Dancing Prince: The Exhibition at the Tate Modern

An exhibition at the Tate Modern plays a critical role in the story of Dancing Prince. 

Jason Kent-Hughes, whom readers first met in Dancing Priest as Jason Bannon. Jason, then 16, was one of the “warehouse children” living near St. Anselm’s Church in San Francisco. He’s drawn to Michael’s outreach program, a coffeehouse with live music. In A Light Shining, Jason is taken in by Michael and Sarah Kent-Hughes and eventually adopted. Almost accidentally, Michael and Sarah discover the boy has a gift for painting. 

By the time of Dancing Prince, Jason is in his early 30s, married and with two sons of his own. He’s an assistant curator at the Tate Modern. As Sarah recognizes in the story, their San Francisco street child has become an artist with a gift for art administration. As part of a regular staff activity, he gives a talk on the two paintings by Sarah owned by the museum. The interest is so great that the museum has to move the venue from a lecture room to Power Hall, the large interior space that helps define the Tate Modern’s architecture.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph by Dil via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Edvard Munch - Poet?

It’s September, 2012. We’re on vacation in London, and I’m on my second visit to the Tate Modern. My first visit, two days earlier, was simply to see the collection and the museum’s incredible interior space (the Tate Modern occupies what was formerly a large power plant on the Thames River). This second visit is to see the current exhibition – Edvard Munch: The Modern Eye.

The exhibition does not include the only Munch painting with which I’m familiar – The Scream. The reason is that the exhibition covers only Munch’s 20^th century works (including experimental photographs). The Scream, all five or so versions of it that he painted, dates from about 1895.

That’s something I learn from the exhibition. Munch (1867-1944) returned to the same themes over and over again, and not only with The Scream. The Sick Child (likely based on the experience of his sister) and The Girls on the Bridge are two other subjects that he returned to again and again. He also painted women, in all stages of dress and undress. And mundane events like men walking to work and more sensational events like house fires also inspired his painting.

Two years later, on another London vacation and browsing the Tate Modern’s shop, I find The Private Journals of Edvard Munch: We Are Flames Which Pour Out of the Earth, edited and translated by J. Gill Holland.

Edvard Munch wasn’t only an artist. He was also a poet.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting: Girls on the Bridge by Edvard Munch (1899); The Munch Museum, Oslo.

The Bartering

The painter plays with his camera

and projector, using himself

as image, as subject, as object

to realize what a film can do

to express art by altering

reality. He learned that film

doesn’t express art but simply

exchanges one image for another,

an artistic bartering of image,

of self.

Photograph: Self-portrait by Edvard Munch (1930).