London can show you the world in an afternoon

Intrigued by a fellow blogger's recent account - over at City Views, Country Dreams - of the Weiwei Zodiac Heads in New York, I was inspired to go along and see the same exhibition in London last week.

As in New York, where the imposing Plaza hotel and its fountains were the backdrop, the setting here was equally spectacular - Somerset House on the Victoria Embankment ...

Our iffy June weather was evident  - umbrellas were up (you can see some rain drops on my lens!), but there were little bursts of sunshine in between the drizzle ...

The heads have been placed in a semi-circle around the fountains in the courtyard (which in winter becomes an ice-skating rink).

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, as Frances at City Views mentioned, was detained in China shortly after launching the tour of his animal head sculptures to New York and London. Before this, he had made news in London for a remarkable exhibition at the Tate Modern of 100 million individually-created porcelain sunflower seeds! He remains imprisoned, for reasons to do with political dissent.

Some people didn't mind getting wet at all ...!

The Zodiac heads represent the twelve Chinese astrological signs and are a recreation of the heads that once decorated an 18th century fountain clock at Beijing's summer palace. The originals were looted when the palace garden was destroyed by the British and French.

Some looked fierce and imposing ...

others cute and even cartoon-like ...

I had another reason for coming here, though. The Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House opened an exhibition this week of Toulouse Lautrec's portraits of Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge.

The Courtauld is one of my favourite galleries in London (though I might have said that about the Saatchi?). Small and cosy, it has a fabulous little collection of impressionists and post-impressionists in a setting, in a wing of Somerset House, as beautiful as the paintings ...

Toulouse Lautrec helped make Jane Avril famous through his posters of her dancing at the Moulin Rouge ...

But the exhibition aims to go beyond that by exploring their private relationship off-stage. Nicknamed 'La Mélinite' (a form of explosive), she came from a harsh background of poverty and abuse, and suffered from a neurological disorder - St Vitus Dance or chorea.

portrait of Jane Avril

'La Goulue' (the Glutton), dancer Louise Weber, Avril's rival

Mlle Marcelle Lender    

I think I liked the lithographs best of all  ... I love the life and movement in these drawings ...

Walking back along the Embankment after leaving the exhibition I had a choice of the Victoria gardens on one side, where a ping-pong table had been set up, below. My mind still half on China, it reminded me of Boris Johnson's oafishly funny speech at the Beijing Olympics hand-over ceremony about 'ping-pong coming home' (watch here) ...

... or the Thames on the other ...

I liked this view of the London Eye apparently on the back of a smiling Sphinx (and a tiny aeroplane serendipitously overhead)

Behind the sphinx I could also spy Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament further down the river ...

Two faux (Victorian) sphinxes flank the Egyptian obelisk, below (an original, dating from 1450 BC).  It is one of a pair - the other is in New York's Central Park. An interesting coincidence I thought, given the twin exhibitions of Weiwei's sculptures in these two cities, the history of China's original Zodiac heads, and Weiwei's intention "to toy with ideas of real and fake, looting and national symbolism".

While pondering all this I snapped a more conventional view of the London Eye 

... and, taken just before I hopped on the tube, this view from under the Jubilee Bridge of St Paul's against a grey blue sky.

Quelle mélange this post has turned out to be - it seems a couple of hours meander along the Embankment can make the world connect in strange ways!