Sigmar Polke at Tate Modern

Tate Modern is now showing the retrospective Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010, previously at MoMA, New York. Polke, who died in 2010, was born in Silesia in 1941, fleeing west with his family as the Red Army advanced in 1945. In 1953 they left East Germany and settled in Düsseldorf. By the time he was a student alongside Gerhard Richter and others, the German economic recovery (Wirtschaftswunder) was under way and he responded to the rise of they saw as an American-style consumer culture with pop art works like The Sausage Eater (1963, Der Wurstesser, below left) and “raster drawings” made up of dots like Portrait of Lee Harvey Oswald (1963, below right):

The dot drawings were far less mechanistic in appearance than Lichtenstein’s and part of a social commentary (Capitalist Realism) on German affluence and tourism, for example Girlfriends (1965-66, Freundinnen, below left), and fabric paintings like The Palm Painting (1964, Das Palmenbild, below right):

Also in the 1960s he took to criticising modern art in its various forms, whether abstract or conceptual – Solutions V (1967, Lösungen V, below left), even ridiculing artists in general - Polke as Astronaut (1968, Polke als Astronaut, below right):

During the 1970s Polke experimented with hallucinogenic drugs and went on the hippie trail through what is now called AfPak, and then further afield, making films (there are three at the Tate) and colouring in photographic images - Untitled (Quetta, Pakistan), (1974-1978 , below top)- but also painting works like Supermarkets (1976, below lower) which are a continuation of earlier preoccupations:

After the 1980s Polke began experimenting with unusual pigments – dye extracted from snails or heat and humidity sensitive substances as he used at the Venice Biennale in1986. A raster painting Police Pig (1986, Polizeischwein, below left), was hung outside the German pavilion. At that time he also made a series of Watchtower paintings which evoke both divided Germany and the Nazi camps, Watchtower (1984, Hochsitz, below right):

In the 1990s he experimented even more widely with soot paintings, distorted photocopying , resins, the effect of radiation on photographic materials, 3-D lenses and holograms, all explored in the Tate show. At the end of all this in 2007 he created The Illusionist (below), a work which I will not attempt to interpret but instead reproduce what Tate Modern had to say about it:

Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963–2010 continues in London until 8 February 2015 and will be at Museum Ludwig in Cologne from 14 March to 5 July.

I have now posted here about all three of the most highly regarded German post-War painters, Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer being the others.  For what it’s worth, my personal preference is for Richter.

Richard Tuttle at Tate Modern

This piece has been commissioned by Tate Modern for the Turbine Hall and will be on display until 6 April 2015.

It complements the survey of Richard Tuttle’s work, I Don’t Know, Or The Weave of Textile Language at the Whitechapel Gallery until 14 December.

Kazimir Malevich at Tate Modern

Malevich at Tate Modern is a major and chronologically-organised retrospective of one of the most influential painters of the last century, Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935). It is a moot point whether being born in Kiev to Polish parents makes him a Russian or a Polish artist or even a Ukrainian one, but his major achievements as a pioneer of Modernism were realised in Moscow and St Petersburg (Petrograd). It was in the capital when in his twenties he was introduced to French modern art and his Self-Portrait, 1908-1910 (left) shows the influence of artists like Gaugin and Matisse.

In 1909 Marinetti had published the Futurist Manifesto and the Russian avant garde response attempted to blend Futurism with traditional Russian rural themes, for example Morning in the Village After a Snowstorm (below left) and The Woodcutter (below right) both 1912:

By 1914 Malevich had adopted Cubo-Futurism showing the additional influence of Cubism in works like An Englishman in Moscow (below):

He then moved on to more abstract forms, with the first version of the famous Black Square being painted in 1915. A 1923 version is on show, the original being too fragile to go on loan. Malevich has partially recreated the Last Exhibition of Futurist Painting 0.10 (Zero-Ten) which was held in Petrograd in 1916 (below top). Some of the works are lost but nine out of the twelve known to survive are on show (below lower).

This exhibition marked the launch of Suprematism which Malevich saw as art with forms having no link to nature but being an exercise in colour and geometry, like Suprematist Painting(with Black trapezium and Red Square), 1915 below and Supremus No.55, 1916 (detail in the poster above).

He would take this to the extreme of painting in white with very simple shapes and then turned to experimenting with architectural models and lecturing. However, Malevich’s career was disrupted by events leading up to the Russian revolution in 1917 and the following civil war. In the early years of the Soviet regime, Suprematism and its associated architectural movement Constructivism were accepted, but with Stalin came disfavour and a preference for Social Realism.

