Monthly Archives: November 2015

Pentagram

We had a meeting at the headquarters of Pentagram this afternoon in what was once an old dairy off Westbourne Grove where the horse-drawn milk carts would load up.   It was bought by the original partners of Pentagram in the late 1970s as their offices, meeting rooms, workshops and archive on the ground floor, open plan on the top.   I saw the workshop where Kenneth Grange designed the Intercity 125 and the later London taxi and sat in a meeting room opposite some of their classic logos, not just Alan Fletcher’s design for the V&A of 1990 (it was required to be ‘functional, dateless, memorable’) and Harry Pearce’s logo for the RA, but also Berry Bros & Rudd.

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Francis Bird (2)

Having done a post on Francis Bird, I thought the least I could do would be to inspect his work in situ.

Queen Anne still presides in front of all the tourists taking photographs of the west front, but she’s a copy dating from the 1880s by which time the original had been much vandalised:-

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Goya Portraits

We went to Goya: The Portraits.   It was a strange sensation seeing portraits so apparently lacking in artifice, so direct and humane, showing sitters in ways which are ostensibly unflattering, which they not only tolerated but admired, beginning with his great group portrait of The Family of the Infante Don Luis de Borbón, where Don Lois is old and grumpy while his wife is having her hair done.   Goya painted for a relatively small group of inter-related liberal aristocrats.   He painted their face first, then dashed in their clothes at speed back in the studio.   Great group portraits.   We liked the Self Portrait with the hat which he put candles in to finish off the highlights. And the last Self Portrait, which shows him with his doctor, Eugenio Arrieta, who was responsible for his survival.

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