Saturday 30^th January 2010

I gain Tate Britain at 8.25 on Thursday morning. No reply to e-mails of the day before to the Tate’s heart from me and from the Photographer Multi. Will I be admitted? I forge up the steps. A small figure is standing at the entrance: ‘Are you here for the Ofili breakfast? This way, please.’ Half-way down the massive and thrillingly, privately empty, corridor that runs the length of the museum I encounter a young man with a clipboard. ‘Oh, yes, Adrian Edge is expected. Your friends are waiting for you.’

The Multis have paved the way with gold.

I had envisaged a crowd or at least a gang, but they are the only people there, with a plate of sliced-up out-of-season fruit and an attendant in charge of a coffee thermos. In the end we are only about ten in the party, terribly exclusive, one of them, so the Blond Multi says, Lord Hollick who is a Multi Multi but nothing much to look at.

Why bother? So dreary.

Curator does her best as well as several times thanking us for our support – rather blush-making to the free-loader. It is a well-paced tour and, glory of glories, not too long. The main point of coming was to get a better grasp of the art.

It was! I know you won’t believe it.

We did see more. We saw the dignified representation of grief in ‘No Woman, No Cry’ and that each of the black woman’s tears contained a tiny picture of Stephen Lawrence, who, as you know, was murdered in a racist attack in London in 1993. We saw the black ‘Holy Virgin Mary’ disturbingly surrounded by beautifully-placed pornographic images cut out of magazines. It won’t do to call these paintings merely decorative. But I’m not convinced.  The crude, cartoonish shapes are the drawback. The figures now and again manage to be expressive despite rather than because of this. In the whole exhibition there was only one human form represented with the kind of fluidity of line that might be powerful and that was the man hanged, in one of the all-blue pictures. The more we found out about Ofili the more incidental and unurgent the work seemed.  In the 1990s he happened to have a studio in King’s Cross. He was surrounded by prostitutes and their debris. Hence the idea bringing gruesome sexual images into the Black Madonna painting. Now he has moved to Trinidad. The murder rate is high there. His work has become more menacing.

These more recent paintings we could not be reconciled to at all. Brian Sewell is right: Walt Disney.