Tate Britain

I went to the Tate Britain the other day. I went there plan­ning to go to the Folk Art exhib­i­tion, but real­ised I didn’t have the time or money to do it justice that day, and what I was actu­ally in the mood for was post-war modern art. So that’s what I looked at.

These Phyl­l­ida Barlow install­a­tions were in the main hall. I liked them a lot, but there was a very posh woman behind me berat­ing the poor gallery attend­ant as if he had person­ally put them there for her displeas­ure. Those kind of people are the abso­lute worst thing about work­ing in museums.

The gallery has a huge amount of Henry Moore sculp­ture.

Here’s a Lucian Freud paint­ing from the 40s which I liked a lot. It was inter­est­ing to see some­thing by him without the thick, textured brush-strokes. Freud is one of those artists whose paint­ings look so much better in the flesh than in books, because a photo­graph doesn’t really capture the texture and, I don’t really know how to put it, sheer heft of the paint.

I partic­u­larly liked this Eduardo Paolozzi sculp­ture.

Also these inset metal floor dates for the galler­ies which are organ­ised chro­no­lo­gic­ally.

These maquettes by Reg Butler were the winner of an inter­na­tion­al compet­i­tion to create a monu­ment to polit­ic­al pris­on­ers. It was supposed to go up as a 400ft tall statue in West Berlin, but caused a huge stink both in the UK and behind the Iron Curtain, so was never built.

I liked this install­a­tion by Brian Grif­fiths a lot too.