Katie And Dive Do London Pt.2

So, put on your walking shoes and come along with Katie and me as we continue our amble through the delightful squares and backstreets of Bloomsbury.

As I said yesterday we were making our way from her hotel to Tate Modern to see the much anticipated Rothko exhibition but then Katie revealed that she was on a Lara Croft style mosaic hunt, so as we were but a hundred yards from the British Museum we moseyed on in there to head for the Roman rooms.

London is a great place to tear up your plans and improvise your itinerary on the fly, which is just what we did for the rest of the trip and it was much more fun that way.

You've seen so many of my British Museum posts (including some only recently with the delightful Mme and MB) that we'll skip the Rosetta Stone and the usual suspects … yadda, yadda, yadda … and only allow ourselves to get sidetracked by my superstitious habit of always visiting my favourite horsie in the Elgin Marbles Gallery, here being introduced to Katie.
You'll notice that Katie bought a shiny, waterproof bag "specifically for London". A wise move, though it didn't take her long to bring sunshine to our grey city.

Ah, Mosaics!
We would be eating most of this lot the next day.
The seafood; not the mosaic - that's just a little too crunchy.

As it turns out, the best mosaics are between the Roman and Greek wings in the stairwell.
Like so many people I have passed these dozens of times and never really stopped to appreciate them.

Not any more!
I had with me an expert mosaicist and enjoyed a wonderful, two day crash course in the history and techniques of mosaics from a fantastic teacher.
Here Katie demonstrates how to look completely … er … sane beside a mosaic of Phobos (fear).

I shan't post all of the mosaics as we photographed dozens of them, but I'll be sending the CDs of all of them to Katie so she can do a special mosaic series of posts (she knows so much more about them than I).

Fortunately for us the BM allows flash photography, otherwise I think that scary, fanged monkey thing on the wall behind Katie might have attacked us.

You simply must click on this one to enlarge it.
We'd left the British Museum and had reached the Thames. Wandering along the embankment we stopped beside Cleopatra's Needle and I turned and snapped Katie gazing up at it with the Houses of Parliament in the distance.
Only when I downloaded the photographs did I notice the girl with her finger rammed up the sphinx's nose. Hee hee.

Here is our heroine much further along the Embankment at Saint Paul's. We were crossing the Wibbly-Wobbly Bridge and getting all excited at the prospect of our imminent Rothko-fest (justifiably, it turned out).
I know this is a classic touristy shot but it is a classic for a reason.

As we were attempting to take another classic touristy shot with Tower Bridge in the background, the weather finally decided to listen to the forecasters …

… and things got a little blustery and wet.
So we legged it pronto into the shelter of Tate Modern.

We were not allowed to take photos in the Rothko exhibition, which is a great shame as it is truly awesome.
It was a pure delight to be able to experience something as glorious as this show with a person who was equally as excited and knowledgeable and who could appreciate just what we were seeing.

I scanned this from the catalogue. It shows some of the Seagram murals in a smaller room at the Tate when they were trying to sort out the hanging arrangements and of course doesn't do justice to the monumental final hanging in the big room.
Back in '58 (when Old Dive was born), Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of vast murals for New York's Seagram building on Park Avenue.
These ended up never being installed and on his death nine of them were bequeathed to the Tate with some cryptic notes on how they might be displayed.
A couple more went to Japan's Kawamura Gallery and to the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC. They disappeared from public view and into legend; a holy grail for art lovers around the world.

It has taken decades to prepare and arrange just the one central room in this show. It displays eight of the Tate's nine Seagram murals together with those from Japan and Washington.
Katie and I spent most of the day in there, gazing, open-mouthed with wonder at these legendary and monumental masterpieces which are never likely to be seen together again in our lifetime.
To say the experience was awesome doesn't even begin to scratch the surface. This was a once-in-a-lifetime event for two people who were only too well aware of just what it was that we were witnessing.