In the late 1920s Malevich returned to painting in a style more acceptable to the authorities. Could Head of a Peasant, 1928-29 been an influence on Abram Games’ Festival of Britain poster in 1951, (below left and right)?
 

In the years before his death he produced figurative portraiture as in his Renaissance-style Self-Portrait of

1933 (right). After 1935 his work was kept from public view until the 1950s. As late as 1971, when the British Council put on the exhibition Art in Revolution: Soviet art and design since 1917 at the Hayward Gallery, the Soviet Ministry of Culture, a major source of the exhibits, demanded and achieved the removal of all works by Malevich.  Black Square would not be seen until the 1980s.

Malevich continues until 26 October. The high standard of the catalogue matches that of the exhibition. 

The exhibition was at the Stedilijk Museum, Amsterdam, October 2013 to February 2014 and at the Bundeskunsthalle (Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany), Bonn, March to June 2014.

Matisse Cut-Outs at Tate Modern

Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs at Tate Modern has been such a well-publicised show since it opened in April that there is little for me to add here. Matisse (1869-1954) was suffering from ill-health in the 1940s to such an extent that he had to give up painting. He turned to mounting cut-out pieces of gouached paper (découpages in French) , a technique which he had previously used to work out arrangements for paintings, as in Still Life with Shell, (1940, Nature morte avec coquillage, below top as a cut-out, below lower as an oil):

This is the starting point of the exhibition and is followed by The Lyre (La lyre, 1946, below left), as the first intentioned Matisse cut-out – later comes one of his last paintings, Interior with Black Fern (Intérieur à la fougère noire, 1948, below right):

Then comes the original set of 20 cut-out maquettes, mostly of circus subjects, which Matisse made during the Occupation and  hung above the corresponding pages of the art book, Jazz, eventually published by Tériade in 1947; The Horse/, the Rider and the Clown, plate 5 (Le cheval, l’ecuyere et le clown, 1943 below left) and Icarus, plate 8 (Icare, 1943/44 below right):

It is interesting to see the flattening of appearance and colour shift which resulted from the stencil-printing (“… the transposition, which removes their sensitivity” as Matisse put it).

There are of the order of 100 works in this show. Among the highlights are magazine and book covers, Cahiers d’Art, 1936 (below top) and Henri-Cartier Bresson’s The Decisive Moment, 1952 below lower): 

... the designs for the Dominican Chapel at Vence (Alpes Maritimes department, SE France), Zulma (1950, below left) and, rather smaller, some of Matisse’s best-known images such as the Blue Nudes, (all four brought together), (Nu bleu II, 1952, below right):

... and Tate’s Snail (Escargot, 195x, below left) and The Sheaf (La grebe, 1953), below right):

This is a spectacular exhibition which, as one of its curators points out, is unlikely to be repeated and it has an appropriately fine catalogue. Visitors should be able to take away lasting impressions of Matisse’s mastery of form and colour, the latter being particularly welcome during a disappointing London summer and probably even more so during New York’s next winter - Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs will be at Museum of Modern Art from 14 October to 15 February. It closes at Tate Modern on 7 September. Most, but not all, works appear in both London and New York - exceptions include The Swimming Pool (La Piscine, 1952, below) which has not left MoMA – but it is 1.85m x 16.4m:

Radev Revisited

Two years ago a post appeared here about The Radev Collection: from Pissarro to Picasso at the Victoria Art Gallery in Bath, an exhibition during the Collection’s 2011-13 UK tour. Now on at the same location is The Radev Show 2, and again visitors can be sure to find something they will like. There was some background to the Collection’s formation in the previous post, so I won’t repeat it here.

Some of the works on show last time have come back to Bath, like Modigliani’s Portrait of Soutine and Jawlensky’s Blaue Strasse c1916 (below, left and right):

Others are having a first showing: Vanessa Bell, Vase, Hat and Flowers, 1910 and a couple of Duncan Grant ceramic table-tops c 1950 (below, top and lower):

One of the originators of the Collection was Eardley Knollys, co-partner in the Storan Gallery in the inter-war period. Two pictures now in the Tate Gallery which were purchased from the Storan originally have been leant for this show, Maurice Utrillo’s Eglise de St Hilaire (Church at St Hilaire, c 1911, below left) and Chaïm Soutine’s La Route de la colline (Vence) (The Road up the Hill, c1924, below right):

However, as in 2012, most of the works in the exhibition are by British artists (more Ben Nicholson and Alfred Wallis!) and, as I said then, “Anyone interested in British 20th century art should try to see it” – again, possibly. The Radev Show 2 ends on 31 August. There might be a clue as to why the Radev Collection has returned to Bath towards the end of this post.

