London: Aug 2: Tate Modern, Hyde Park, and Green Park

On Sunday, August 2, 2009, I took the train to see the Tate Modern, located in a renovated old power station. London's contemporary art museum, it shows the true expanse of 20th-century art in all its many styles. It's organized by form or subject, not chronologically as at most museums. I appreciated that almost every piece has an explanation. The museum is free, though I skipped the special exhibits (which charged) because I wasn't interested enough in them. Since it wasn't really my scene, I went through it in the relatively fast eighty minutes.

Though the museum didn't allow photography, I want to comment on some pieces that struck me:

• Georges Braque. This artist, who I'd previously never heard of, surprised me the most of everything I saw at the Tate. His works were so typically cubist, they could've easily been Picassos. Given the identical look and quality of the paintings, I'm shocked he doesn't get more attention.
• The large (7' x 16') canvas that is Monet's Water Lilies after 1916.
• The similarly large, long (6' x 18') canvas that is Jackson Pollock's Summertime: Number 9A.
• Robert Therrien's Table and Four Chairs. It's a table tall enough to walk under. Weird. It made me laugh and smile. Located in the small special exhibit on Scale.
• Miroslaw Balka's column of stacked, colored soap (which looked like flat stones). Looks cool.
• Alighiero Boetti's map of the world that has the every country colored/patterned like the country's flag--a neat idea.
• Jeff Koons's room with large outlines of stuffed animals (scroll down) (a bear, an elephant, etc.) in colored, reflective plastic. Cute.
• A set of thin, otherworldly, statues of standing women. These would've gone well in my collection of such pictures.

I also liked the Red Star Over Russia room (in the State of Flux collection): a room with a collection of Soviet communist propaganda posters, which reminded me of my visit to Shanghai's Propaganda Art Museum. I also like the Ruscha room (he has fun with text) and the look of the unusual material sculptures in the Arte Povera and Anti-Form room (in the Energy and Process collection).

After the museum, I began taking pictures as I walked along the Thames, past the reconstructed Shakespeare Globe Theatre, and through the historic pubs and other brick buildings in the neighborhood that is Southwark / the borough market (closed this day) to get to a tube station. Grabbing lunch on the way, I took the train to Hyde Park and walked part of it and saw that it has a feel and functionality like New York's Central Park.

Later, I met Di Yin and we strolled through Green Park. Green Park has many pleasing grassy expanses and artistic, tree-lined, crisscrossing paths. It looks like a great place for a picnic.

Incidentally, Di Yin took some pictures after I met up with her. I linked to her first picture. While flipping, when you see a picture with the caption "The next weekend, we went back to borough market" (it's 18 pictures after the one linked above, or picture #103 in the album), you're done with the relevant pictures. I'll link to the other pictures at the appropriate time in later posts.