway, a large black man with a booming, sonorous voice screamed, “WAIT! WAIT! DON’T DRIVE!” while rushing onto the road. He bent down, plucked something-or-other off the road, then rushed back to the island across from me. In New York, this would’ve earned swear words, beeps, and quite probably injury. In the here and now, he earned merely an exasperated look from a cabbie.

“What just happened?” I asked an onlooker.

“Looks like he dropped his mobile,” he responded. We shared a chuckle because it seemed so crazy. But, then again, he had his cell phone (or mobile, if you must have it that way. Actually, mobile does have a certain ring to it. No pun intended.)

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BOOK REVIEW: THE MASTER AND MARGHARITA

Yesterday I finished The Master and Margharita by Mikhail Bulgakov, and I meant to review it then. But I forgot, so I’m doing it now. The book is set in Soviet Russia, and concerns a surprise visit by the Devil in the guise of a foreign professor “in the black arts.” He terrorizes Moscow, and the literary community in particular before…well, I couldn’t give it away.

Simultaneously a funny book with many witty asides, and a very serious book, The Master and Margharita is well worth reading.

One of the principal lines of thought regarding the book that I’d like to discuss briefly are its themes. Most suggest that the book involves itself principally with art and its nature; the people who are terrorized are often held up as evidence.

But I disagree; I think the book is about randomness, and the folly of trying to defeat or rationalize it. The artists of this book believe they have the world figured out. Not for nothing does the book begin with an editor lecturing a poet on the correct history of Jesus’ life. But the devil disrupts all that. The human temptation, in the face of disaster, is to defy it and explain it. Some disasters—disease, say—are amenable to this kind of response. Others are not. There will always be problems in life that are inexplicable and invincible. They must be accepted. That’s what the successful characters do, at least. The trouble is in identifying what these invincible problems. Surely some diseases were thought to be insolvable for the longest time, until they were. It is probably best, therefore, to adopt the contradictory attitude of accepting its existence and somehow defeating it.

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The biggest news of the day, wiping out this mysterious “Mandy” mystery story that I haven’t put the effort in to finding out about, is that the Chelsea FC (Football Club)’s manager was just fired and given 20 million pounds for the trouble. Everyone’s got this as front-page, top-fold. I mention this not out of particular interest about the story, merely to note how quickly it was the story of DNA testing and shattered lives to Ohmigod! He just got fired! That’s the modern media culture for you.

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Glancing at a Gap storefront window today, I noticed that the British Gap sells different clothing than the American Gap. This particular one sells jodhpurs and jackets with mandarin collars. I guess the imperial era is back after all! (I did like the jacket with the mandarin collar.)

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COUNTS:
ALL THE SAME AS YESTERDAY.

*****

The past two days, an unusual number of people have begun asking me for directions, and a surprising number of times, I have been able to guide them to the proper destination. This never happens in Rochester (either part; people rarely ask me for directions, and when they do, I never know what they’re asking about.)