A Comedic Greek Tragedy And A Rhinocerus In London

To London for a few days . . . On Wednesday evening it was the Old Vic with Kristin Scott Thomas and Diana Quick in Ian Rickson's production of Electra. After reading some positive reviews, I must admit we were a little disappointed. The disconcertingly flippant style took some getting used to, and the longer the performance went on, the more it seemed to play for laughs. Laughs in a Greek tragedy? Although Scott Thomas as Electra was impressive in her histrionics, and Quick as her husband-slaying mother Clytemnestra a wonderful foil, we were left feeling rather let down: a case of bathos rather than catharsis. The next morning we walked from the Travelodge in Farringdon Road to the Charles Dickens Museum in Doughty Street (above), along Chancery Lane . . .

 . . . through Holborn, past the Law Courts and down the Strand . . .

. . . to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, where we bought tickets for Rembrandt: The Late Works. The show was simply stunning. Many famous pictures were on display, including several self-portraits. Compared with the flat, prosaic book and poster illustrations we're all familiar with, the original oils are all about vitality and texture — you could witness close-up the rough layers of paint Rembrandt applied with a palette knife, giving human skin a sweaty, tactile, lived-in quality. Unlike most of the visitors, who dutifully toured the exhibition in the pre-planned order of their yawningly tedious audio guides, we darted about here and there, going where the crowds were the thinnest, sometimes viewing etchings and paintings from more distant and unusual perspectives across dimly-lit rooms. I was especially struck by this sketch of a young woman sleeping (above) . . .      

On Friday we climbed to the top of St Paul's . . .

. . . to a bird's-eye view of modernist London in muted greys and greens.

The Thames and Blackfriars Bridge.

From St Paul's we crossed the river by the Millennium Footbridge and made our way past Tate Modern to the National Theatre and the Southbank Centre.

Sunset over the Thames.

The Hotel Russell, Bloomsbury. I remember many sales conferences here in times past . . .

. . . but back to times present, and it's Saturday morning, and we decided to visit the British Museum before catching our train. London had been vibrant and dynamic — buzzing with happy, optimistic young people — but we were glad to return to the peace and quiet, the serenity and fresh air of home.

Marble sculptures from the Greek Parthenon.

The special exhibition Germany: Memories of a Nation: a 600-year History in Objects was well worth the price of its £10 entry ticket, and included Tischbein's iconic portrait of Goethe and Dürer's woodcut print of a rhinoceros. 

London: (8) At The British Museum

Inside the British Museum. The circular construction on the right is the restored British Museum Reading Room, which stands in the centre of the Great Court. It's now a temporary space for major exhibitions. The Reading Room and its library were famously used by Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, George Bernard Shaw, George Orwell, Mahatma Gandhi, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Lenin and Karl Marx.

Lely's Venus, named after the baroque portrait painter Sir Peter Lely (1618-80), who used to own it.  It's a Roman copy (from the 1st or 2nd century AD) of a Greek original (perhaps from the 2nd century BC). This is an absolutely beautiful statue of a naked Venus or Aphrodite, the goddess of love. She's been surprised while bathing, and crouches down, attempting to cover herself. You can't see it in this shot, but a water jar rests under her left thigh. Prior to this, only male statues were nude.

The Nereid Monument, a tomb in the form of a Greek temple from Xanthos in present-day Turkey. This façade was reconstructed from ruins discovered in the 19th century and shipped over to England.

Greek sculptures of female figures from the Parthenon in Athens. The figure on the right may be Aphrodite, reclining on the lap of her mother, Dione. Note the wonderfully-sculpted folds of the garments. These figures form part of the collection known as the Elgin Marbles, so-called because the Earl of Elgin brought them from Greece to England in 1816. This remains a controversial issue.

Part of the frieze from the Temple of Apollo in Bassae, Greece. This block shows part of a battle between the Greeks and the Amazons, who were all-female warriors.

I'm not exactly sure what this object is: perhaps a totemic wooden shield from the Pacific region? Or some kind of talismanic effigy?

Turquoise mosaic of a double-headed serpent from Mexico, carved in wood. This is an iconic piece of Aztec art.

 Serpent imagery occurs throughout the religious iconography of Mesoamerica. The serpent is associated with several Mexica deities including Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent), Xiuhcoatl (Fire Serpent) and Mixcoatl (Cloud Serpent) or Coatlicue (She of the Serpent Skirt), the mother of the Mexica god Huitzilopochtli. The habit of snakes to shed their skin each year probably led to them being used to convey ideas concerning renewal and transformation. Likewise the ability of many species to move freely between water, earth and the forest canopy helped underline their symbolic role as intermediaries between the different layers of the cosmos (underworld, earth and sky).

