Modigliani – Tate Modern, London

This was a nice exhibition, leaving out the drama and focusing on displaying a good mix of high-profile loans and Tate collection works.  I’ve pretty much left it too late for any of you to go and see it after reading this review (it closes today, sorry!), so instead I want to do a quick exhibition review and then focus on the virtual reality experience it incorporated.

So as I said, my overall conclusions were that I liked the exhibition for the way in which it was curated, as well as the works on display.  I always look at the labels of works on display in an exhibition to see where they come from – this seems to be unusual behaviour amongst those who I attend exhibitions with, but I suspect is less unusual for a museologist.  We are no longer in the days of big loan exhibitions touring to multiple far-flung sites around the world (although collaborations between top institutions continue, such as the joint exhibitions of the Tate and the Centre Pompidou), so it interests me to see where the curators have gathered works from and therefore what the budget of the exhibition was and what the support is from other museums, and from the government who will have had to provide indemnity for some of the works.  The Modigliani exhibition included a number of loans from UK and foreign institutions, including a number from the US, South America and private collections, which always gives me confidence that the curators have gone after the paintings they wanted to tell a story, rather than working with what they had to hand in their own and other London collections.  First seal of approval.

The other thing I liked about this exhibition was the curation: it was sleek, sensibly grouped, and told the story of Modigliani’s artistic development and place in Paris artistic society without the drama.  In something like 2008 I saw a big Modigliani show in Korea: again it had a number of good loans, but in hindsight the narrative was all about the pathos.  You know – the turbulent relationships, the death from tuberculosis, the death of Jeanne in response…  The curators at the Tate did a superb job of staying away from this – instead it was the arrival in Paris of the young artist, the trying out of different styles until he found his voice, the community of artists, the striking nudes, the relocation to the South of France, etc.  A couple of rooms stood out to me.  Firstly the small room with a selection of Modligliani’s sculpted heads, some of which were displayed in the Salon d’Automne of 1912.  Minimalist and striking, they are reminiscent of classical sculpture, but also of Brancusi, of Picasso, and other contemporaries.  In the exhibition they are displayed in a ‘white cube’ room, lined up on the diagonal in a way which reinforces the angular effect.  The backs are unfinished like medieval religious sculptures designed to be seen only from the front, and the fact that the labels for each sculpture are on the back of the case forces the viewer to circle them and confront this new aspect.  Whether this is deliberate or was to avoid cluttering up the view with label text I don’t know, but it’s definitely effective.  The other room I liked was called ‘Modern Nudes’.  And modern they certainly are.  Again the curators have obviously worked hard to assemble some top quality paintings that, hung together, show the way in which women seemingly had more agency than in traditional nudes.  Their gazes are direct, their individuality apparent, their poses seductive, and, perhaps most importantly, their pubic hair present.  They may have been painted for the male gaze, but at least there is some life to them!

So, that was a longer digression than I thought.  On now to the virtual reality.  It’s a very ‘museums of the future’ type of concept, so I was interested to see what the experience brought to the rest of the exhibition as well as what it was like in and of itself.  The idea is that Modigliani’s last studio, which although it still exists physically does not exist as a shrine to the artist, has been recreated as it was when he lived and worked there, through careful research.  The visitor sits on a chair both in real life and in the studio, and passes through two seasons and three different viewpoints.  White dots, if focused on, bring up quotes from contemporaries and Tate curators speaking about Modligliani’s work and life.  There are a maximum of three such dots in each viewpoint before moving on to the next one, so the virtual reality experience has a finite timeframe before it ends and brings the viewer back to actual reality.  Some thoughts I had on the experience, in no particular order:

• Yes, it’s a gimmick, but it’s quite good.  Was my primary objective in entering the virtual reality world to soak up the atmosphere of Modigliani’s last studio?  Maybe, but only incidentally.  I was more interested in looking at the dust motes, trying to look out the window, and looking down at the chair beneath me for the interesting experience of not having an avatar and thus being ‘invisible’.  So it seems to me that it’s more a crowd-pleaser than an educational tool at this point, but it did please me, and I was one of the crowd.
• Access is difficult.  A fairly short queueing area ends in a sign saying that the wait is 30 minutes from this point.  The Tate seem to have started with a first come, first served ticketing system for the virtual reality room (which sounds great for the culture vultures and too bad for everyone else), but had given up on this by the time I visited on the last weekend.  So instead it’s those with some extra time on their hands, the ability to stand and queue, and the curiosity to stick it out, who benefited.  The relative expense of VR and the exhibition space it takes up mean I don’t see this changing quickly.
• It was very passive.  Sitting on a chair in three different places in a room is perhaps as passive as one can be, particularly with no avatar to interact with the virtual world.  Having visitors mobile within a VR space would bring a whole new list of considerations and issues, but the only other time I’ve used a VR set up (coincidentally in a thing called Museum of the Future in Dubai which was less museological than it sounded), it was ostensibly about future medical technology and bionic knees or something similar, so I did have an avatar, and by bending my knees and ‘jumping’ without leaving the ground, I could leap from building to building in a single bound.  The point being that I don’t think it took up any more space, but was more immersive because it was less passive.  I mean seriously, in the Tate VR world there was a painting covered in a sheet, and the wind had to come and blow it away because I was invisible so couldn’t help…
• Despite this, I still described it as ‘wonderful’ to the Tate employee who helped me off with my headset and on my way.

So there you have it: my thoughts on the Modigliani exhibition and the virtual reality experience within it.  As I said at the outset I really haven’t left you much time, but if anyone should be in central London today with an ICOM card or similar, do go and have a look.  Some solid curation, a clear narrative and a fun VR gimmick make for a good couple of hours’  art historical pleasure.

ENDS 2 APRIL