Plastic Bag Awards 2021

2021 has been an odd year, yet again, and continues to be so. Between official lockdowns and self-imposed lockdowns when the government wasn't doing its prime objective of protecting its citizens, I managed to get out and see and do some things over the year. The categories are, again, abbreviated to make sure there are enough contenders to make it worthwhile convening the judging panel, but here they are, the Baggies of 2021! 

Best Theatre (Drama and Dance)

I only saw one drama this year but several dance productions. The nominees are:

'The Normal Heart' @ The National Theatre
'Romeo & Juliet' @ The Royal Opera House
'The Midnight Bell' @ Sadler's Wells
'L'Heure Exquise' @ The Linbury at the Royal Opera House
'Curated by Carlos' @ Sadler's Wells

'The Normal Heart' was the only play I saw this year and, while it's an important work, it's not a great drama. It was wonderful to see Alessandra Ferri dance twice over the autumn, especially dance with Carlos Acosta, I also saw the ballet that made me fall in love with the art form with my original Romeo, Steven McRae on his return to the stage after his injury. But the dance work that made me sit up and pay attention was the new work from Matthew Bourne, 'The Midnight Bell', telling stories of the seedy side of Soho between the wars. I'm looking forward to seeing it again one day.

The winner is 'The Midnight Bell' by Matthew Bourne at Sadler's Wells.

Best Exhibition

I managed to see a few good exhibitions over the summer and autumn, with all major galleries open and the Courtauld finally re-opened after a three-year restoration project in November (and it's looking good). The nominees are:

'The Making of Rodin' @ Tate Modern
'Sensing the Unseen' @ The National Gallery
'Sophie Taeuber-Arp' @ Tate Modern
'Poussin and the Dance' @ The National Gallery
'Durer's Journeys' @ The National Gallery

There have been some great exhibitions this year that gallery curators will have been working on for several years but fewer people than expected will have seen them due to the plague. That's unfortunate but those of us lucky enough to see them are very grateful.

Who knew that Rodin made naked models of his works to get the musculature and stance right before adding clothes? Who guessed that Durer made sketches from his travels around Europe to incorporate into his paintings? There's a lot to learn from exhibitions. I didn't expect to like the Poussin exhibition but I did, seeing his graceful paintings of dancers and it was a joy to discover Sophie Taeuber-Arp, a colour master I'd never heard of. 

But the Baggie goes to 'Sensing the Unseen' at the National Gallery, a digital and interactive exploration of Jan Gossaert's 'Adoration of the Kings'. Not only was this a great painting to explore but it was perfect for this experimental exhibition of different ways of looking at it, one of my favourite paintings in the collection.

Best Installation

This year I've split off installations from exhibitions since they are, essentially, different things, different ways of experiencing art. The nominees are:

'Rupture No 1: blowtorching the bitten peach' by Heather Phillipson @ Tate Britain
'Infinity Mirror Rooms' by Yayoi Kusama @ Tate Modern
'Forest for Change' @ Somerset House
'In Love With The World' by Anicka Yi @ Tate Modern

This has been a fine year for installations in London and I admit to wanting a holiday cottage in Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms. I loved the 'Forest' in the stone courtyard of Somerset House and I want to adopt one of the alien creatures floating round the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, but the winner is Heather Phillipson at Tate Britain.

This is a fabulous installation that should be called 'The Great All-Seeing God of a Thousand Eyes' and I can't help but gawp at it as I walk through and experience it. It's a sound and vision experience and occupies the central galleries of the Tate. It's fabulous.

Best Face Mask

The pandemic went on from 2020 into 2021 and more places started selling masks since the need continued. Cressida Bell produced a 'Fireworks' mask and the V&A Museum produced different William Morris designed masks (I bought a green one), but the award goes to the Tate that produced a fabulous mask based on the 'Punjabi Rockers' work by Chila Kumari Singh Burman. I bought two.  

And that's it, the reduced Plastic Bag Awards for 2021. Here's hoping we can get closer to normal next year. 

'Sensing The Unseen' - Gossaert at the National Gallery

Jan Gossaert's 'Adoration of the Kings' is the subject of a Room 1 exhibition at the National Gallery at the moment. The exhibition was being set up on my last visit to the Gallery in December 2020 before we went into lockdown again so I made a point of seeing it now that the Gallery is open again and I'm so pleased I did. Gossaert's 'Adoration' is a favourite painting of mine and it's always astonishing to see how much detail Gossaert managed to cram into a single painting. I've seen it often so it's a joy to explore it in a new way.

Room 1 exhibitions focus on a single painting or a narrow theme to look in detail at something. Room 1 is, as you'd expect, the first room you come to in the gallery off the (former) main entrance and foyer except that the main entrance has now moved to the Sainsbury Wing so, all too often, it's one of the last rooms you're likely to visit, especially in these pandemic days. Exhibitions are generally on for a short time, only for a few months, so we're lucky that the Gallery decided to extend the Gossaert exhibition after lockdown.

The exhibition is a sort of 'sound and vision' immersive experience  focusing exclusively on the one painting. There is timed entry and you walk into Room 1 and take your place in one of the three 'pods', standing in a circle on the floor in front of a large screen showing an enlarged detail of the Virgin with glints in her hair. You hear the sound of the wind, dogs barking and the chatter of the crowds around you as the camera moves slowly around the painting showing enlarged detail after detail. I've seen this painting many times but who knew that the dog in the centre actually has eyelashes? I suspect this is what the title of the exhibition refers to, the amazing details in the painting that we haven't seen but we know there is more to it.

