Exhibitions

Saturday was a day of exhibitions. Weapons of Mass Communication at the Imperial War Musuem and Cranach at the Royal Academy. I hadn't been to the IWM before so that was a treat in itself. I was shocked by how small a Spitfire is/was. I'd always assumed they were larger than that. I felt claustrophobic just looking at it. And *then* I went into the Trench ...
Anyway, the posters were interesting. Whereas most of the propaganda posters had a snappy or at least brief text, the post-Revolution Russian ones ended up with alarmingly long exhortations! I think my favourite poster was one from France, WWI, which actually looked more like a film poster for a 1950s sci-fi movie. There was nothing else like it.
I'd had a sneak peak of the catalogue for the Cranach exhibition so knew what to expect. The portraits were probably the most impressive although they don't approach Holbein levels of realism. The eyes and mouth tend to be very stylized which you only truly realize when you see a selection of them together. The figures of his (clothed) females also follow a pattern, and certain elements such as the apple tree and various animals reappear. Looking at the paintings, they almost seem to belong more to the preceding century.