We returned to a Bolognese from the Aga and, Saturday, a walk to the village in the afternoon rain after a day mainly spent slogging through Venetian photos, ending

with pasta alla [fresh from the farmers’/fishers’ market] sarde, wonderful dinner as always.

Sunday saw some sun and a ramble about the Heath, aswarm with people all of whom

seemed to be thinking it might be the last time they’d see said [wan] sun for months to come,

then a late walk around the neighborhood before squid and black pasta.

Monday we figured we’d figured out enough about the tube to, keeping the river on our right after the Shard, find the Tate Modern, food with a view of the Thames followed by German

[so, or now, -called] “Magic Realism” [Above, Albert Birkle’s “Acrobat”; below Hans Grundig’s

“Girl with Pink Hat”] a limited look at a tortured period difficult to parse albeit with a few interesting works interspersed…then across the bridge to the Other Side and

Jenny Holzer’s Artist Room …mesmerizingly engaging, deeply political…

In that wing we saw a good little film about Tony Cragg as well as the Shanghai photography duo Birdhead, whose photo philosophy bore reassuring similarities to my own less frantic [as opposed to the eternally clicking selfie-shooting hordes of Venice and the Louvre, their

ubiquitous-ness having given me paws] practice.  Pause… and returned across the bridge

to galleries illuminating materialist strategies, beginning with collage, Romare Bearden’s being larger and considerably more powerful than anticipated.  We moved materialistically on to

wood with some wonderfully minimal  Japanese pieces such as  Jito Takamatsu’s

“Oneness of Cedar”, 1970, above…

further on, dyed hemp rope, “Jauba 2000”, by Mrinalini Mukherjee

and I forget whose surprising little marble and felt thingie this was but it was surprising;

in a glass case, it made its case.  We descended…too far; ascended and, halfway back down

again, finally escaped, walked back [river on the left],

found the tube and returned to Hollycroft for bream with seared peppers and ravioli.

Last London day found

Rick threading us through bewildering downtown streets to the Royal Academy,

first for a look at the new wing, where a gallery brilliantly installed by Christopher Le Brun, whose paintings, decorative abstractions, don’t particularly appeal to me but whose curatorial expertise and the reasoning behind it were stellar. The room started off with a series of tiny Constable plein aire studies from the RA collections but also included the sole Michelangelo

sculpture in Britain, the little-seen unfinished tondo below, as well as a copy of Leonardo’s

otherwise largely lost “Last Supper” and numerous degree paintings from Members…some pretty awful, some awfully interesting [none shown].  A fascinating Renzo Piano retrospective

[WAY too much to take in] in addition to the stylish “poster bar” where we took in a couple of espressos in globular glass cups completed that visit before crossing into the original building where in even grander older galleries we encountered “Oceania”, inaugurated by

a monumental drapery woven of blue plastic detritus and a powerful four minute film by Kathy Jetñil-Kijiner…which should be watched, and if I sent it to you already, well, it bears watching again. From there it was just one beautifully installed jaw-dropping amazing object after

another through one amazing huge room after another; exquisite seagoing log canoes [not shown; stick and shell navigational maps likewise]*, powerful ritual figures of many emanations,

bark cloth, a fifty-foot long continuous animation/live action video depicting history and colonial horrors across the entire Oceanic region [a quarter the circumference of the globe], more

objects of undeniable numinousity

[funerary and otherwise]

and out into London’s splendid downtown weather…

and opulence.

Mr. Wat, how I can’t fathom, found his car and our way back to the Heights of Hampstead in good order, on to a last afternoon among the Hollycrofters…oh, watch this again, really;

 

…and VOTE !

* There is, however [of course!] an excellent catalog, with everything depicted and scholarship in depth; definitely worth it.

But vote first!