The British Museum

London: (7) Trafalgar Square

The giant bright-blue cockerel (by German sculptor Katharina Fritsch) on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. It joins the august company of George IV and generals Havelock and Napier on the other three plinths and Admiral Nelson on his column. What a great splash of fun and colour!

The National Gallery, Trafalgar Square.

Five paintings I saw and loved in the National Gallery: (anticlockwise from the top) Van Gogh's Farms near Auvers and Long Grass with Butterflies, Turner's Rain, Steam and Speed, Cézanne's Landscape with Poplars and Monet's The Water-Lily Pond.

London: (6) Thames Riverscape

Old and new: St Paul's Cathedral, Blackfriars Bridge, modern skyscrapers.

Brigitte from Berlin.

St Paul's and the Millennium Bridge.

View west from the Millennium Bridge. Tate Modern (formerly Bankside Power Station) is on the left of the picture.

View east from the Millennium Bridge. The tapering, rather elegant skyscraper is the Shard, the tallest building in London, the UK and the whole of the EU. It's also the second highest building in Europe, after Moscow's Mercury City Tower. On the right of the picture you can see part of the reconstructed Shakespeare's Globe Theatre.

London: (5) Tate Britain

To Tate Britain on Millbank . . . The Tate has just reopened its doors again after a two-year refurbishment. The result is simply stunning. There's an Art Deco-inspired circular staircase, an elegant rotunda balcony and a vaulted basement café serving the finest Jing tea. 

Tate Britain is famous for its collections of Henry Moore, Constable, Turner, Blake and the Pre-Raphaelites.

For fun I bought six cards of some of the artworks which had impressed, intrigued and moved me the most. From left to right these pictures are: Henry Moore Pink and Green Sleepers Graphite, ink, gouache and wax on paper; Howard Hodgkin Rain Oil on wood; John Constable A Lane near Flatford Oil on paper laid on canvas; JMW Turner The Burning of the Houses of Parliament Watercolour; William Blake The Blighted Corn Wood engraving on paper; William Blake Newton Colour print, ink and watercolour on paper.

London: (4) Winter Wonderland

Winter Wonderland: Hyde Park's Christmas market and funfair . . .

London: (3) Walking From Piccadilly To Westminster

Posh shop in Piccadilly: buy your champagne and caviar here.

A rather classy hotel in Piccadilly.

Drinking fountain, statue of Diana and shadow of the photographer in Green Park. Diana was the Roman goddess of the hunt, the moon and childbirth. She is associated with woodland and wild animals, and had the power to talk to and control wild creatures.

Maple leaves on the Canada Memorial, Green Park.

The Victoria Memorial opposite Buckingham Palace.

View of Westminster Abbey from the seclusion of Dean's Yard. This peaceful quadrangle is home to Westminster School.

Statue of Nelson Mandela in Parliament Square. Many tributes, candles and bouquets of flowers have been placed on and around the plinth. Note the iconic black cab and bright red London bus!

The London Eye from Westminster Bridge.

Earth has not anything to show more fair:
Dull would he be of soul who could pass by
A sight so touching in its majesty:
This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,
Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie
Open unto the fields, and to the sky;
All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep
In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;
Ne'er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:
Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;
And all that mighty heart is lying still!

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH Upon Westminster Bridge

London: (2) Not Any Old Iron

I've been around iron all my life ever since I was a kid. I was born and raised in iron ore country where you could breathe it and smell it every day. And I've always worked with it in one form or another.

Gates appeal to me because of the negative space they allow. They can be closed but at the same time they allow the seasons and breezes to enter and flow. They can shut you out or shut you in. And in some ways there is no difference.

BOB DYLAN

I left Grosvenor Square and walked the short distance to New Bond Street, where the Halcyon Gallery is hosting Mood Swings, an exhibition of Bob Dylan's sculpted iron gates. My main reason for visiting London was to see this. I was not disappointed. These are beautiful art works, the gates enclosing a welded tracery of satisfyingly composed 'found' metal objects, such as wheels and cogs, springs and horseshoes, hammers and nails, chains and spanners, workmen's tools of all kinds. They are decorative rather than raw and disturbing — with some whimsical and autobiographical elements thrown in, such as a dog, a guitar, a treble clef symbol and a small buffalo (his logo on each work) — but this is surely Dylan's intention: the whole forms a nostalgic memorial to and celebration of the Minnesotan Iron Range country of his youth, and his hometown, Hibbing, site of the biggest opencast iron ore mine in the world.    