Paul Klee at Tate Modern

A post here last year about the Bauhaus exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery mentioned three painters who had spent time in Weimar and Dessau: Paul Citroën, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. Searching on Google, I can find no evidence of a recent retrospective of Citroën’s non-photographic work but Kandinsky is widely exhibited (eg currently at the Guggenheim in New York), and Klee almost as much (eg earlier this year in Rome). Nonetheless, a full retrospective is always worth seeing for any artist and The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible at Tate Modern is the first large-scale showing for Klee in London for over 10 years.

Klee was born in Bern in 1879 and moved to Munich to study painting when he was 19. He began to establish himself as an artist in his early thirties and the Tate exhibition shows 128 examples of his work from 1912 until his death in 1940. Klee produced and carefully catalogued about 10,000 paintings, drawings and other works. In 1911 Klee met Jawlensky, Marc, Kandinsky and others and joined the Blaue Reiter group (Landscape with Flags 1915, left). In 1914 he travelled to Tunisia and its colour, light and landscape would influence his subsequent work. From 1916 to 1918 Klee served with the German air force. His 1920 Aerial Combat (below left) is in sardonic contrast to Nevinson’s Futurist Spiral Descent 1915, seen recently at Dulwich, while his experience of the chaos of postwar Germany reflected in Memorial to the Kaiser (also 1920, below right) shares the viewpoint of his contemporaries like Grosz. Both these works were produced by the oil-transfer method, tracing over painted paper then transferring onto a blank sheet.

Klee joined the staff of the Bauhaus in 1921 at Weimar, moving in 1926 to Dessau. In 1922 in Berlin he encountered Russian constructivism in the form of works by Malevich, Tatlin and others. Klee’s work in his Bauhaus years involved colour investigation in both constructions and imaginative surreal pieces (Pictorial Architecture Red, Yellow, Blue 1923 and Around the Fish 1926, below left and right). In 1930 his work was exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and that year he left the Bauhaus to teach in Dusseldorf. In 1933 Hitler became Chancellor of Germany and within a few months the Bauhaus closed. Klee and his family left for Switzerland in December. In poor health after 1935, he died in 1940, the same year as his father.

Brian Sewell in the London Evening Standard liked the Tate’s catalogue but had reservations about both the exhibition and the artist, as did Andrew Lambirth in the Spectator, although of a different kind. Klee described himself as possessed by colour and since reproductions fail to do justice to the subtlety with which he used it, the opportunity to visit The EY Exhibition: Paul Klee – Making Visible and view source works is worth taking. The exhibition continues until 9 March 2014.

Lichtenstein at Tate Modern

Tate Modern’s Lichtenstein: A Retrospective is a show that does what it says on the Warholian can. Roy Lichtenstein (1923-57) was the other central figure of American Pop Art in the 1960s and 70s and one of the best known artists of the last century. After showings in Chicago and Washington, 125 of his works, rumoured to be a worth a billion US$, have arrived at Tate Modern for an exhibition which is mostly chronological. So we see his first experiments with Ben-Day dots and then the renditions of comic book images writ large in blocks of primary colour. A roomful of some of the most familiar of these grouped as War and Romance include Whaam! (the Tate’s own) and Los! (below) and Oh, Jeff … I Love You, Too…But… 1964 in the banner above.

It is intriguing to see the original sources of these images, not least because of the opportunity to appreciate their size and construction. Two things struck me about reproductions of Lichtenstein’s works which, inevitably, are very much smaller than the originals. Firstly, in the 1960s he used a very pale grey ground which usually appears as white, and secondly, reproductions often fail to differentiate adjacent dark blues and blacks. The paintings are usually described as oil and magna on canvas, Magna being the brand name for the acrylic resin paint used by Lichtenstein for the broad black lines which delineate the monotone areas of his pictures.

After establishing his style, Lichtenstein produced variations on it for decades which are shown in the rooms which follow. His reworkings of Picasso, Mondrian and others, the massive depictions of artists’ studios (Matisse above), the late nudes (below) and the Chinese landscapes, all of which are on a near-white ground, are interesting to see but lack the innovatory impact experienced at War and Romance. The show ends where it might have begun with some of Lichtenstein’s early abstract expressionist pieces alongside small late paintings.

