Jordan
English Major

Let's chat about London. I don't know how to organize this so here are some things that I loved.

I loved class time. It was always different and interesting, especially at this stage in the course, because we had covered all the movements leading up to what artists are studying now, and were finally into contemporary artists. Understanding contemporary art was what I was anticipating most for this course. Every day we'd have class outside in Hyde Park by this fantastically huge and ornate and (according to one of us) goldleaf-smothered, gaudy statue of Prince Albert (which is pefectly great because I say that gaudy is definitely IN) and students would present their researched artist. Sure, some presentations were better than others but that's normal.

This was followed by museums and London life. And London life is probably the best sort of life one could live, I think. It's grand and graceful. It includes loads of beautiful city walking, tube riding, great food eating, and the like (not all at once, of course). Going to the Tate Britain was one of my favorite visits because I felt like it was a class reunion of every artist we'd covered in this course. In one room we would have Vorticist works like David Bomberg's "Mud Bath" or Wyndham Lewis' "Revolution", juxtaposed with Jacob Epstein's brilliant sculpture "Rock Drill." (This was definitely my favorite room.) In another room we had walls upon walls of Turner sunsets, followed by Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Francis Bacon, and so on. For the first time in my life I felt aptly prepared to gauge and enjoy almost every room in a museum. Of course, this is not to say that in a mere three weeks the brilliant Scott Kolbo had made me an art historian, but that now I finally have some tools with which to dig into and enjoy a museum full of art. And I love that.

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