A Visit to Margate and The Turner Contemporary, with some thoughts on erotic influences in art, a ramble with pictures.

With the inclement forecast and a day off giving the desire to go somewhere and do something, I decided that that any good weather would probably be in Thanet and if it rained hard The Turner Contemporary would provide shelter and some pictures to look at.

I started with tea at Puffins Café and did the sketch above while drinking it, don’t count the windows this was a quick sketch and I didn’t, in fact I missed at least one building completely.

The sketch was done by using a fine Pit pen, type S, black India ink, for the sky line and then mixing up some likely watercolours and splodging things in.

Puffins Café  on Margate harbour arm comes highly recommended the civilised pot of tea for the three of us cost £2.50.

We then meandered off into Margate capturing a supermarket sarni en passant but with a storm brewing it was too hot and oppressive for shopping so headed back to the harbour arm, on reaching The turner Contemporary two things happened. The first was it started to rain and the second was I received the press release saying the gallery has won an architectural prize, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/21-june-2012-turner-contemporary.html

Shedding any thoughts of sheds and feeling somewhat inconvenient after all that tea I made for the vicinity of the Charles Webb, where I relived myself and then started refilling my paintbox’s waterbottle which someone took as a possibly subversive act and I had to assure them that I was a watercolourist and not a terrorist.

Now of course we come to the rude bit, which I will add later when less people are reading this post.

     I wandered around looking at blue sketches of a blue woman who was evidently having some difficulty inserting a blue tampon the artist had eventually resorted to scrawling messages along the lines of “life sucks” and so I wound up looking at the Rodin and Turner sketches which put one in mind of erotic art.

By this time I wanted to sketch something and sought a seat, the only one facing an art work, is a very hard one facing Rodin’s “The Kiss”

I don’t suppose anyone considering drawing this sculpture can do so without thinking of the Marcel Duchamp etching pictured above where the hand has been moved into a more suggestive position. 

My seat viewed Rodin’s The Kiss from a different angle (behind) and as you see I managed after the second attempt to very nearly get the other hand into a suggestive position, perhaps I will return and have another go. 

I forgot to take a photo from where I was sitting when I sketched The Kiss but this is one I took recently from about there, for anyone who isn’t familiar with the sculpture in situ. As you see the hands really are big. 


I managed to change my webhosting firm and can now publish batches of photos again, here are today’s http://michaelsbookshop.com/laptop612/

I acquired two painting implements today, pictured above, I wonder if any readers can identify them, the picture will enlarge if you click on it compulsively. 

Kiss me quick, I can’t find my little Willie, a ramble about Rodin’s second Kiss now at the Turner Contemporary.

I went to Margate to see the sculpture “The Kiss” by Auguste Rodin (a note here on pispronunciation Rodin is normally pronounced Rodan, the best I have heard so far being Odin, I assume they were going on the R being almost silent in French, who say something like rODan) anyway this isn’t so much bout Norse mythology as Greek.

I wandered into the Turner Contemporary, took a few pictures, mostly trying to get a lot of reflections of The Kiss in Dainel Buren’s mirrors and then sat down to look at people looking at The Kiss. The sequence of events in today’s technological world was pretty much the same, walk towards sculpture, fumble about for mobile phone, camera or other small black technological item, take pictures of sculpture, retreat.

Eventually a chap appeared adorned with enough expensive camera equipment to stock a photography shop and started snapping away like a pro, at this point one of the gallery staff came and told him that photography of The Kiss wasn’t allowed.

This is all rather strange, my understanding was that The Turner Contemporary had banned photography in the galleries upstairs as a lot of the exhibits are still in copyright and with so many artists work on show, sorting out the copyright position would have been pretty much impossible.

Rodin died in 1917 94 years ago and copyright lasts until 70 years after the artist’s death , so what is going on there I didn’t really understand, particularly as you can photograph it when it is in its normal home The Tate Gallery.

At this point I got my sketch book out and put my camera away, I haven’t yet been ticked off for sketching in an art gallery, so this seemed a fairly safe option.

The Kiss on display in the gallery is the one I always think of as the second kiss, the first one that Rodin did was commissioned by the French government in 1888 and is now in The Rodin Museum, this one was a copy done by Rodin for a private commission. So when some sculptor says something about revealing the shape that was already there in the stone, in this case several tons of marble, you may wonder what they are blathering on about.

The history of this second kiss is rather amusing, it was commissioned by the American collector Edward Perry Warren, Edward Perry Warren was gay and apparently saw Rodin as the modern inheritor of the classical Greek tradition.

Anyway he wrote to Rodin asking that the man’s genitals be clearly sculpted in the Greek tradition, rather than modestly hidden. Warren paid 20,000 franks a lot of money in about 1900 and when the sculpture turned up things on that front were a bit disappointing.

Warren put the sculpture in his stables where it stayed for ten years, in 1952 The Tate organised an appeal for public donations and bought it for the nation for a knockdown price of £7,500.

We now have a situation where the standard Tate loan agreement says no photography so lots gallery staff time is wasted telling people not to photograph the thing, I will endeavour to sort it with the Tate for the Turner.

A point here about copyright and galleries, when a gallery says that a photograph of an exhibit they have where the a artist has been dead for over 70 years is copyright, the copyright they are referring to is that of the photographer who took the picture of the work of art, not the work of art. 

The picture above is of the Kiss etching by Marcel Duchamp, with the repositioned hand that I mentioned in a previous post.

I have been trying out a compact camera, but the delay on it is too long, so I will have to find something else, pity because the picture quality is OK, anyway here are the pictures I took in Margate yesterday http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/1011/id5.htm not many because I lost patience with the camera.

Update, the Tate have agreed to relax the photography restrictions on The Kiss and as the Turner Contemporary have removed the note that photography of The Kiss is not allowed from their website, it would appear that the situation is resolved.  

Art Installation Animal Export Protest as The Turner Contemporary Margate gets Rodin’s Kiss.

I couldn't find a picture of Rodin turning up with his sculpture The Kiss so I have done a quick sketch.

I know the repositioning of the hand is an old joke in the art world, I am sorry I couldn’t resist it.


A bit of an overreaction from TDC I thought to about twenty people engaged in a peaceful protest, see http://thanetpress.blogspot.com/2011/10/statement-on-live-animal-export-protest.html


I think the leaders comments that it is ok to protest in Ramsgate but not in Margate in case it effects business are open to some unfortunate interpretations. 

Here is some video footage of the protest