My only reservation about this show is the size of the captions on the wall adjacent to each canvas. These have been confined to a space about 8cm by 10 cm. By contrast, Nudes with a Beach Ball 1964 (above) is 301 cm by 272.4 cm, and so has over 1000 times the area of its caption. The positions which the viewer will find suitable for reading one and for appreciating the other are several metres apart. Now that many gallery-goers carry smart phones, is it not possible to design an app for them which, by accessing local wi-fi perhaps, delivers the appropriate captions to their screens? Then there would be no need to trot forward and back, the risk of collisions with other visitors would be eliminated, and, best of all, there would be more time to look at the pictures.

Lichtenstein: A Retrospective continues until 27 May.

Tate Modern: The Tanks, Hirst and Munch

A belated post-Olympics visit to a relatively uncrowded Tate Modern with three things to see, in ascending order:

The Tanks

When Tate Modern was created by the transformation of the old Bankside Power Station, the underground oil storage tanks remained in place but no longer had a use. In Tate’s own words: “they have now being transformed into some of the most exciting new spaces for art in the world, The Tanks, the world’s first museum galleries permanently dedicated to exhibiting live art, performance, installation and film works”. Fifteen Weeks of Art in Action in The Tanks started on 18 July and is far better seen and experienced than described, but a listing of the events up to 18 October is available here.

The development of The Tanks has been the first phase of the Tate Modern Project which it is hoped to complete by 2016 at a capital cost of £215 million, three quarters of which has been raised.




Damien Hirst


The first floor gallery of Tate Modern is given over to a major survey, Damien Hirst, an artist whose work is so well-known as to need little description. There are, as to be expected, spot paintings, cabinets full of medicines and other medicalia, a maggot-fly life-cycle piece sustained by a rotting cow’s head which promises to leave an indelible souvenir on Tate’s floor, longitudinally-bisected animals, butterflies both alive and mounted, and, more revolting than anything else for a non-smoker, arrangements of cigarette ends. The pretentiousness of the titles of his works never ceases to impress: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (the pickled shark) – oh yes, what about a pathologist? – and The Acquired Inability to Escape (cigarette ends), though Crematorium (more cigarette ends) is relatively obvious.

Two items in the hand-out given to visitors struck me:

"In I Am Become Death, Shatterer of Worlds 2006, one of Hirst's largest butterfly paintings, kaleidoscopic mandala-like forms recall Buddhist and Hindu traditions. The title is taken from the Bhagavad Gita, a part of the ancient Sanskrit epic, the Mahabharata."

On 16 July 1945 the first test of a nuclear weapon was carried out in New Mexico. Robert Oppenheimer, who led the scientific effort at Los Alamos during the Manhattan Project, said that witnessing the explosion had reminded him of this same line which he quoted as: Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds. It would be interesting to know if Hirst was aware of this. Coincidentally, the test was codenamed Trinity and one of Hirst’s works in the exhibition is Trinity – Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology 2000.

Also:

"The sculpture Loving in a World of Desire 1996 offers a counterpoint to the rotating spins. Here a giant beach ball hovers above a coloured box. Suspended on a jet of air, the sphere flutters over the structure in an interplay of precariousness and balance, and evokes the title’s themes of love and desire."

I’m not sure what exactly is meant by ‘suspended on’ or ‘an interplay of precariousness and balance’. But this is part of how they explain Bernoulli’s equation at Princeton:

A table tennis ball placed in a vertical air jet becomes suspended in the jet, and it is very stable to small perturbations in any direction. Push the ball down, and it springs back to its equilibrium position; push it sideways, and it rapidly returns to its original position in the center of the jet. In the vertical direction, the weight of the ball is balanced by a force due to pressure differences: the pressure over the rear half of the sphere is lower than over the front half because of losses that occur in the wake (large eddies form in the wake that dissipate a lot of flow energy). To understand the balance of forces in the horizontal direction, you need to know that the jet has its maximum velocity in the center, and the velocity of the jet decreases towards its edges. The ball position is stable because if the ball moves sideways, its outer side moves into a region of lower velocity and higher pressure, whereas its inner side moves closer to the center where the velocity is higher and the pressure is lower. The differences in pressure tend to move the ball back towards the center.

which sounds more analogous to the stability of a long-term relationship than to the precariousness of love and desire. Hirst, once a YBA, is still only 47 and his artistic reputation will almost certainly have its own ups and downs for decades to come. In the meantime the production of his expensive works provides gainful employment for hundreds of technicians in numerous UK workshops – a welcome trickledown to the UK economy from the global super-rich. Damien Hirst continues until 9 September.

