Friday 27 September 2013

Liverpool - Chagall and the RC Catherdral


We had a great trip to Liverpool on Friday. Both Jill and I love Chagall's work so we'd been looking forward to this exhibition and it certainly didn't disappoint. The exhibition was in chronological order, ending up with the period when he was living in the South of France as an old man.

Highlights for me were The Poet Reclining and The Green Donkey. Both of these paintings were based on memories; the latter of his native homeland, Russia and the former of his honeymoon with his wife Bella.



We were staying near Liverpool's Metropolitan Cathedral and took the opportunity to explore it. Designed by Sir Frederick Gibberd and completed in 1967 it is certainly a building of the modernist architecture of the 1960s. That's me in the photos in a pink top, you can see the impressive scale of the building. I loved the concrete simplicity of the design. It was good to see how many artists had been involved in the project - Elizabeth Frink made a sculpture for the altar and John Piper designed exquisite stained glass windows, many more artists contributed pieces to all the different chapels.

The crypts, underneath the modern Cathedral, were designed and built in the 1930s by Lutyens for a Cathedral that was never completed. The brickwork and motifs are absolutely beautiful and typical of Arts and Crafts Architecture.

I was in my element as the building as a whole combines two of my favourite periods of architectural design.

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