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.

I like the walk across the park at this time of year when the sun is low and the trees are turning:-

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of our exhibition, Dalí Duchamp, which opens to the public on Saturday.   They were unlikely friends:  Salvador Dalí, the great mustachioed Catalan showman;  and Marcel Duchamp, the conceptual ironist.   But there is a photograph of them chatting together in New York and they were friends, Duchamp renting a holiday apartment in Cadaqués during the 1950s.   And their art fits together interestingly:  both relentlessly experimental, dressing up, using new materials, enjoying the erotic and exploiting surrealism.   Duchamp exhibited a urinal (‘The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’).   Dalí stuck a lobster on a telephone.   I also hadn’t realised that when I visited the Dalí Museum in Figueres in the early 1980s, he was still alive.

In honour of Romilly’s exhibition at Goldsmith’s Hall this week (opens Tuesday), I took some photographs of the workshop upstairs where all the work is made:-

I went to get my shoes mended yesterday, not for the first time (I wear them constantly) and was impressed to find the shop filled with sacks of shoe lasts on their way from the third floor to storage in South London, where they are sent after fifteen years of being unused:-