Munch

And then on to the second floor and Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye, which I enjoyed more than I expected. Munch (1863-1944) is very widely known for The Scream which he called Der Schrei der Natur (The Scream [or shriek] of Nature). Not always appreciated about this famous image is that Munch frequently produced several versions of the same work. In The Scream’s case, three are in Norwegian museums and it was the 1895 pastel which sold for a public auction record (for any work) of just under $120 million at Sotheby’s in New York in May. The Tate show doesn’t include any versions of The Scream (even the lithographs) but gives one room over to 'Reworkings' to make the point with several versions of The Sick Child and The Girls on the Bridge (above) and again later with Weeping Woman.

Munch, like Degas, took up still photography and he also later made amateur handheld films. In the case of Weeping Woman (left) 1907-09, as well as six paintings, drawings, a lithograph and a sculpture, he made a photograph in 1907 (Rosa Meissner at the hotel room in Warnemunde). Although Munch grew up in Oslo (Cristiana at the time), after his twenties he spent much of his time in Paris and Berlin, only returning to Norway permanently in 1908 after a nervous breakdown. In 1906 in Berlin he had collaborated with Max Reinhardt on artistic aspects of a production of Ibsen’s  Ghosts, followed in 1907 by set designs for Hedda Gabler. This is considered to have developed Munch’s interest in the use of small rooms as claustrophobic settings for works like Weeping Woman. To me his earlier Two Human Beings: The Lonely Ones 1905 (below) evokes Ibsen’s The Lady from the Sea (1888), which Munch would almost certainly have seen.

Munch produced some unsparing self-portraits later in life – he was lucky enough to survive the 1919 influenza epidemic. Branded a decadent artist by the Nazis, his final years were spent in artistic isolation during the occupation of Norway.
 

Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu 1919 and Self-Portrait with Bottles ?1938

The arrangement of the paintings and photographs in the exhibition aims to support the idea that Munch is better regarded as a major painter of the early 20th century than as a late 19th century avante gardiste. If his significance as a painter is justified by the prices now paid for his work and his creation of one of the most widely recognised art works of all time, then he has to be regarded as a major painter in whichever period of modern art he is allocated to. Munch left most of his estate to the City of Oslo and it is now held by the Munch-museet which has lent many of the works in the exhibition.

Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye was organised by the Centre Pompidou and has previously appeared in Paris and then Frankfurt, and continues at Tate Modern until 14 October.

PS

An even lower-brow comment than normal, and revealing an over-exposure to Scandinavian noir, but I can’t help seeing a resemblance between the female figure in Ashes 1925 (below) and the Danish actress best-known in the UK for playing the detective Sara Lund in the TV series Forbrydelsen (The Killing). I must get out more!

Gerhard Richter at Tate Modern

A recent post here about Degas at the RA touched on the subject of the impact of photography on painting, which is an unavoidable issue when visiting Gerhard Richter: Panorama at Tate Modern. This is a major retrospective coinciding with the artist’s 80th birthday, and, as with Tate Modern’s Miró retrospective earlier this year, it is impossible to dissociate the artist’s work from the turbulence of 20th century European history.

Richter was born in Dresden in 1932 and grew up under National Socialism followed by Soviet-enforced communism in East Germany. In 1961 he escaped to the FDR and began painting photographs from a family album (“… painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic and inartistic thing that anyone could do”). Subsequently his works addressed the Nazi past and bombed cities, but also responded to the art he was seeing in the West – in 1965 Ema (Nude on a Staircase) followed an encounter with Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase No2 from 1912 (below right and left).

Once settled in the West, Richter’s work moved in various directions. The Tate show includes many works which are abstract, for example the Colour Charts and later Squeegee and Roller Paintings. But in the 1980s Richter produced images of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group based on press photography. And other representational work exhibited includes two haunting portraits of his daughter Betty from 1977 and 1988. These exhibit Richter’s ‘out-of-focus’ technique with edges softened by brushing across the wet paint.

As well as explorations like his 1974 work 4096 Colours, Richter is interested in optical effects – two constructions explore the reflections provided by parallel sheets of glass. 4096 Colours has a mathematical basis recognisable to anyone familiar with binary numbers. The square is of 64 x 64 elements; each of the 1024 shades appears four times. Each shade was generated as a unique combination systematically made from red, blue, yellow and grey (one source says green). He revisited its theme on a larger scale in 2007 for a new stained-glass window in Cologne Cathedral (below right, 4096 Colours left – but neither well).

