[Nettime-ro] For your attention

[bory@xmail.com]

Bory spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

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Note from Bory:

Iata ce crede lumea despre arta moderna in UK. Cititzi cu atentzie cifrele reprezentand numarul de vizitatori. Impresionant, nu? 
Matisse/Picasso @ Tate Modern, London, Southbank.
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To see this story with its related links on the Guardian Unlimited site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk

Late at the Tate 
The art revival spreads beyond London
Leader
Monday August 19 2002
The Guardian


Now that the 20th century is safely over Britain's ever-cautious art public is free to pay homage to that century's two greatest painters, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, side by side again in a British gallery for the first time since 1945. Judging by the crowds which have flocked into Tate Modern on London's South Bank since mid-May we are now as happy to embrace modernism as we have long been willing (also after a wary delay) to queue to admire impressionism. The Tate stayed open all night on Saturday to allow the last of the 450,000 visitors to pass through at an entry rate of 500 an hour before it closed on Sunday night. 

Many people came with a predisposition towards one of the two artists and emerged with that notion confirmed or confounded. They are in good company. Friendly rivals for 50 years, the French bourgeois and the Spanish Bohemian were more than each other's antithesis in colour and form. As a succession of paintings demonstrates, side by side in this show, they constantly stimulated and infuriated each other. Picasso responded to Matisse's sad 1916 portrait of his wife by painting a young woman in the Cubist style. He used Magritte's gift, a portrait of his daughter, Marguerite (on display here), as a dartboard.  

That was unfair of the younger, greater man. But he was not alone. Among the many gaps in Tate Modern's collection, the result of defective purchasing policies in the mid-century, is Matisse's Red Studio, offered for £800 and turned down. It went (where else?) to the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And talking of money, though the culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, is delighted that her free museums policy (actually Chris Smith's) has increased attendance by 62% nationwide since December 1, it should be noted that Matisse and Picasso cost a tenner. A new gallery, a new footbridge and popular exhibitions can revive a faded riverside, as both banks of the Tyne are now proving. 

Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited
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