Tate’s Van Gogh and Britain exhibition will have been seen by about 400,000 people by the time it closes next weekend. Only for the David Hockney extravaganza in early 2017 did more enter the portals of Tate Britain. The gallery’s Don McCullin show from earlier this year also did far better than expected - 170,000 in just three months.
After several years in the doldrums, partly because of its big sister Tate Modern, which many tourists think is the only Tate in town, and partly because of some lousy exhibitions, Tate Britain is finally on a roll. The strength of the Van Gogh - other than the obvious lure of major paintings like Starry Night over the Rhône - has been a story cleverly told of the artist’s formative three years in Britain from 1873. Another surprise success at the gallery is its current retrospective of the black British artist Frank Bowling, unjustly an unknown name to many until now.
And, from mid-November, there’s another photo exhibition - Steve McQueen’s Year Three project in collaboration with the ever-original Artangel. The Turner and Oscar winner has been snapping most of London’s seven- and eight-year-olds in school pictures, which will show the city’s hugely varied ethnic mix. No doubt a large chunk of these 75,000 kids will themselves go to the exhibition, most with proud parents in tow. And just before the show opens at Tate Britain, some of the photos will be put up for 10 days on billboards around London. A very clever project.
Will the arts be encouraged by the arrival of Boris Johnson? I don’t mean in his alleged hobby of making buses from wooden wine crates before painting them. In a speech last weekend he surprisingly included “culture” as one of his four “ingredients” for the UK to succeed. I suspect this is prompted by two women who are extremely close to him.
His girlfriend Carrie Symonds has a degree in the history of art and theatre studies, and used to work in the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport. And Munira Mirza, left, his new director of the No 10 policy unit, a communist turned Tory Brexit-enthusiast who was his deputy mayor covering culture and education. Maybe their knowhow can rub off on Johnson? Not a natural arts lover, I recall him as mayor of London opening the British Museum’s exhibition on Hadrian, where he tried to show off with some cod Latin before dashing around some statues.
A play written by the Palestinian Ahmed Masoud starring Maxine Peake was an obvious draw. Obliterated was to be performed this Friday at Amnesty International’s theatre in London. With free tickets, not surprisingly more than 2,500 tried to book. But last Tuesday, they were informed online of its cancellation. Actually there never was a play. The cancellation message explains that Masoud and Peake had come up with the idea as a wheeze to draw attention to the wanton destruction by the Israelis of Gaza’s only theatre, the Said al-Mishal cultural centre on 9 August 2018 – exactly a year ago. Obliterated. A decidedly apt title.
