OPENING IMAGE: Art in London in 2009

Thursday, January 07, 2010

Art in London in 2009

I was meant to go see the Turner and the Masters exhibition at Tate Britain last night, but when you're a little older and wiser and it's snowing down hard and the tube is sporadic, you know it's probably best to stay home and safe. So that's what I did - I finished Theodor Fontane's Effi Briest, a book I perfectly enjoyed and admired but hardly got excited about. It's similar to Madame Bovary in its detailing of a woman and her eventually disastrous relations to the society she lives in, slightly more impressive in its critique of 19th century conservatism than MB, but way less sumptuous prose and kind of a slog to battle through the last quarter when the narrative is so predetermined (possibly the fault of the translation TBF). I'll probably watch the Fassbinder adaptation later this week. What else? I played freekickfusion for maybe half an hour (too long). Me and Soph realised that poached egg on toast is a great starter for an evening meal. We watched the Louise Bourgeois documentary The Spider, The Mistress and the Tangerine, which was really quite excellent. What an amazing artist! Her sculptures are so full of narrative energy, be they minimal or extravagant. There's few people I can think of who make such a visual impression on me with their art. It was an excellently made documentary too, never ground down in biography, plenty of scenes showing Bourgeois at work and lots of fascinating (and often fierce) insight into how she thinks about art and life

So anyway, today I was going to write about the Turner exhibition, but instead of that here's a list of the best art shows I went to last year (in no order):

John Baldessari: Pure Beauty at Tate Modern