Paris, London, Widdington, Braintree, West Wickham and Cambridge, all in the space of ten days.
Paris: Picasso et les Maîtres at the Grand Palais. As always, I marvel at the number of people prepared to queue up in freezing conditions just for the privilege of getting into the museum and paying an entrance fee. I am not being altogether frivolous in writing these words as such devotion surely gives the lie to our tendency to decry the philistine nature of modern life. Who exactly are these people prepared to spend much of the day waiting to see and then seeing works by the likes of Picasso? Quite obviously, a lot of them are members of the grey brigade – you know, people of my age but of course looking considerably older. On the evidence of the crowd assembled outside the Grand Palais, quite a lot of them are foreigners, too. And what am I, with my noticeable lack of anything resembling an artistic bone in my body, doing there? I honestly don’t know. Perhaps the vague feeling of nostalgia that such visits procure, plus the ever-present possibility of piling up points for this or a future life? No, there’s more to it than that but there’s no denying that I’m more interested in reading about artists than actually looking at their pictures.
Picasso is no exception, but he has certainly gone up in my estimation now that I know that he went to art school and could actually paint if he set his mind to it (even though he decided at any early age not to bother). I was particularly interested in his Blues Period.
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