One of those that I could feel nourishing me as I moved through it. Organised in eight thematised sections, each covering around two decades from the late 19th century on, it's a wonderful survey of modern art, taking essentially a 'greatest hits' approach to its selection of artists, with the result that there are pieces by all of the 'big five' of my favourite painters:
Giorgio de Chirico - "Gare Montparnasse (The melancholy of departure)" (1914), which is heartstopping when actually seen, not least - but far from only - because it's so much larger than in any reproduction. This is the one I spent longest with.
Rene Magritte - "The Portrait" (1935), not one of my favourites of his, but possessed of a nice slippery toughness.
Georgia O'Keeffe - "Banana flower" & "Eagle claw and bean necklace" (both 1934), charcoal drawings (rather than paintings) which I need to go back for a proper look at.
Edward Hopper - "Gas" (1940), brilliant. I reckon I saw this one in MoMA a decade ago and it's one of the dozen or so of Hopper's that's always near the surface for me. Much brighter in reality than in pictures.
Mark Rothko - "No 3 / No 13" (1949).
Also, speaking of personal favourites, Olafur Eliasson is also represented through "Ventilator" (1997) in the big ground floor space before the great hall, a fan swinging from the ceiling which I'd like to see in the daytime.
Elsewhere, Dali's "The persistence of memory" (1931), probably the most famous individual piece in the exhibition (?), was both tiny and stunning, while the Pollock, "Number 7, 1950", brought a smile to my face with its liveliness and all its associations.
One issue with the exhibition's approach, which I guess is the nearly unavoidable flipside of its near-comprehensiveness, is that, particularly until it reaches the more contemporary era (say from about the 1970s on), it very much reproduces the canon of modern art, but in this case, it's hard to feel too complain-y about that, and there does seem to be a consciousness of it in the more recent selections.
Also, this reminded me not only of those happy modern art visits in the public galleries of NYC all those years back, but also the NGV's own brilliant Guggenheim winter masterpiece show in 2007 (*), which made such an impression at the time, and which I still think about.
(w/ Alex - my first NGV Friday Night, I think)
Giorgio de Chirico - "Gare Montparnasse (The melancholy of departure)" (1914), which is heartstopping when actually seen, not least - but far from only - because it's so much larger than in any reproduction. This is the one I spent longest with.
Rene Magritte - "The Portrait" (1935), not one of my favourites of his, but possessed of a nice slippery toughness.
Georgia O'Keeffe - "Banana flower" & "Eagle claw and bean necklace" (both 1934), charcoal drawings (rather than paintings) which I need to go back for a proper look at.
Edward Hopper - "Gas" (1940), brilliant. I reckon I saw this one in MoMA a decade ago and it's one of the dozen or so of Hopper's that's always near the surface for me. Much brighter in reality than in pictures.
Mark Rothko - "No 3 / No 13" (1949).
Also, speaking of personal favourites, Olafur Eliasson is also represented through "Ventilator" (1997) in the big ground floor space before the great hall, a fan swinging from the ceiling which I'd like to see in the daytime.
One issue with the exhibition's approach, which I guess is the nearly unavoidable flipside of its near-comprehensiveness, is that, particularly until it reaches the more contemporary era (say from about the 1970s on), it very much reproduces the canon of modern art, but in this case, it's hard to feel too complain-y about that, and there does seem to be a consciousness of it in the more recent selections.
Also, this reminded me not only of those happy modern art visits in the public galleries of NYC all those years back, but also the NGV's own brilliant Guggenheim winter masterpiece show in 2007 (*), which made such an impression at the time, and which I still think about.
(w/ Alex - my first NGV Friday Night, I think)