At the Tate show, in addition to the Seagram room there are eight more rooms full of late Rothko paintings including 1964, No.1 - Black on maroon which I must confess got me more excited than any painting I have seen in decades.
I was totally blown away by it and spent ages absorbing every last detail. Inevitably this scan looks nothing like it. The real thing glows from within and looks like it is miles deep.
The black central panel is underpainted with several layers of reds and the longer you look at it the more it glows and the deeper it becomes. The maroon - almost black at first sight - is rich and velvet-textured with smaller, careful brushmarks and the whole thing draws you in hypnotically.
It is hugely powerful and almost erotically intense. I could have stood in front of it and gazed forever.

The Tate is excellent at background material and a series of natural, infra red, ultraviolet and x-ray photographs of sections of various paintings helped to demonstrate Rothko's technique, emphasising every careful brushstroke as layer after layer of colour was built up so that even his black on black paintings glow with a shocking intensity.

We stared at them for hours, drawn in by their beauty. It was an epiphany; the closest a Godless heathen such as myself can get to a spiritual experience. These pieces are stunning and simply must be appreciated in person.

Wonderful as the other eight rooms were, we were drawn back again and again to the central gallery to experience the Seagram Murals in all their glory.

I cannot say it forcefully enough. If you get even the remotest chance, go and see this exhibition before it closes on Feb 1st next year! You'll only get one chance in this lifetime and believe me it is worth it.

Afterwards, we sat in the balcony coffee bar gazing across the river while the storm battered and lashed Saint Paul's on the far bank, our minds still reeling with wonder at what we had seen; chattering away like excited kids.
Katie lost a wrestling match with a shortbread wrapper. Boy, that shortbread did not want to be eaten!

And then we were off into the wild, grey weather, heading west for the V&A, where a cool exhibition of Cold War art and design awaited our eager perusal.
We had spent so long with the Rothkos that we didn't have time to pop across the street from the V&A and see the Natural History Museum and the Science Museum but the links will take you to earlier posts I did from there so Katie can see what she missed.

It was Katie who spotted this spiffy Dale Chihuly glass sculpture in the foyer. I hadn't realised he had a piece in the country; the last time I'd seen one was a few years ago when he made a temporary installation for Kew Gardens.

The Cold War exhibition was great fun! Again, no photography allowed, however, so poo on the V&A curators for that. You'll have to make do with my description.

I often say it because it's true: I miss the Cold War.
There was a kind of romance to knowing that every minute could be your last.
If you want a good chuckle (and an hilarious photo of mum, Phil and me), take a look at this post and read about our own little contribution to Mutually Assured Destruction and what the Cold War was actually like to live through.

The exhibition brings it all flooding back. I'm like a kid in a candy store; Katie (who is too young to remember) watching bemused as I repeatedly point and yell "We had one of those!" and "Woah! Cool!" at just about everything.

Tricky Dicky looks so young in that 1959 debate with Kruschev about … er … kitchens. I bought myself a new kitchen pinny with the two of them on it and Kruschev's slogan "We Do Not Have The Capitalist Attitude Toward Women" Hee hee.

Oh, my! I almost blew hundreds of pounds on a signed sketch by Ken Adam of his design for the War Room in Doctor Strangelove (which of course was showing on one of the many screens).

There were so many cool things! From gloriously kitsch household appliances, through East German cars (the wonderful VEB P70 coupé in immaculate condition) to spacesuits and plastic and metal minidresses and artworks and videos and Saarinen chairs and early computers and plastic crockery and propaganda art and a 1964 Cuban movie made to entice Russians to emigrate that Katie had actually once sat and watched (¡Soy Cuba!).

To wander through this tacky Commie wonderland of my childhood with an übercool Berkeley chick was Heaven on toast with chocolate sauce.

And of course there were lots of postcards in the shop which Katie devoured. Keep checking her blog for them!

Much, much more tomorrow … when at last the California sunshine catches up with Katie and we hit the sights!

Miss it and I'll slap you.

Hard!