From the north side of London, the Tate Modern is best reached by walking from the traffic circle before St. Pauls Cathedral over the Thames on the new Millenium footbridge to the main doors of the museum. That seventeenth-century St. Pauls and the twenty-first century Beckmann exhibit both contain paintings of "spiritual significance," that both display religious-seeming tryptychs, makes the meander over the bridge ironically a bit of an arc across the human condition. In our war- and atrocity-ridden time, the journey seems entirely one way, towards Beckmann.
A further irony might be induced from the fact that the Beckmann exhibition was running concurrently with the Aztec …