Lots to see in and round Somerset House

I was in the Aldwych area for an afternoon meeting which meant that I could go to the theatre nearby in the evening and could fill the time in between at Somerset House.

It was London Fashion Week which meant that the courtyard was full of strangely dressed people taking photos of people even more strangely dressed. I was wearing a suit with a Liberty tie (as always) so I felt very comfortable amongst the hipsters and weirdos. I even had my photo while having a coffee and cake in Fernandez & Wells, but that was just by a student so I do not expect to find my face on the cover of Vogue. I would not know if it was.

After the coffee I headed to the southern section of Somerset House, i.e. the bit next to the river, as that is where the small galleries were kept. I had no idea what was on and was very pleasantly surprised to discover three very different exhibitions next to each other.

I would not normally have gone to an exhibition called Time: Tattoo Art Today but I had the time to kill and it was free.

The exhibition was of specially commissioned pieces by tattoo artists on the subject of time. The only rule was that they could use their usual materials, i.e. skin.

I went in expecting to walk around quickly and then straight out again but I was struck by the drama in many of the works and I fell in love with several of them, despite their sometimes bleak character. Having to choose just one photo for the blog I eventually settled on a traditional dragon neatly draped over a shoulder.

The exhibition occupied just a couple of medium-sized rooms and was time very well spent.

I had been to Somerset House many times but had managed to learn nothing of its history before. I fixed that by visiting the exhibition on the lower level. This was so obscure that I had never noticed it before and even now it is hard to find anything about it on the Somerset House website.

It was a long, narrow and space with some posters and artifacts on one side and a boat on the other. The point of Somerset House when it was built was that it had one foot on the Strand and the other in the Thames, thus linking two of London's main thoroughfares. All that changed when the embankment was added and now a hideous main road separates the house from its natural home.

Somerset House is a large and extravagant building today and the exhibition helped to show how much larger and more extravagant it must have seemed when imposed on medieval London in 1547, that's pushing 500 years ago!

Filling one of the many entrance halls was a collection of photographs of Nick Cave.

The exhibition, A Little History: Nick Cave & Cohorts 1981 - 2013, was of photographs by all taken by Bleddyn Butcher.

Clearly the most interesting thing about the photos was the way that Cave's appearance changed over that time and through all those changes his hair remained an entertaining feature.

I was also interested to see that several of the photographs had been taken in fairly modest clubs in London. I have never seen Cave live, despite buying quite a few of his albums, but I assumed that he had always headlined at big venues.

Exiting by Victoria Embankment I walked up the steps at Waterloo Bridge and then crossed it heading towards Southwark and my theatre date.

The view from Waterloo Bridge is one of THE views of London, as evidenced by the number of people who select it as their favourite on the Robert Elms show, and it still enthrals me even though I have crossed that bridge many many times.

There are good views in both directions but in recent years I have tended to look eastwards towards the City simply because there has been so much change there. When I worked in the Nat West Tower in the late 80's it was the only tower there, now it is just one of a growing cluster.

The Young Dürer at the Courtauld Gallery

Albrecht Durer was a name that I had heard of but that was about it.

The real reason that I went to the exhibition was because I was in Somerset House anyway and I fancied having a look around the Courtauld Gallery. I had glimpsed some of the main galleries when visiting the Gaugin exhibition a couple of months previously and wanted to get back to see them properly.

The Young Durer: Drawing the Figure exhibition was a bonus, and a big bonus at that. It was on the top floor so I headed there first.

The exhibition covered just a few years in his early life, circa 1490-96 (that's a long time ago!), when he was still learning his art. In addition to the completed pieces there were several studies of things like folded cloth and various body parts, often Durer's own.

A lot of research went in to the exhibition which included earlier works by other artists that Durer either copied or drew some inspiration from. It also showed some sketches that became full works. There was a rough earlier version of this farmyard scene that was reworked quite significantly, e.g. the piglets were not in the original.

The descriptions of the drawings explained their subject which helped to understand them. I did not know, or had forgotten, the story of the seven wise and seven foolish virgins which was very popular at the time and various artists drew inspiration from it. The wise virgins remembered to bring lights in order to see their lovers in the dark, so this is one of the wise ones.

As with all of Durer's works on show, what impressed me most about this was the technical skill in the drawing.

The helpful texts also said something about the techniques Durer used and how this changed as he learnt more about his craft and saw more examples of other artists' works.

It was a nicely curated exhibition and convinced me to spend some time learning about a subject that I did not know that I was interest in.

My plan to see the rest of the Courtauld Gallery suffered due to the amount of time that I spent with Durer and I was restricted to a quick run through the floor below. The impressionists I liked, the rest less so. A Rubens outline did catch my eye but that may have been because it has the roughness of a sketch rather than the bland (my view) purity of the finished article.

I live in London so that I can go to things like this easily and often. And I plan to carry on doing just that.

Stanley Spencer at Somerset House

I was looking for an exhibition to visit and an email from Somerset House alerted me to Stanley Spencer: Heaven in a Hell of War.

I was aware of Spencer's work, or, more accurately, his style, but had not seen any of his works in the flesh before or, if I had, they had made no impact on me. This slight knowledge was enough to get the curiosity juices flowing. The exhibition was free and that always helps when making a decision about seeing something unknown.

The works were all taken from their usual home at the National Trust’s Sandham Memorial Chapel for which they were commissioned by the private benefactors who built the chapel just to house them.

The above picture shows the paintings as they were displayed in the chapel. The exhibition had the side panels arranged the same way but the end piece was integral to the chapel and so could not be moved. Instead a picture of it was projected on to a wall.

The pictures all depicted scenes from Spencer's experience of the First World War and they focused on the normal life of the soldiers rather than the fighting.

The busy pictures made with broad strokes did little to impress me artistically. If anything, it reminded me of the fat lady pictures by Beryl Reid that were briefly popular a few years ago.

Whatever their artistic merit, they did convey something about a soldier's life and, despite this subject matter, carried an eerie sense of peace. There were people moving in every picture yet the overall impression was of stillness.

The busy canvasses meant that I could look at each picture for quite a while spotting more and more little details as I did so. The, not very complimentary comparison, was with Where's Wally. That business alone made them a rewarding set of paintings.

Heaven in a Hell of War is a neat little exhibition that compliments the paintings with come contextual notes and other works on both Spencer and the chapel.

I am still not a Stanley Spencer fan but at least now I have a better idea of why not and also why other people might be.