Tag: Tate Liverpool

Since I had once again taken on tour guide duties, it seemed amiss not to take in Tate Liverpool as Bev likes modern art, even though there was perhaps a slightly more sceptical approach from the rest of us. I’ve been here a couple of times before and I can’t say that I found the collections particularly engaging in the past.

Fruit is left to rot on rocks. The artwork description explains that it is by Edgar Calel and in the artist’s home stories from dreams are shared and stones are sacred sites where fruit and vegetables are placed on top. Some of the fruit is local and some is exotic, although the museum guide told Bev that most of it is local and there’s a limited amount of exotic going on.

Without wishing to be disrespectful as the Tate aimed for this to be a work based on cultural links, but to me this artwork just made me think of the waste and profligacy of privileged institutions. The artwork is not permanent, but is on loan to the gallery for 13 years, wherein its future is uncertain. However, artwork appeals to everyone differently and I’m sure most people will engage with it in a more positive manner.

On the bright side, there’s no admission charge to visit Tate Liverpool, other than for special exhibitions. That accessible approach ensured that the galleries were reasonably busy, so at least that means that artwork becomes accessible for the many and not the few. I’m sure most people will find some artworks that they like and are interested in, so that’s all rather positive.

This artwork is made from couscous.

We rushed Bev out in the end, but I don’t think that she noticed as it’s quite easy to distract her with promises of other shiny things. We were all hungry though, we had seen enough modern art to ensure that we were culturally refreshed and it was an interesting enough way to spend 40 minutes or so.

Whilst accepting that it’s easy to sneer and be negative, I really struggle to see what this artwork by Ellsworth Kelly (1923-2015) offers and how it’s relevant in the Tate Liverpool. In reality, obviously I’m completely wrong insomuch that Kelly sold hundreds of artworks and was an important figure in the artistic world, well, if Wikipedia can be trusted on this. I can find the painting mentioned only once in the media, when in 1970 the Surrey Advertiser (a bastion of art journalism) commented that “it’s a work on which opinions still vary”.

The gallery description reads:

“This painting, one of a series that developed from a small black and white study, is called after the famous avenue in New York. Here the red form can also be read as a ‘broad way’ receding into the distance, Kelly having cropped the edges of the rectangle to imply perspective. At the same time it appears absolutely flat. Asserting the real, flat nature of painting has been one of Kelly’s central concerns. He achieves this here without sacrificing effects of space. The picture plane suggests at once flatness and three dimensions. Other works in the series are titled Wall after New York’s Wall Street and ‘North River,’ another name for New York’s Hudson River.”

The artist wrote about the work:

“My original intention was to paint a larger black and white “Wall”, but it came out red”.

So this painting of near solid red wasn’t even meant to be red. This is all beyond me and I’ve now spent ten minutes writing about it all, so perhaps I’m more interested in the artwork that I had realised. Indeed, maybe I’ll be inspired to create my own red artwork.

Welcome to the art review section of this blog written by someone who knows just about nothing about art…… This painting is on plywood and was painted by Carel Weight (1908-1997) in 1932. The gallery notes that ‘allegro’ means merry and ‘strepitoso’ means noisily. I struggled to find a great deal of interesting work in the gallery, but that’s I suspect because I’m not sophisticated enough to understand the bulk of modern art and it goes over my head. This means that this is one of the artworks that I actually liked at the Tate and I mention all this as in later life Weight (once known as the Poet of Putney) said:

“For me the acid test of a painting is: will the ordinary chap get anything out of this.”

That sounds to me a rather sensible measure of artwork, so I’m going along with that. If I get time, I find it interesting to read old newspapers to see what people at the time thought about an artwork that I’ve now seen in person. There’s an element that it’s sometimes just slightly odd to think of someone nearly 100 years ago looking at this very painting in a different environment. A review in the Nottingham Journal of this painting said that the artist was “a young man with a keen sense of humour”.

The Tate’s web-site isn’t that detailed in explaining the heritage of the artwork, simply saying that it was purchased in 1990. It had been purchased by the Friends of the Atkinson Art Gallery in 1970 from the John Moores Exhibition, although I’m not sure what happened to it after that.