Monday, July 19, 2004

The Tate Modern Gallery

I was going to write a lengthy review of my visit to the Tate Modern Gallery last Wednesday, but it's just not coming together. I took some pictures of the outside of the gallery and the interior "Turbine Room" featuring a giant metal spider sculpture. The rest of the gallery was off-limits to cameras. I skipped the temporary exhibits of Edward Hopper's works and a French (I think) artist, and instead viewed the permanent collections instead. My favorite items were "Revolution," an exhibit of Soviet propaganda posters from the 1920s and 1930s, some of which I saw at MoMA here in NY a few years ago, Chris Ofili's "Double Captain Shit" featuring dung genitalia (NYC readers may remember Ofili's Virgin Mary painting caused a stir at the Brooklyn Museum of Art a few years ago), and a painting by CRW Nevinson entitled "Soul of the Soulless City," which showed the artist's disdain for New York, but which I liked anyway. You can see some of these works at the Tate's web site, including the Nevinson painting, but not the "Revolution" posters. Which is too bad, because I would have loved to get reproductions of some of them for our apartment. Nothing like Soviet propaganda to motivate me to work harder.

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