The Tate Modern

Tony and I finally made our way together to the Tate Modern Art Museum. Tony has gone twice already with different guests, but somehow I've not managed to get there.









It was a beautiful sunny morning, so we took the bus down to St. Paul's Cathedral, and walked across the Thames River on the Millinium Bridge. It is a really neat bridge to walk on, and provides great views of St. Pauls and of the Tate.



The Tate Museum is housed in an old Power Plant. It's massive coal burning tower reaching up towards the sky. I can still imagine the huge plumes of smoke they once belched upwards.

Inside, the massive turbine room lies empty, and in need of an exhibition. I guess this space is used for temporary exhibits. It would be neat to see some large scale installation here.

Our main purpose was to visit a special showing of the works of spanish painter Joan Miro. It is the largest single exhibition of his works in a long time. I'd seen some of his works in Spain, had been impressed, and had desired to see more.




In the Miro exhibit, I was most impressed with his earlier works, where he played with bending perspective. As he aged, he became more and more symbolic and simplistic in his surreal works.







He was a contemporary of Picasso, and was also a Catalonian artist. Many of his works speak to the distressing state of Catalonia under Franco's regime. He had a long career, and eventually did outlive Franco.

Tony was not impressed, and quickly made his way through the exhibition. I found him sitting at the end of it browsing the internet. I do have to admit that a lot of Miro's works were quite odd and not as approachable as I had hoped.

We then wandered into the permanent collection. It is full of strange and wonderful pieces that rotate in and out of display. They also give opportunity to other world artists to display unique works on a temporary basis, so it is constantly changing.

One particular piece that was interesting was a pile of what appeared to be sunflower seeds, but were in fact porcelean, and painted to look like sunflower seeds. I didn't really understand the piece of art, but okay. . .





I was surprisingly impressed with Jackson Pollock, who is often associated with drippy paint, but did some wonderfully powerful large scale paintings.








We really enjoyed walking around the museum.



Unfortunately, when it was time to leave, it was pouring rain outside - a surprise. We decided to have lunch at the museum cafe. It is a very nice place to take a break and enjoy some good food and drink. We tried some locally made soda. Tony had the Curiosity Cola, which tasted a lot like Coca Cola, and I had an Elderflower Soda, which tasted like liquid summer - flowers and sunshine in a bottle.



Sadly, the rain didn't really let up, and we got soaked on the way home. That will teach us to leave the apartment without our umbrellas - even in the summer.