Captivated by William Blake at Tate Britain

As soon as the William Blake exhibition at Tate Britain was announced I knew that I would go. This was despite seeing a lot of the collection several times before in the permanent display of his works in the same gallery.

It still took me several months to book to see it and I finally got there fairly early on a Thursday morning about a week before the exhibition closed.

I picked a 11am start as on my previous visit I had gone for 10am and that was bit of a rush with the museum opening at that time. The extra hour allowed the place to open properly, including the cloakroom where I left my Winter coat, and for me to have a coffee and a cake beforehand. The extra zip that gave me was most welcome.

The exhibition was held in the usual place just to the left of the main entrance but unusually the eleven rooms were described as just five in the small free guide. This made sense for the exhibition but confused my timing as I was never quite sure how much there was still to see, and that was after I made a dash to the end to see the extent of what was to come.

The exhibition was organised chronologically which made perfect sense as the work he did was governed by his changing commercial fortunes while the style stayed much the same throughout.

What surprised me the most was the size of many of his works. I had seen some of his smaller pieces before, typically illustrations for books, and there were many more of these here and several much smaller ones too.

The picture on the right is something like actual size and I struggled to read the text on most of these. The picture above is enlarged slightly.

There was a great deal to see, over 300 pieces, and everyone required careful consideration. This was not at exhibition that you could whizz through absorbing the highlights on the way.

And there were plenty of highlights.

It took me two and a half hours to get around and that was driven more by my capacity to consume art than by the amount on display. I did not exactly rush through the last couple of rooms but they certainly got less attention that some of the earlier ones. I also lacked the energy to go back and revisit my personal favourites.

The William Blake exhibition did everything that I hoped and more. There were no surprises on the content aside (apart from the two landscapes) and I was able to wallow in his familiar style savouring old favourites and many new items. I also read all the words and while a few of those were curator's licence on interpretation there was a lot of information that was new to me which helped to explain the man and his works.

Tate Britain knows how to put on a show and William Blake was my kind of show.

Sumptuous Hockney at Tate Britain

I had been to a couple of Hockney exhibitions in recent years and that was more than enough to convince me to go and see another one. This time it was at Tate Britain.

Scheduling these things is always difficult and as the tickets were selling rapidly my choices were limited and becoming even more so. In the end it was easiest to go on a Saturday and add a theatre to the trip. I saw a matinee performance at Arcola Theatre and then headed to Pimlico for my 7:30pm date with Hockney. My Art Fund membership entitled me to a ticket for a very modest £8.85.

Time was a constraint and so my evening meal consisted of a sarnie from a Pret a Manger in Horseferry Road, Westminster, which was fine.

The Hockney exhibition was spread over a lot of rooms created within a rectangular space. Like IKEA, you had to go through all of the rooms one after the other and each room had a sequence to it which some people followed while others chose the easier option of moving to the least crowded spaces and taking the pictures in a random order. The exhibition was very busy but, generally, moving around was easy and the crowd did not get in the way of my enjoyment of the exhibition.

Photography was not allowed (they had a catalogue to sell) which was a mixed blessing; I would have loved to have taken lots of photographs (I managed just one sneaky one to prove that I was there) but then so would have everybody else and the circulation of people would have slowed dramatically and many of the more impressive pictures would have been swamped with people taking selfies.

What impressed me the most this time was the range of styles and materials he used. I was expecting, and saw, many large colourful paintings but these were complimented by sketches in graphite and iPad drawings that you could see being composed. I was reminded, as other exhibitions had shown me, just how good Hockney is technically.

It took me a couple of hours to navigate the exhibition simply because there was so much to see and I wanted to spend time appreciating each item. I am grateful that the fairly recent trend of having late openings for major exhibitions allowed me to see it.

An afternoon at Tate Britain

An evening meeting in Pimlico/Victoria gave me an ideal opportunity to pop-in to Tate Britain for a couple of hours beforehand. It was a fairly aimless ramble (as they usually are) and, helped by the connected layout of the rooms, I found myself going through some of the galleries several times.

