Friday night in the City – One New Change and Tate Modern's Gauguin

It used to be that Friday nights after work we’d pile into the nearest pub – or wine bar – and stay there until our legs would no longer hold us up. How times have changed. Is it that we can now have to periodically sneak outside for a cigarette in the wind and rain to be further assaulted by the withering looks of the passerbys or our inability to imbibe vast quantities of alcohol without making career-threatening fools of ourselves?

Anyway. On Friday I embarked on what has become a new sort of Friday night. First stop was the wonderful new shopping centre near St Paul’s at One New Change. Maybe it’s because I’m a sucker for a shiny new building or maybe because shopping maintains its addictive grip. Anyway, I wondered through those beacons of light in a host of big, new shops – sometimes with my umbrella in my grip and sometimes not (Why didn’t they cover it all?). The publicity blurb positioned it as “mid-market” so it was no surprise to find all those High Street staples – Jaeger, Top Shop, Mango, Boss and, oh joy, Banana Republic. Westfields eat your heart out because although it has enough people on a Friday evening to prevent it looking like a ghost town, shopping here is so much more enjoyable than the unseemly crush of the West End. They even have a Blow Dry Bar for when you simply have to repair the weather damage for an important evening out.

On the upper level there are food places – Zizzis, Wasabi and even Gordon Ramsey. No doubt the local office workers are overjoyed. I made a mental note to head upstairs on a future Friday evening. Instead, we took the escalator down to the lower level being lured by the sight of shoes as a sizeable Office outlet. Found L K Bennett and Kurt Geiger here as well ladies along with Reiss, Hobbs, Links, Karen Millen, Phase 8 and – for the younger folk – a super sized SuperDry store. Whilst the beautifully lit St Paul’s stands guard over our souls, shopping heaven now has a City address.

And so I reluctantly left One New Change to potter over to the South Bank. I walked along to the Millennium Bridge dodging the temporarily erected stands from which the crowds will watch the Lord’s Mayor’s show and picked my way across wet, slippery pavements to the bridge. It’s lovely not having the roar of London traffic as you take in the views across the magnificent River Thames. And it’s equally wonderful hearing the chatter of a thousand languages as the tourists stop to take their holiday snaps of the City, or the London Eye or the anachronistic Globe or any of the other well known views. You can easily spot the Brits – those are the ones with their umbrellas held firmly in front of them as they march across the metal bridge at fast pace looking neither left nor right.

Reaching the other side you slip down the ramps and across the darkened gardens with the subtly lit trees and enter Tate Modern. I have been wanting to visit The Sunflowers exhibit since I had seen media reports of people playing happily amongst the 100 million hand painted porcelain seeds. It was a sight to behold but sadly it is now encased in ropes preventing access. Major disappointment. Still, we spent a while watching a film of Al WeiWei amongst the 1,600 Chinese people who were happily making these little works of art. Fascinating. I could hardly believe that 2010 is the 10th Anniversary of the Tate Modern – it seems like only yesterday I was there to admire that first favourite giant spider sculpture...

Having been around the Tate Modern’s main galleries just a few weeks ago, we decided to take a walk around the Gauguin exhibition – even though I really wouldn’t put him on my favourite artists list. Therefore, please understand that the following comments are not from an enthusiast.

Room 1 is identity and self-mythology. I don’t like portraits at the best of times but these felt dark and drab – can you get depressed paintings? - so I sped through. There were some of the Tahitian women for which he was famous – but they only drew memories of Disney’s Lilo and Stitch for me.

The second room is “Making the familiar strange” and is meant to be about still life paintings but his inclusion of lots of children in these I guess provided the surprise. In Room 4 the colours were more cheerful and I spent a while admiring a small watercolour landscape from Martinique framed in a fan. The Caribbean vibrant colours versus the Parisian dark hues – I get his point.

Room 5 is landscape and rural narrative and I was beginning to feel that I was experiencing a world tour in pastels. We admired “The loss of virginity”, not so much the sleeping girl but the small fox who is an Indian symbol of perversity or sexuality. Nice. Really not liking modern religious painting I walked fast through room 6 which is sacred themes – particularly as I knew that Gauguin was disappointed to find his island idylls had already been Christianised and entered room 7 – the eternal feminine.

Te Pape Nave Nave (Delectable Water) – with its bright orange earth and strangely masculine Tahitian women made an impression. There were lots of paintings of women in water – sadly no mermaids. I liked the English translation of one title “Be in Love and You Will be Happy” although the actual artwork wasn’t so hot IMHO. My favourite picture was his well known “Two Tahitian Women” which has been shipped in from The Met in New York – the women are more feminine in this one and their bared breasts don’t seem as unpleasantly spied upon as in some of his other works. As I wandered round the exhibition, what did strike me was the incredible range of materials with which he worked – watercolour, oil, gouache, woodcuts (some of these were really quite stunning – especially the book illustrations) and a surprising number of sculptures.

Anyway, with my spirit enriched we left the Tate Modern to seek food and wine. The weather was still miserable so we opted for the nearby warmth and informality of Amano round the corner. It’s an unpretentious place with friendly staff and mostly local trade serving excellent light and crispy pizzas (I had the goat’s cheese with roasted peppers and it was fabulous) and good wine (a couple of glasses of Montepulciano will sooth most souls on a rainy Friday) while my friend experienced for the first time a coconut mojito – declaring it a surprising success.