Downstairs I was surprised and delighted to find a collection of framed, poster-size silkscreen prints representing Dylan's Revisionist Art Series. Here Dylan has fun with the covers of famous American magazines such as Time or Playboy, cutting and pasting headlines from here and images from there in a surreal and satirical mashup. (This technique of recontextualisation recalled some of his songs, his stream-of-consciousness prose poem Tarantula and his film Renaldo and Clara.) He's debunking our cultural icons in these screen prints, but in an affectionate not bilious way. There's also a display of rusty, bullet-holed car doors, each attributed to a Depression-era gangster. 

Finally, upstairs and in a section of gallery across the street, you come across an exhibition of Dylan's paintings and drawings  — The Drawn Blank Series (1989-92) — and his prints — Side Tracks, a series of 327 prints (each hand embellished by Dylan), and Drawn Blank Graphics (2008-13), a series of limited edition prints (most of them sold). The subject of much of this art is the transient nature of life on the road: train tracks, city scenes, café stools, fleeting encounters with women.

Dylan himself has said that he draws 'to relax and refocus a restless mind'. While his style can seem a little awkward and derivative — you detect the strong influence of artists such as Chagall, Dufy, Van Gogh and Warhol, for example — I did enjoy his paintings more than I ever have done before. He does have a keen eye for colour and composition. And it was good to see these artworks 'in the flesh', rather than in reproduced form, and good also to find them alongside the reworked magazine covers and the gate sculptures. It really brought home how Dylan is impelled and adventurous enough to experiment with different forms and means of artistic expression. When you consider the songs as well, and the storytelling element within them, all these separate strands link together and cohere.  

Back on the gallery's ground floor the directors were schmoozing with the buyers and dealers, though apparently most of the iron works had already been sold. I bought a paperback copy of the Mood Swings catalogue (which was later stolen) and asked one of the long-blonde-haired, six-inch-black-heeled assistants if Dylan had visited. 'Yes, he came late one evening.'

'Did you meet him?' 

'No, sadly not, only the directors were there!' 

'Did he like how you'd displayed his stuff?' 

'Oh, yes, I think so.' 

Then I stepped back outside, past the doorman, and into the polluted and expensive air of New Bond Street, with its Cartier and Chanel, its Asprey and its Dior, its Ferragamo and its Alexander McQueen.

Well the winds in Chicago have torn me to shreds

Reality has always had too many heads

Some things last longer than you think they will

Some kind of things you can never kill

Though it's you, and you only, I'm singin' about

But you can't see in and it's hard looking out

I'm twenty miles out of town and Cold Irons bound.

BOB DYLAN Cold Irons Bound

London: (1) A Sombre Morning

I arrived home yesterday after three days in London. I took not a bus, nor a taxi, nor a tube train, but walked everywhere — much the best way to see the city. At first I was like a kid in a sweet shop. But after a couple of days the attraction palled. I found the overstimulation exhausting, and the petrol fumes got into my eyes and throat. The visit was intense and enjoyable, but I fled back to the provinces with relief.

As I walked from King's Cross Station on Wednesday afternoon and made my way to the Thistle Hotel near Marble Arch, I couldn't resist popping into the British Library on Euston Road. There's a copy here of every publication produced in the UK: that's a staggering 150 million items, with three million new items added each year. I spent an absorbing hour or two in the John Ritblat Gallery (free admission), and marvelled at the incredibly rare early manuscripts and printed books on display: the Lindisfarne Gospels, Shakespeare's first Folio, the Gutenberg Bible, the Magna Carta, Leonardo da Vinci's Notebooks, some Beatles' manuscripts, and many other gorgeous works, including some extraordinarily beautiful illustrated natural history books.

The next morning I walked the short distance from my hotel through Mayfair to Grosvenor Square, site of the US Embassy. In the photo you can clearly see the gilded-aluminium eagle over the main entrance. Opposite the embassy the blue tent houses an Iranian protest against the recurrent Iraqi attacks on Camp Ashraf and Camp Liberty, home to Iranian dissidents, exiles and refugees. 

On the other side of the square stands the Canadian High Commission, and also the 9/11 Memorial Garden, officially opened on 11 September 2003. There's an oak pergola flanking a pavilion upon which is inscribed: 'Grief is the price we pay for love'. Three bronze plaques carry the names of the 67 British citizens who died in the Twin Towers. Below them is a fragment of a girder from the World Trade Centre preserved in resin. 

In front of this Grecian-style lodge is a memorial stone bearing these words from American poet Henry Van Dyke: 'Time is too slow for those who wait, too swift for those who fear, too long for those who grieve, too short for those who rejoice, but for those who love time is eternity'.