Steve_Bamlett_blog

Diary blog: A day visit to visit on 21^st February 2024 to London to The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House exhibition of Charcoal Heads by Frank Auerbach and to the Hayward modern sculpture exhibition, When Forms Come Alive.

This is the Introduction blog to one introducing my day trip: For other parts use links here: Part 2: On Auerbach’s Charcoal Heads and for Part 3: On When Forms Come Alive : https://livesteven.com/2024/02/24/this-is-blog-is-about-seeing-the-hayward-gallerys-sculpture-exhibition-on-21st-january-2024-when-forms-come-alive/

Today I go to London on the 9.43 train from Durham to two exhibitions. And I am here in good time for the train.

The journey starts with brunch, it seems: here is the choice I took from the menu.

As I go, I will chart my journey and finish the blog in a Part 2 tomorrow if I need to. So here goes with the journey, as I now, just await arrival at 12.39 at King’s Cross., now predicted to be nearer 12.53, after an ‘incident’.

First stop after Kings Cross if delay does not negate that, on a walk through edges of Bloomsbury, before joining Southampton Row through Holborn to the Aldwych, Gay’s The Word bookshop, and next door to it, or so, a wonderful second-hand bookshops  I found on the last visit. My aim is anything  good I can find on Félix Vallotton’s “Intimacies”, or other of his works, especially prints and illustrations.

Having got here, not a Valloton to be found, not even for ready money as Oscar put it. So, after the delayed train, it was on to see the Frank Auerbach Charcoal Heads, the main aim of this trip, for he is a favourite artist in paint of mine, though I do not know the charcoals and have never seen a full retrospective ‘in the flesh’, only wonderful individidual works. I believe there are only about 25 works. However,they are rarely shown, and so it  matters to see them when you have a chance. Here is the gallery pre-information, which points out that:

I never go without the purpose of learning something new – even if only to improve how I see things. Hence, I have a pre-paid copy of the Auerbach catalogue awaiting me and will get the Hayward one on arrival:

The Courtauld at last:

However, before reporting it, not that view from the Courtyard of Somerset House was on a more clement day than today. No blue skies this Januar, though they look so in my own photograph below:

Having seen the exhibition,  I feel very overwhelmed.  The catalogue, too, is beautiful with a long essay by Colm Toibin. So reportage on this art will have to wait for a later blogbin this series. The heads were, and had to bevcomplemented by looking at the paintings of post-war destruction and e construction in London, and I will include these in my write-up, but for now just a silent preview till blog 2, and even, 3.

You only have now to cross Waterloo Bridge, living up to its name in rain, to another kind of world – brutalist in architectural name but kind of imaginative realisation, the Southbank and in that: The Hayward Gallery.

This exhibition  amazes. It’s an amalgam of sculpture in sound and physical substance. Medium and appearance are often atvliggrheafs as are binaries like the outside and inside of things, softness and harder, make and female, dark and light, and even presence and absence. Again, a silent selection of 4 views; content to follow in blogs 2 & perhaps 3.

Amazing, beautiful, even conceptually; even in the play of representation, say of a roller-coaster and an idea of the fundamental turns of experienced lives. And the brutalist interiors of the Hayward. The gallery itself is amazing; an inside ever turning into an outside. A concept that is literally in concrete and a concretd concept.

And as for presence and absence, think – are shadows sculpted? Are windows just contingent happenings or plays on mirrored form? And the book is still in its shrink wrap.

So now I have about 2.5 hours before the train. Lunch, I think. Back to blogging tomorrow.

Now, to upload this and relax.

With love

STEVEN XXXXXX