Whitworth Art Gallery, Etc.

After leaving the Manchester Museum, I strolled ten minutes over to the Whitworth Art Gallery. There, I had a sandwich in the cafe before exploring the gallery. Then, I had a bit of a sit-down in a park because that’s what old men do. I followed that with a few quick-hit sights in Manchester.

Ready? Set. Go!

Whitworth Art Gallery

Whitworth Art Gallery is a smallish modern art gallery. Like the Manchester Museum, it’s part of Manchester University.

I use “modern art” here the way I think a, say, Renaissance art historian might use it. Fortunately, I can always count on a Renaissance art historian to drop by. Hopefully, she’ll correct me if I get it wrong.

By this definition, modern art is artwork which was created less than two or, maybe, three hundred years ago.

That, by the way, is not my definition of modern art. By my definition, modern art is anything that was created by an artist who is either still alive or died sometime after I turned eighteen. I make an exception for some older works. I’ll call them modern if they’re totally abstract and impossible for any sane person to interpret unless the explicit interpretation was passed down to them in a direct chain from the artist.

Those are the rules. I do make them up.

The Whitworth is, as I said, a smallish gallery. When I was there, it had only two exhibitions running. One qualified as modern under the art historian definition, as I perceive it, but not by my definition. The other exhibition also qualified as modern under my definition.

The exhibition that required the art historian’s definition to qualify as modern displayed works by the English landscape artist J.M.W. Turner. He lived from April 23, 1775, to December 19, 1851.

The vast majority of the works in the Whitworth’s current Turner exhibition are prints, including all 71 of his published prints.

The prints were made from engravings. In some cases, J.M.W. Turner did not just do the sketching, but also created the engravings. In other cases, he had others do the engravings from his sketches, but under his strict supervision.

A sign in the gallery said some engravings were done after his death, but some critics say they lack the quality of the ones done by him or under his supervision.

I was quite impressed with the prints. They were monotone, but the variation in intensity of the tone gave them much more depth than that. Then again, I haven’t the foggiest of ideas as to what I’m talking about. Never mind.

The exhibition also displayed a few of Turner’s watercolours. To be honest, I preferred the prints. The watercolours looked more blotchy and less defined to my eye. Then again, please keep in mind the above caveat about me not having the foggiest of ideas as to what I’m talking about.

I was particularly interested in seeing the other exhibition. It displayed the works of an artist named Santiago Yahuarcani. The exhibition was titled “The Beginning of Knowledge.” As I write this, I’m 72 years old. I thought it was well past time that I finally began to obtain at least a modicum of knowledge. Who knows how old I’ll be when some random stranger wanders by and reads it? Time leaves static pages behind.

Santiago Yahuarcani is, at the time of writing, still living. He was born in 1960 and resides and works in Pebas, a small town in the Peruvian Amazon. He is an indigenous person and his paintings relate the stories, including those of violent persecution, of his recent ancestors’ history and of his culture.

The dates clearly fit my definition of modern. His paintings are abstracted, while being far from 100% abstract. His colour palette, at least of the works on display at the Whitworth, is bold but dark.

In addition to some of his paintings, there was a video loop containing excerpts from a 2020 film, “El Canto de las Mariposas” (The Song of the Butterflies) by Núria Frigola Torrent, with English subtitles. It documented the life of his family in Pebas.

I somewhat enjoyed Yahuarcani’s art in a darkly abstract, but highly evocative sort of way. Again, I have absolutely no idea what I mean by that. Just let the words flow over you.

Whitworth Park

The Whitworth Art Gallery sits immediately beside a park. Probably not coincidentally, it’s called Whitworth. They’re probably both named after the same whit’s worth.

Whitworth Park is irregularly shaped, but it’s the equivalent of about two or three normal blocks wide and three or four normal blocks long. However, the blocks in the neighbourhood aren’t normal, so don’t bother trying to count it on a map.

The park is very pleasant, with lots of grass and trees, and a few flowers. And, most importantly, it has some comfortable benches for old men. I think others are allowed to sit there too, but don’t tell them.