It was the amazing details of the painting on the screen in front of me that astonished me. The sound element enhanced the experience but I was blown away by what I was seeing. This is such a great idea for an exhibition and I hope the Gallery tries it again with other paintings.

The incredibly detailed photography panned around the painting taking in details of the rich clothes and faces, details of the background and the offerings to the new king from the three kings. The film focuses in on where Gossaert signed the painting around the black king Balthasar's hat (under his crown) that I'd never noticed before since it's actually so small. This exhibition really is an advert for looking at the details in paintings. You never know what you might find.

In a way, this exhibition is giving us the view of the painting that curators and restorers have with the incredible detail. I'll never get close enough to the painting to see the highlights in the Virgin's hair or the embroidery details in Balthasar's hat or his rich robes but I now know it's there.

The camera climbs slowly to the top of the painting and the final few close ups are of the angels flying above the scene and then up towards the star that the kings and shepherds have followed, getting closer and closer and we look into the heart of the star. Such detailed work that is impossible top see when you look at the painting when hung on the Gallery's wall, almost breathtaking

You're then invited to step outside the pod to view the painting hung on the wall and listen to the voice of Balthasar as Theresa Lola reads her poem about Balthasar's journey as he hears people call out to him, comment on him, the strangeness he feels being in the presence of so many different people. And then the light dims and the door is open and it's time to leave. It was an astonishing experience and I felt privileged to be able to see it.

Sadly there's no exhibition book or even postcards so I'm pleased I took my own photos of what I saw on the screen. I want to see it again.

The painting was created between 1510-15 in oil on a wooden panel and is about 5'9"x5'3".

Four Northern Renaissance Paintings at the Prado, Madrid

The Museo del Prado in Madrid has a great collection of paintings from the Northern Renaissance, the countries around Holland, Belgium and Germany in the 1400s and 1500s. That's not too surprising in a way since Spain used to rule over some of those countries so it's only to be expected that some of the glorious art works found their way into Spanish collections. It has room after room on the ground floor full of these paintings, so very different to the Italian Renaissance paintings in rooms nearby. I've chosen four paintings that I particularly like, starting off with Jan Gossaert's 'Christ Blessing, the Virgin Mary and Saint John the Baptist' from 1510-1520.

The thing that always grabs my attention is the delicacy of the figure of Christ in the middle, the serenity and stillness. Is he blessing the Virgin? If so, why? And why is John pointing at Christ? It's an odd composition, especially with the angel popping through the round opening above Christ's head. Maybe it was painted to go above the doorway into a private chapel of something like that, so you receive your blessing for going into the chapel? I really don't know, but it's not a painting I find I can just glance at and walk past, once glanced at I need to look properly.

An earlier painting is 'The Descent from the Cross' by Rogier van der Weyden, painted before 1443. We see Christ being held by Joseph of Arimathia and Nicodemus, Saint John aiding the fainting Virgin and, I think, Mary Magdalene being distraught on the far side of Christ (in Italian paintings of the time her hair would be loose). The figures are almost life-sized and that makes the painting even more dominating. The Virgin's figure reflects that of her son as he hangs limply before he reaches the ground. What would you think if you saw this hanging in a church surrounded by flickering candles reflecting the gold background and the rich colours, the sight of your lord who gave his life to save yours? It must have been a powerful image back then.  

Heironomous Bosch, known simply as El Bosco in Spain, is a great favourite at the Prado and has a room to himself that houses some of his greatest paintings, including 'The Garden of Earthly Delights'.

The painting is constantly surrounded by viewers several deep so you've got to be patient in order to see it properly and up close. It's a triptych of three scenes showing paradise, earth and hell, all with so much weirdness you can only wonder what sort of magic mushrooms El Bosco ate. It's odd since it's this painting that people crowd around leaving his other works easy to see up close - this is his 'big hit' that people know but you can learn a lot about him from the other paintings as well.

The Prado held a major exhibition of El Bosco's work three years ago that was sold out and opening hours had to be extended due to popular demand. I was lucky enough to get tickets and enjoyed the exhibition but it was too crowded to be able to view the works in comfort. I enjoyed seeing his paintings much more now that they're hanging together in a single room without the crowds.

A final painting I want to show you is this self-portrait by Albrecht Durer from 1498. Here he is, a young man, assured and confident, dressed richly like an aristocrat and with his life ahead of him. It shows his Italian influences with the three-quarter pose and the landscape through the window.

It's also a bit of a show-off painting using himself as the poster-boy for his workshop. If you look under the window there's some text inscribed on the wall. This says, "1498, I painted this after my image, I was twenty six, Albrecht Durer". So, the show off was only 26 when he painted this astonishing self-portrait. He had an interesting and largely rewarding life ahead of him and he left behind a great body of work. Surely we're due a Durer exhibition sometime soon?

I first came across this self-portrait when I was 16 at school (along with the van der Weyden 'Descent' painting) and was disappointed on my first visit to the Prado three years ago when it was out on loan so I didn't see it. I've seen it since though.

There are dozens of other Northern paintings on display in the ground floor galleries but these are the four I wanted to share.