Snail

We have a thing about fridge magnets.

Two depictions of a snail.

The bottom one is our latest fridge magnet, bought on Saturday at the Liverpool Tate. It is Henri Mattise's take on a snail, "painted" in 1953. Quotation marks because by that time he could not actually paint, so this involves large pieces of paper painted to instruction by assistants and then assembled in a collage. The exhibition was much smaller than I was anticipating - perhaps 12 pictures and a few sculptures in one not large room. This is the star exhibit.

The second fridge magnet is a souvenir from Dresden. At the bottom of a large renaissance painting - the Annunciation by Francesco del Cossa - crawls a snail. He (or she - or both, they are hermaphrodites) is oblivious to the appearance of the Angel Gabriel, or Mary receiving some quite important news. Notwithstanding the glad tidings it continues its crawl across the bottom of the picture. Those Italians have always had a sense of humour !