Meryl Streep, in London for advance publicity of her film The Iron Lady (release 6 January) reportedly said that “she would like to go see Gerhard Richter at the Tate but thought she would be mobbed.” Perhaps the Director of Tate Modern will assist if she returns in January, although Streep must be more capable of adopting an anonymous persona than practically anyone else – so perhaps she’s already been unrecognised. Lesser mortals have until 8 January. In the meantime, Richter’s website is excellent.

Tate in London: The Vorticists and Miró

During a ‘Lunch with the FT’ to mark the publication of his new novel, The Stranger’s Child, Alan Hollinghurst remarked ‘I’m preoccupied, as everyone is, with the first world war …’. Well perhaps not everyone, but WW1 was certainly the biggest thing that happened to the Vorticists. Until 4 September, Tate Britain is providing a survey, The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World, of this brief movement. Vorticism’s origins in early 1914 were a peculiarly British reaction to Cubism, Futurism and Post-Impressionism which had been imported and revealed to the London art scene shortly before. Its short existence was marked by the publication of the two Blast magazines and a couple of exhibitions. By 1917 there was rather more to complain about than the English weather.

Work of some of the leading lights in the Vorticist movement has been shown in London fairly recently. The National Portrait Gallery’s Wyndham Lewis Portraits in 2008 also displayed copies of Blast, and Wild Thing at the Royal Academy in 2009/10 featured Epstein’s Rock Drill and sculpture by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Gaudier-Brzeska died in action in 1915, so we can only speculate as to whether he would have overshadowed contemporaries like Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, had he lived.

A short river trip away Tate Modern has a major exhibition, The Ladder of Escape, of work by Joan Miró, an artist whose career was not so marked by WW1 (he was 21 in 1914), but which was deeply affected by Spain’s turbulent 20th century history. The exhibition shows how Miró’s style evolved, the influences of the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, his growing international recognition, and his monumental late works. Miró’s work is admired more by some than others, but even his supporters must accept that he was overshadowed by another long-lived Catalan artist, Picasso, 12 years his senior. Unlike Picasso, Miró lived to see the end of the Franco regime in Spain in 1975.

Tickets for The Vorticists are £14 and for Miró, £15.50 (there are concessions). The latter is better value for money, and ends on 4 September.

Glasgow Boys and Gauguin

I am ‘out of area’ for a few days and have been to a couple of excellent exhibitions: The Glasgow Boys at the Royal Academy and Gauguin at Tate Modern.

Pioneering Painters: The Glasgow Boys 1880 – 1900, to give it the full title, shows works by the group of about 20 young painters who, the RA says, created a stir at home and abroad in the final decades of the nineteenth century. They were the first significant group of British artists after the Pre-Raphaelites and “by the turn of the century the Glasgow Boys were acknowledged as the only British painters of international standing”, according to the curators of the exhibition.  The Gallery Guide at £2.50 is poor value, particularly in comparison with the educational guide at £4.50 (while stocks last). The exhibition runs to 23 January 2011, £9 max per ticket.

I now realise how much the Glasgow Boys had come under the influence of pre-Impressionist French painters like Millet and Bastien-Lepage. Whereas Gauguin, their contemporary (1848-1903), started as an Impressionist and eventually was selected by Roger Fry as one of the original Post-Impressionists in 1910.

Gauguin: Maker of Myth is a 'must see' exhibition with many of his major works and so, unsurprisingly, very crowded. Curators currently seem to favour captioning works in very small print and sometimes at a considerable distance (up to 2 metres!). Perhaps this is to boost the sale of audio guides, but does nothing to ease the crush. Gauguin runs to 23 January 2011, £13.50 max per ticket, free brief guide.

Down below, Tate Modern's Turbine Hall was given over to Ai Weiwei's Unilever Series commission, Sunflower Seeds, which consists of 100 million porcelain replica seeds, no longer to be touched or walked on. The Tate thinks that the sight “invites us to look more closely at the ‘Made in China’ phenomenon and the geo-politics of cultural and economic exchange today”. The artist has just been released from recent house arrest and is urging David Cameron to raise the issue of human rights on his current visit to China (BBC News).

Outside, it was a cold, grey, wet London November day, nothing like Tahiti.