& Lyle?

[paulkincaid]

A wonderful day yesterday. Met up with John Clute and Judith Clute at Tate Britain to go around first the Edward Burra exhibition then, reached by a staircase illuminated by a glorious Chris Ofili mural commemorating Grenfell Tower (I pointed out that I once worked with Chris Ofili's brother), the Lee Miller exhibition. Wow, that was one eye-opening day. I have known about Burra for a long time, but I've only ever seen one or two of his pictures reproduced in books, and they never quite worked for me. But seeing the actual watercolours en masse was an entirely different thing. The longer you look into them, the more they mean. I was struck how the early pictures were crammed with often cartoonish figures, but as the exhibition went on the later pictures were emptied out so that there are in the final room a number of empty landscapes. And yet, for all that radical change in content, there was an extraordinary continuity in style and approach throughout the fifty-odd years covered by this exhibition. There is a late, post-war painting of a bunch of thugs beating up a scarecrow, yet their postures echo figures in a pre-war painting of dancers in New York. I'm not sure I really like his paintings, but I was awestruck by them. And as the Burra exhibition is coming to a close, so the Miller is just starting (although a slightly fuller version was shown last year at the Imperial War Museum, which I missed). And again, it was dazzling. I was struck again and again by the composition of her photographs, always slightly at an odd or unexpected angle but always telling a story that was more than what was in the frame. It was no surprise to see her collaborations with Man Ray, sometimes as model, sometimes as photographer, because the approach to making a picture is so similar. (At one point a picture of Miller taken by Man Ray is positioned next to one by Cecil Beaton, and it shows you so clearly why one is a genius and one is a hack.)