I'm just coming to the end of a really busy period at work and I've realised I haven't had time to blog about these exhibitions that we've visited recently.
Firstly, we went to see Metropolis: Reflections on the Modern City at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery at the beginning of April.
Then a couple of weeks ago we went down to London to see Lichtenstein: A Retrospective at Tate Modern and Manet: Portraying Life at the Royal Academy.
It struck me that even though each exhibition represents a very specific era, there are a lot of parallels between the kind of 'contemporary' urban life that is portrayed in all of the works on display. Consumerism and popular culture mingle with 'art' throughout; the simultaneously beautiful and seedy of modern life.
The order in which we visited them meant that we slowly slipped into the past - from the twenty-first via the mid-twentieth into the nineteeth century. It's interesting that 'modern life' has been with us for at least a hundred years...
