Saturday, April 21, 2018

About Picasso, sort of

I went to the Picasso 1932 exhibition at Tate Modern yesterday and was going to write something about it but on the way there my attention was grabbed by a different kind of art; dear old, dreamy, enigmatic René Magritte, ripped off, recuperated, to sell yet more glossy, vacuous apartments.




Anyway, my righteous indignation had eased a little by the time I got to the power station, and the Picasso show was good, a tightly packed capsule of life and creativity. We saw the ebb and flow of his little obsessions and what prompted them – he was seriously into octopuses for a few months – and the sheer volume of fact was delightful, from the make of his car to the fact that Carl Gustav Jung, of all people, wrote a really vicious review. And yet it was still tantalising in the details it missed; we learned that Picasso skipped the opening of his first Paris retrospective to go to the cinema – I wanted to know what film.

And, of course, the whole thing was sponsored by a big accountancy firm. So, maybe capitalism won in the end and we just have to live with the big dull flats and the bad Magritte clones. But I wouldn’t want to break the news to this enigmatic figure, for whom it’s still, clearly, all about the pictures.


PS: From Hyperallergic, more about what happens when art and capitalism and gentrification coincide.

2 comments:

savannah said...

What struck me immediately was the target "15% of construction jobs for local people" does that mean each trade involved is targeting 15% local participation or 15% overall? If this project is near the Tate, then I can imagine what the size and cost of the units. (OK, we're guessing here.)

I'd like to see the exhibit, but I'm guessing it won't make it's way to Savannah!

Re: Hyperallergic - yep, I've been following these issues since the Boyle Heights start. I'm still an L.A. girl at heart.

Tim F said...

Yeah, that caught my eye. I assume it's 15% overall but I don't know what they mean by local - from that particular slice of south London, or from London overall, or the UK (as opposed to Eastern Europe) or what.