I went to an event at the Royal Opera House to celebrate the fact that Ed Vaizey has now been in post as Minister for the Arts for longer than any of his predecessors, stretching back to Jennie Lee, who was appointed Minister of the Arts by Harold Wilson in 1964.   It’s impressive that he has remained in post from the beginning of the Coalition Government, taking up his current post on 14 May 2010.   And he was Shadow Minister before that.   He gave a speech which was wry, funny and self-deprecating (well, not entirely).   Let’s hope that he has written his White Paper in this new, pugnacious style.

I have been trying to find out more about attitudes to city planning and have been reading Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter’s Collage City, published in 1978.   They have an admirable description of the origins of townscape:  ‘Townscape, a cult of English villages, Italian hill towns and North African casbahs, was, above all else, a matter of felicitous happenings and anonymous architecture…in the pages of The Architectural Review, even in the early nineteen-thirties, one can detect the uncoordinated presence of all its later ingredients.   A perhaps wholly English taste for topography;  a surely Bauhaus-inspired taste for the pregnant object of mass production – the hitherto unnoticed Victorian manhole, etc.;  a feeling for paint, the texture of decay, eighteenth century folly and nineteenth century graphics…townscape could readily be interpreted as a derivative of the late eighteenth century Picturesque;  and, as it implicated all that love of disorder, cuktivation of the individual, distaste for the rational, passion for the various, pleasure in the idiosyncratic and suspicion of the generalised which may, sometimes, be supposed to distinguish the architectural tradition of the United Kingdom, so (almost like Edmund Burke’s political polrmic of the 1790s) it was enabled to thrive’.

There is a good MA dissertation by Ian McIntyre available online which gives helpful information on the pattern of Robert and Lisa Sainsbury’s collecting.   Robert read history at Pembroke College, Cambridge from 1924 to 1927, but never entered a museum and spent much of his time playing bridge.   Then he studied accountancy.   But he began to collect private press books whilst still at Cambridge which led him to Zwemmers in the Charing Cross Road.   This was where he first encountered the work of Jacob Epstein.   He acquired two Epstein drawings and Epstein’s Baby Asleep in 1931.   The following year he bought Henry Moore’s Mother and Child from the Mayor Gallery for £158.   In 1933 he established the Gemini Press with Blair Hughes-Stanton.   So, the question is who or what formed his taste ?   It was presumably partly a matter of his milieu.   Epstein was deeply interested in the art of Asia and the Pacific Islands.   So was Henry Moore.   But the biggest influence is likely to have bern Roger Fry, whose Vision and Design had popularised the idea of treating African, Asian and American Art as part of a common formal language.