MY MUSEOLOGY

While it's easily acknowledged that history has relevance for the present, and that the work of the past concerning the cultural and artistic productions bequeathed to us still carry value despite and because of their age, it's nonetheless also easily acknowledged that engagement with the past, with that which has gone, is no easy matter. Cue, then, the curatorial turn with exhibitions such as Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art and Beyond Caravaggio , both at London's National Gallery in 2016. In both we see the desire to demonstrate the relevance to our contemporary sensibilities of 'old names', a necessary abandonment of monographic technical explorations of art, and the excitement to be found in their work. So when I visit Beyond Caravaggio  later this year I expect to see appropriate references to the spontaneity and momentary immediacy of his works--that freeze-frame urgency and vivacity--and the dramatic use of light and shadow, for such references to tec...

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...