A very enjoyable night of poetry readings from Laurie Duggan, Elizabeth James and myself at The Lamb in Lambs Conduit in London. A very good crowd (full house) on a warm Summer evening.
The following day I went to the Tate Modern for their Futurist exhibition and having seen it believe that the Russian/French take on it was much more interesting. They seemed to have divested themselves of some of the more chauvanist and brutal aspects of some of the Italian practitioners - unnessary because the art wasn't necessarily made more interesting because of it. Laurie made an interesting comment about Modernists actually believing in the machine...though from the looks of it the machine of war did for some of that optimism.
I was particularly impressed with the room of British Vorticists Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg who were more than holding their own. I wondered having seen it whether Bomborg's painting on show had any influence on the battle paintings of Australian John Brack. It just struck me that the use of the geometric planes to stand-in for the figures reminded me of the massed pencils in some of those Brack paintings.BTW Epstein has an interesting large-scale concrete sculpture in the nave in Llandaff cathedral in Cardiff which I am familiar with that dominates the space in a very satisfying way.
The following day I went to the Tate Modern for their Futurist exhibition and having seen it believe that the Russian/French take on it was much more interesting. They seemed to have divested themselves of some of the more chauvanist and brutal aspects of some of the Italian practitioners - unnessary because the art wasn't necessarily made more interesting because of it. Laurie made an interesting comment about Modernists actually believing in the machine...though from the looks of it the machine of war did for some of that optimism.
I was particularly impressed with the room of British Vorticists Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein and David Bomberg who were more than holding their own. I wondered having seen it whether Bomborg's painting on show had any influence on the battle paintings of Australian John Brack. It just struck me that the use of the geometric planes to stand-in for the figures reminded me of the massed pencils in some of those Brack paintings.BTW Epstein has an interesting large-scale concrete sculpture in the nave in Llandaff cathedral in Cardiff which I am familiar with that dominates the space in a very satisfying way.
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