I went to a big dinner at the ICA last night to celebrate Bryan Ferry. Michael Bracewell gave a talk about his career. I hadn’t realised that Ferry had studied fine art at Newcastle under Richard Hamilton. He was a contemporary of Stephen Buckley and was influenced by Mark Lancaster, who had come back from New York where he had made friends with Jasper Johns and others of Johns’s generation. Ferry then taught pottery for a year at Holland Park before establishing his first band called the Gas Board. He’s a big collector of modern British art, but this wasn’t mentioned.
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
Why has Mark Lancaster been forgotten ? He was a star in the 1960s, exhibiting at the Rowan Gallery. And now, forgotten .. ..
He moved to New York in 1972 and now lives in Florida. Charles
bit weird not to mention the collection in such a context given it’s such a fine one; perhaps he’d been asked not to… Among other wondrous things there’s the Augustus John oil sketch of the 21-year-old Wyndham Lewis as well as one of Lewis’s much later pictures of his lovely wife…
Yes, and lots of Bloomsbury work. Charles