It was still dark in Piccadilly as I walked down to find out how our all night opening of Ai Weiwei had gone. It was apparently busy till 2 o’clock in the morning, then an opera singer performed Elgar’s Sea Pictures at 3, 4 and 5 o’clock, whilst people lay down and had a mystical experience under the chandelier in the Central Hall. The trees will go on Monday:-
It may be my last glimpse of the installation:-
Brendan Finucane very kindly arranged for us to have a private tour of Abbey Mills Pumping Station, the so-called ‘Cathedral of Sewage’ which stands proud in the valley of the river Lea on the site of a monastic water mill. It’s an amazing building, with so much decorative care and Byzantine and Gothic detail lavished on Sir Joseph Bazalgette’s powerhouse of engineering. Inside is full of hand dials and maps of London’s sewers and Piranesian vistas down to the big pipes which transport London’s sewage out to Beckton, all of it constructed after the Great Stink of 1858.
This is the grand entrance:-
Details of the decorative carving:-
We had a party last night at which we served pickled walnuts, not my favourite delicacy, but a stalwart of Royal Academy events and always an accompaniment to varnishing day lunch which is when the RAs view the work they have submitted to the Summer Exhibition for the first time. We normally get them from Fortnum & Mason, although recently they have been supplied by Stephen Cox RA.
I went back to the V&A to the leaving party of Katrina Royall who I recruited as Course Adminstrator to the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design in July 1987 and has remained a pillar of the Course ever since, looking after the needs of students, not just intellectual, but also social and organisational, and particularly the annual study trips. I remember Clive Wainwright, the V&A’s great furniture historian, telling me about a theory of organisations that they are dependent on people who are gatekeepers. Katrina was a gatekeeper.
I missed the opening of the new European Galleries at the V&A eatlier this week, so took the opportunity of a visit to South Kensington to see them. They have been designed by ZMMA, who were responsible for the redesign of the Watts Gallery. I liked the range of objects on display, including a lot of fabrics and also the very faint austerity of the display which offsets the luxe of the objects themselves. The galleries always felt darkly subterranean, but not any more. And it’s particularly nice to see clothes in what were the Jones Galleries as they give a human dimension to the furniture.
This is a very beautiful Spanish sculpture c.1720:-
I liked this Goan ivory:-
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy a modernised version of Winterreise as I like my Schubert uncontaminated. So, I approached the performance of Hans Zender’s 1993 version of the original in St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch with trepidation. I was quite wrong. It was an astonishing, electrified, theatrical version of the original, as performed by the Aurora Orchestra, which made it more vivid, including making one pay more attention to the language, but also amplified it. Both shocking and intense, not least in the way it used the decayed interiors of George Dance’s church:-
I have just been to the launch of a book by Harry Pearce whose title Eating with the Eyes is based on a Japanese epigram ‘Me de taberu’. The book, which consists essentially just of photographs, combined with very brief typographic reflections on the location of the image and its associations, is based on a Japanese belief that ordinary everyday objects – their colour, their texture and their degradation – are worthy of intense visual attention. So, the photographs are of nothing obvious – backstreets, forgotten images, lost objects. I love and admire it as a book and strongly recommend it.
I am doing a post rather belatedly of my visit on Friday to Portcullis House. I was there to see Adam Dant’s Election Special in which he trailed the politicians and recorded not so much them as their public in a large graphic collage based on Leeds Town Hall. But I was also taken upstairs to see the run of recent political portraits, including Tony Benn by Andrew Tift which I had seen before, Margaret Beckett in egg tempera by Antony Williams, and, most impressively, Michael Foot as a snowy white magus by Robert Lenkiewicz, the eccentric painter of Plymouth.
I love the Sainsbury Centre for its strange mixture of the pre-Columbian and the contemporary such that you never quite know what will be in the next case. It had begun to look a bit shabby, but has been completely renovated, everything except the original system of display lighting.
A memorial head from the Celebes:-
A pot by Rupert Spira:-
We went back in the calm of Sunday morning without visitors to see the exhibition and try to take better photographs (but I should point out that one of the pleasures of the exhibition is Verdi Yahooda’s silver gelatin prints).
Some photographs came out. Do they convey the quality of the work ? Probably not:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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