Manchester Central Library

The Manchester Walking Tour I took yesterday afternoon started in front of the Manchester Central Library. There, before moving from the spot, in addition to doing introductions and talking about the immediate neighbourhood and some of Manchester’s history, the guide said a few words about the library. He stated that it was modelled after the Pantheon in Rome.

Yesterday, I didn’t take any pictures of the exterior because it was raining steadily. I didn’t want to stand out in the rain to take a picture. And we didn’t go inside then.

I decided to go back today to get a dry picture of the exterior and to take a look inside.

The exterior is reminiscent of the Pantheon in that it’s round. But it’s a very modern take on the concept.

The guide said that, like the Pantheon, the architect put a hole in the centre of the roof of the Central Library. But unlike in the Pantheon, the architect put glass in the hole because they get a lot of rain in Manchester.

When I went into the Central Library today, I expected to be able to walk to the middle of the ground floor, look up, and peer through a clear glass-covered hole. It wasn’t like that. If you look up from the ground floor, you see an opaque ceiling that’s the floor of the first storey.

Up on the first floor (second by North American numbering), there is a lovely, round reading room, with gold- and black-coloured cylindrical columns around the outside of the room. And, looking up, there’s the glassed-over hole in the ceiling. But the glass looked frosted to me, not clear. That, to me, detracted from the Pantheon feel.

However, it is a very attractive library.

St. Mary’s Hidden Gem Church

My walking tour app says that St. Mary’s Catholic Church has a nickname of the hidden gem church because it is plain, red brick on the outside and rammed up against other buildings, but is beautiful on the inside. It turns out that’s not just an informal nickname. On a wayfinding sign on a street a bit away, the arrow for the church pointed to “St. Mary’s Hidden Gem Church.” And a printed sign posted on the door said the same thing.

The hidden part of “hidden gem” is accurate, for both the reasons mentioned above and because coming from the closest main street, it’s kind of difficult to find.

Inside, well, what can I say? A gem? No, not too my eyes. Sorry.

What looked like white plaster religious statues of various sizes overcrowded the wall at the front of the church. Overcrowded, as in absolutely jam-packed. The sculptures were probably carved out of stone, but from the distance I was from them, they could have been plaster.

I read somewhere that the columns in the church were marble. And from a distance, they indeed looked like veined marble, but looking at them close up, they didn’t look like marble to me. The surface was pebbly, not polished smooth. It looked to me like it could have been paint, but I’d have no trouble believing that I’m wrong about that.

Heavily abstracted paintings hung along the two side walls. They weren’t so abstracted that I couldn’t make out some faces and other items in the paintings, but I don’t know what they were doing there. To my uneducated eyes, they didn’t look at all religious in nature. Nor could I figure out why they were in a church. Or anywhere.

Pedestrianized Shopping Streets

Regular readers know I greatly appreciate pedestrianized shopping streets. I hate shopping and I don’t go into the shops. But I enjoy walking on streets without cars.

Manchester has at least a few pedestrianized shopping streets. I’d been on a couple in the past couple of days, and I decided to go back. Two, which are each about a block long, are really one street, but it changes name on either side of a cross street. Those are Exchange Street and New Cathedral Street. Exchange Street has oldish buildings on it. New Cathedral Street has newish, flashy buildings of about four storeys. I think that the renovation of New Cathedral Street is a result of the IRA bombing in Manchester in 1996.

I’ve included pictures of both Exchange and New Cathedral Street. There are no bonus points for spotting the sign on one of the stores on New Cathedral Street that caught my attention.

There’s another pedestrianized shopping street that runs perpendicular to Exchange and New Cathedral Streets, but starting a couple of blocks away from them. That’s Market Street, because what else would a pedestrianized shopping street be called?

I’m not sure how long Market Street stays pedestrianized, but at least for a few blocks.

I posted a picture of a section of Market Street and a close-up of one store on it. There are definitely no points for guessing why that store caught my eye.

That’s it for today. I’ve got one more day here in Manchester. At the time of writing, your guess as to what I’m going to do tomorrow is as good as mine.