It was a year since I had last been to Tate Britain and it had been refurbished since then, though I did not notice anything significantly different apart from the new members' area on the top floor.

The galleries were organised by date and were probably in chronological order, though I did not test this. This was helpful as I was able to walk briskly through the early rooms full of uninteresting portraits and landscapes. It was only when I got beyond 1800 did I find much that I liked.

Having seen the Stanley Spenser exhibition at Somerset House just a few weeks before it was bit of a surprise to find some of his works in the Tate. Of course they should have been expected, he is a major British artist of the last century, but I thought that I had not seen any of Spenser's works before going to Somerset House but I almost certainly did see some the last time that I was in Tate Britain. They clearly did not make much of an impact on me then.

This is part of Resurrection, a very large work, and I chose it just because it is weird. I still do not like it very much.

All the other works that I have chosen I do like.

The appeal to me in this picture comes from the mix of the abstract and the real with the waves composed of damaged aircraft. The colouring is subdued leaving the lines to do the work.

Tate Britain focuses on paintings but it does also have a number of sculptures, installations and videos. I liked this cube because it is a very precise cube despite being made, apparently, out of bits of junk of all shapes and sizes. The combination of the shapes and colours of the material made this a very striking display.

If I could trust the locals (and could afford it) I would love to have this in my front garden.

A do not usually like landscape and those that I do like are normally very dark and gloomy. Like this one. They heavy use of grey almost hides the detail, such as the man and his dog in the bottom-left corner.

This is how I imagine Scotland.

Technically, I suppose that this is a landscape too but I love it as for its abstract qualities with its large simple shapes, simple colours and contrasting blotches of white.

There were a couple of rooms dedicated to Henry Moore and while I would not call myself a Moore fan (I'm not even sure that I like any sculpture that much) this family grouping has a lot of charm despite, or because of, the passionless pose. Another candidate for my front garden.

I think that this may be a landscape too (I may have to revise my opinion on landscapes) but it is even more abstract than the last one. Indeed, when I was going through my photos to pick a few for the blog I chose this one on the grounds that it was an abstract. It is only now looking at it again that it has become a Winter scene with mountains, trees, a village and lots of people.

The one part of my visit that was planned was the hardest. I wanted to go back to the William Blake room but it was not where I remembered it and the signs to it ran out long before I go there. It was only when looking at a map on the wall my the entrance as I was leaving that I discovered that it was in a different part of the building altogether.

Other people obviously had the same problem and the two stranded galleries only had one other person in when I eventually found them.

The beauty of William Blake's work speaks for itself.

Tate Britain did all that I asked it to, including proving coffees and cake, and the mix of works was stimulating, exciting and (literally) arresting.

Pre-Raphaelites at Tate Britain

The Pre-Raphaelites exhibition at Tate Britain was just the sort of tempt me back there, even though it is a little off the beaten track to be a regular haunt.

Previously I had only seen the free permanent exhibitions at Tate Britain so this was my first chance to see a faulty curated show.

I went on a Thursday evening late in to the run to avoid the worst of the crowds. That worked but it was still busy, which is clearly a good thing.

The works are spread cross seven themed rooms (or is it eight?). Each room's theme is explained clearly and so is the contribution of each work to that theme. There is plenty to read and plenty to learn.

There is some thinking to do to work out the best way round each room and there are no clues to help you so half go clockwise and half go anti-clockwise with the resultant confusion that causes.

The works include a few expected favourites, such as Sir John Everett Millais' Ophelia, that has simply been moved from the free part of the gallery to the exhibition. It is a classic and so deserves its place as one of the major works on how. It also has some local interest for me as the background is taken from the banks of the Hogsmill that enters the Thames at Kingston.

Unsurprisingly there are large dollops of Dante Gabriel Rossetti too.

Paintings dominate the show but there are smatterings of other media such a sample of Morris wall paper and one of his carpets. The later is called Peacock and bird, which is enough to tell you that you will like it.

The big surprise and the undoubted high-light for me was the number, variety and size of works by Edward Burne-Jones that were the main attraction in the final gallery.

