art fragments

A busy day of art seeing!  First to the Tate, for the Sickert show, which I didn't enjoy nearly as much as the RA retrospective in 1992, and I don't know whether that's because my taste has shifted, or because this one seemed to stress his voyeurism more.  I could get myself interested from a fairly theoretical point of view in his images of music hall architecture and angles and reflections, and in his early visual relationship with Whistler, and in his early etchings, but I was super-aware how claustrophobic many of the images were.  

Alas, the Cornelia Parker retrospective is a couple of days off opening.  But her version of Rodin's The Kiss - The Distance (A Kiss with String Attached) (2003) was on show outside the Sickert, and most wonderfully of all, Hew Locke's The Procession (2022) fills the entrance hall with reminders that Henry Tate was a sugar refining magnate - that the whole building and foundation carries the baggage of colonial control and global finance with it.  It's full of images and fabrics from Locke's childhood in Guyana (and of references to his own artistic past - rising sea levels, Carnival, the military) - so much waiting to be unpacked in this!

Then to the Royal Academy for the Whistler Woman in White show, which was terrific - really well curated, and containing almost all the known paintings of Whistler's model and partner, Jo Hiffernan (as well as Whistler's blue and white porcelain).  Here was the sketch book in which he sketched out Wapping, 

which has some excellent Thames-side smokestacks in it;

other Women in White that ripped off Whistler (like Albert Herter's Portrait of Bessie (Miss Elizabeth Newton), 1892.

I've always loved these fiery feet in Rossetti's Ecce Ancilla Domine! (a precursor).

I don't think I'd ever fully taken in how strange the painting is around Jo's left hand in the painting that provided the main attraction ...

Nor, in Frederick Sandy's Gentle Spring (1865), had I taken on board the curiously solid dandelions.

And then, there was the woman who had clearly dressed appropriately for the show.