MY MUSEOLOGY

I visited the Matisse at Tate Modern for a second time last night, which I'm glad about. Last week I ran in before closing one weeknight because I was prejudiciously convinced that it wasn't an exhibition for me, but I'd felt since opening that it was something of an obligation at least to nod to it, given the name (Matisse!) and the creeping realisation that some things in life are singular and may in fact be seen or missed, not recouped. Why glad? Glad because it made me happy, and I was happy appreciating it alone with the audio guide and the relatively few anonymous participants - some alone, some in groupings - towards the later part of a late-summer evening when the humidity has passed in London but the weather hasn't approached anything like cold. There undoubtedly is a magic to the contrast of colour against a white ground, and this enlivened me, too, along with the irreality of the colour combinations, the shapes, the adjacencies of motifs, the scale and r...

[Digital media consistently use images from Twombly's Untitled/ Bacchus series as illustrative content to accompany stories about the money dispute with the Twombly Foundation. They put me in mind of the violent sea (an unsurprising association if one considers the artist's Hero and Leandro inter alia), turned red like that horrific scene in Lord of the Flies following the fall of Piggy, or photographs I think I remember of unreal-red, carmine seas, dyed with the blood of whale-hunting. Additions to the dispute story have been in the press today, and so I think the world's emphasising value .] Courtauld's Picasso exhibition is tiny, comprised of two rooms or a vestibule and a room in which are hung 19 or so paintings. The arrangement is systematic and logical, although I must confess to having been influenced by the large-print booklet of the painting labels, which I always pick up because I feel awkward standing too long trying to read and consider what they say wh...

Writing without a brief is liberating, but I wonder if it's not also indulgent.  By 'Auto-Impression' I meant a sketch of my reactions to the Ladder of Escape , seeing it a second time round.  But the value of that is questionable: if I want readers to derive something other than my opinions from this blog, it has to be my opinions framed within intentions .  To this end, I shall write about the growing sense of liberation one can discern in the Miró exhibition's paintings. The precision of the architectural depiction in Mont-roig, the Church and the Village and The Farm became startlingly apparent to me today.  Having woken up to this, I think I started to find Miró's attention to detail and meticulousness more prominent, especially with regard to the Constellations series, but the pastel drawings and 'neons' on copper are also treated with an artistic exactitude of some force.  If one considers The Ladder of Escape (1940), the way the figures' eye...