I had seen plenty of Burne-Jones at places like Two Temple Place and the V&A but nothing quite on the scale of this.

So much to see and so much to love.

Yet, somehow, the exhibition failed to spark in the way that, say, Hockney did earlier in the year. It was informative and luscious but it lacked the wow factor. It felt more like a school trip to museum than a day out in a gallery.

As if to prove the point, I ventured briefly in to the main part of Tate Britain and soon found several pieces that grabbed my attention in a way that non of the Pre-Raphaelites had.

Perhaps they are too familiar now and perhaps they are just a little too similar to sustain a show on their own.

That is not to say that I did not enjoy the afternoon, because I did, not just as much as I expected.

To end on a plus note, I did take advantage of my Arts Fund card which meant that it cost me about £7 to go rather than the full price of £14.

And some of the money saved on the entrance fee was ploughed back in the cafe on a coffee and a cake. Again the reward of giving something extra back outweighed any guilt from the calories consumed.

I think that I will go back to Tate Britain before too long because of the promise of the few rooms I went in to on the way out rather than the expectation of another exhibition.

Pictures in a gallery

Somehow this was my first ever visit to Tate Britain.

It's not that I'm a stranger to art galleries, I've been to Tate Modern many times and the National Gallery several times, but never to Tate Britain.

I'll blame its location for this. Tate Modern has a prime position on the rejuvenated south Bank, the National Gallery is on Trafalgar Square in the heart of London but Tate Britain hides among the mansion blocks of Westminster a safe distance from any tube station.

I discovered where Tate Britain is, and how to get there, in my regular morning walks to work from Vauxhall Station and that's the route I took this time, over Vauxhall Bridge and then a right-turn towards Millbank.

The first stop was the busy and slow cafe for my usual latte that was just about worth the wait. The cake helped the mood too.

Tate Britain offers a map but it's a quid and there's only one main floor so how hard could it be? With no particular objective in mind I headed upstairs and into a room promising Blake and Physiognomy and then just moved on to whatever room looked most interesting.

One of the first pictures to catch my eye was Edward Wadsworth's Bronze Ballet with its fresh colours and clean lines.

 I also like the low vantage point, high horizon and the ships in the distance.

Next up was Winifred Knights' The Deluge.

Here it is the figures that I like.

The sharply angled poses and the definitive hand gestures make this look like a scene from a modern ballet, not that they had modern ballet in 1920 when this was painted.

The anguish in their expressions also reminded me of Nick Cave's Weeping Song.

The lack of colour adds to the bleakness but, somehow, despite the negative subject and portrayal, it's a very attractive picture.

The Pre-Raphaelite section was especially popular and was thronged with visitors.

One of the more famous pictures here is Ophelia by Sir John Everett Millais.

The river was painted from real life in Kingston. It's part of the Hogsmill that joins the Thames in the town centre. Ophelia was added in later, probably using PaintShop.

I love the Pre-Raphaelite thanks to the comic artwork of Barry Windsor Smith who was clearly a big fan too. It's the magic and the mystery. There's a story in every picture.

Tate Britain houses a large collection of paintings by Joseph Mallord William Turner and it's easily worth visiting just for that.

They can be found in the Romantics exhibition, but not easily due to some renovation works. Perhaps I should have bought that map.

The exhibition covers all of Turner's career and it is interesting so see how the traditional early works morphed in to the later abstracts for which he is most famous for.

This picture is called Sun Setting over a Lake, but that hardly matters. Love it for its colours.

And this story ends as it began with William Blake.

One of the Romantics galleries has a series of small book illustrations by Blake drawn with watercolour and ink on paper. These were originally done in just ink and the colouring was done much later.

This is a plate from The Book of Urizen written by Blake in 1794 which is a parody of the Book of Genesis.

The style is definitely Romantic and brings another comics illustrator to mind, this time it's P Craig Russell.

I'm not sure how much of Tate Britain I got to see in the end (I should have bought that map) but there is plenty left for another visit. Soon hopefully.