Monkey's Blog - with a little help from Alice

Doing Art 2: Picasso et al

Across the road from the Munch, at the TTISH NAL F DERN ART (look at the previous post here, and you'll see what I mean by pretentious) the Picasso et al exhibition was showing. Alice says I should give it its proper title. Yes... but as long as she avoids lengthy digressions like last time. OK, we're agreed. It's Picasso & Modern British Art, and was first shown at Tate Britain, to much acclaim.
 
It seems that this particular Poster Girl, Nude Woman in a Red Armchair, caused a lot of problems when the publicity department of the galleries got her put up in Edinburgh Airport. Some lady passengers (and I do mean ladies as opposed to post-feminist women) complained about the nudity. Goodness me, it's Art! Moreover, it's Internationally Famous Art!!

They even put a "white vinyl cover" over her (or just her breasts?) but finally relented and restored her to the eyes of the public.

In the grounds of the SGMA

If the view from the steps of the gallery looks familiar, it's because it was designed by Charles Jencks, who did the Life Mounds at Jupiter Artland.

My personal tastes aren't as wide ranging as Alice's (Damien Hirst, for the love of god!) so I was expecting lots of weird modern stuff from Picasso, like his ghastly Weeping Woman. But I have to admit, some of it I actually liked.

His Goat's Skull, Bottle and Candle was decidedly less garish and the tones quite pleasing. Unlike Francis Bacon's Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion. Makes me shudder. Click for a bigger view, if you must...

When his cubist paintings were first seen in Britain in 1910, G K Chesterton described one of them as "a piece of paper on which Mr Picasso has had the misfortune to upset the ink and tried to dry it with his boots". A snidey way of trying to seem clever.

A recent review is more favourable! "English critical opinion struggled to make sense of Picasso, to normalise him. They never could. The superman is above all norms". What do you think?

Our absolute favourite of all (both of us) was Henry Moore's Reclining Figure in elmwood. Made you want to reach out and stroke it - like most of his figures.

The painting though, called Source, is a Picasso!
So there was a surprise.

Moore's bronze Reclining Figure outside the front of the gallery has a sister round the back, which used to live in the Botanic Gardens, and Alice said her sons loved to climb in and over and under that one when they were little.

Same impulse.
Art appreciation starts early.

When Alice was at boarding school (No, no, please don't wander into another digression!) she used to have a postcard of Picasso's The Old Guitarist pinned up in her cubicle. She particularly liked this quotation from The Man with the Blue Guitar, by Wallace Stevens:

The man bent over his guitar,

A shearsman of sorts. The day was green.

They said, "You have a blue guitar,
You do not play things as they are."

The man replied, "Things as they are
Are changed upon the blue guitar."

The above was a rather narrow escape from a lengthy losing (by Alice) of my intended plot. Phew...

GMA One has a really good cafe , less expensive than GMA two, too (enjoy the pun) with a nice garden area. I think we must have been there on the last warm day of the year...

Then we had a final stroll round the Life Mounds after closing time.

But that wasn't the end of it! With her Friends' membership, we were able to go back for a more leisurely browse a while later on - but as you can see, the season had definitely turned, so the tea and cake had to be indoors. If you look carefully at my reflection in the teapot, you can see I'm still smiling.