Since it was such a spectacularly beautiful morning, I decided to potter round some of my old haunts in Limehouse where we used to live. I got a good view of 5, Newell Street which was, and remains, a monument to early post-modernism, designed by Tom Brent in 1977 when he bought the whole of Nelson’s Wharf as an experiment in semi-communal living:-
Monthly Archives: July 2016
Regent’s Canal
I walked down the Regent’s Canal and was struck by how hugely beneficial it is that, whether because of poverty or ecology, Tower Hamlets has allowed the verges of Mile End Park to run wild, so that Canary Wharf pops up out of an overgrown meadow:-
The New Tate Modern (2)
We went back to the new Tate Modern to get a better sense of it without the opening crowds. It felt better being able to navigate it on one’s own. We liked the view from outside the new south entrance:-
Kader Attia’s table reconstructing the ancient city of Ghardaïa out of couscous:-
King’s
The launch of Jean-Michel’s festschrift was held in the chapel at King’s:-
I went to have a quick look at the installation of the Rubens (plain black benches have been added to soften the gap between the choir and the ashlar where the seventeenth-century choirstalls used to be):-
Jean Michel Massing
I went to the launch of the festschrift for Jean Michel Massing, who is retiring as a Professor of Art History at Cambridge after nearly forty years on the teaching staff, hired the year after I graduated. It was an extraordinarily impressive occasion with paper after paper by his former students, exhibiting the formidable range of his learning, above all on the transmission of ideas through the medium of prints and the relationship of western to non-western art, including the image of the black and Oceania. More than his own work, he is interested in his extended influence on the work of his students in a way which is wholly admirable:-
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