I’ve spent the day reading Tom Hoving’s book Making the Mummies Dance, about his time as Director of the Metropolitan Museum from 1967 to 1977.   I was offered a copy when I first went to the National Gallery as a primer in how not to be a museum director (the person who offered it made clear her utter disdain).   But I now wish I had read it then because it actually gives a good and interesting account of his intemperate reformist zeal, looking at ways of encouraging more people into the museum and how they might actually enjoy it.   There were two things I found particularly interesting, neither of which I knew:  the first is that it was Hoving, helped by his architects, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, who introduced the front steps to the Museum, abolishing an automobile drop-off, in order to create the democratic experience of people sitting on the steps outside and making the museum look and feel more physically accessible (Ed Jones wanted to do the same at the National Gallery, but got no encouragement);  and the second is that it was under Hoving that the Met’s distinctive form of semi-compulsory charging was introduced whereby cash registers were introduced to receive what was intended to be a genuinely voluntary (but psychologically compulsory) charge.   I’ve always thought that Hoving was excoriated by the museum community, but he definitely left the Met a much more lively place than it was under Rorimer.

To mark a day spent indoors looking out onto the snow, I am posting the same view as yesterday with snow attached:-

A short session yesterday at the so-called Leica Akademie being taught about the mysteries of aperture, focal length and depth-of-field has made me more attentive to what I was seeing this morning and how to photograph it.   The houses of Stepney Green:-

Stepney Farm:-

And the light indoors:-

We had the opening tonight of our exhibition which looks at the ways in which a very diverse group of artists make use of drawing in their work.   Many of them belong to the last generation who were required to undertake life drawing as part of their training and, for good reasons, rejected it, regarding it, as Jon Thompson described it, as ‘an ideologically loaded tool for making students conform to a certain philosophy of art’ or, as Antony Gormley describes it, ‘At art school, I had a really uncomfortable feeling that we were ignoring the main subject, which was the sensation of living.   The Life Room was denying the most interesting thing’.   But it feels as if it has never completely gone away.   Lucian Freud used drawing as the basis for his paintings.   Hockney has gone on drawing against the tide.   Michael Landy retreated to drawing weeds after destroying all his possessions and drew his penis after one of its testicles had been removed.   The question which hovers over the exhibition and the accompanying book is exactly what the status of drawing is nowadays in the process of looking at, recording and documenting the physical world.   What’s its currency ?  Has it been, and can it be, replaced by new tools for looking ?   Bridget Riley puts it best:  ‘I think – and there is evidence enough from other artists – that this kind of discipline is useful even when you are not actually drawing.   It creates a kind of thinking that feeds right through into picture-making.   It lays an intellectual foundation’.

I’ve twice been asked this week to explain the architectural history of the General Assembly Room at the Royal Academy.   The only problem is that it belongs to a period of the building history about which I am a bit foggy.   The answer is that Lord George Cavendish, the cantankerous third son of the fourth Duke of Devonshire, member of parliament and of Brooks’s, and rich in his own right having inherited £700,000 from his Uncle Henry in 1810, took a lease on the house in August 1815 from his nephew, the sixth Duke.   He had already decided that he would radically remodel the rooms at the front of the house and convert what had been a bedroom on the west side into a State Dining Room and create a ballroom at the east end of William Kent’s grand rooms of parade.   He employed Samuel Ware as his architect, who had been articled to John Carr, the prolific Yorkshire country house architect who had been employed long before on making changes to Burlington House, and he been a student in the Royal Academy Schools from 1800.   As the Survey of London correctly describes, ‘Owner and architect showed exemplary good taste and great skill in the remodelling carried out between 1815 and 1818.   Considerable preliminary study had preceded each operation and full respect was shown for the work done in Lord Burlington’s time’.   This is what is confusing about the style of the room.   It is essentially a scholarly reworking of William Kent’s style, using details which were copied from Kent’s own designs, either in Burlington House or Chiswick:-

Before I leave the subject of Avedon, I should add a footnote on the tone of slight defensiveness I adopted in describing his photographic technique.   One of the reasons was that he had asked if the exhibition could be reviewed – preferably at length – by David Sylvester.   I telephoned Sylvester and put the request to him.   He said that he would consider it.   Avedon was pleased.   Sylvester then came in to see the exhibition and hated it.   I thought that he had written something about it, but I have discovered that this was a false memory.   But I felt badly for Avedon, who had so wanted something written in depth about his work and had not paid attention to the fact (or maybe regarded it as a challenge) that Sylvester almost never wrote about photography and didn’t regard it as an art.

I was actually able to locate without difficulty a copy of the original magazine in which the photograph of my brother and me by Avedon was reproduced (that’s the benefit of being a hoarder – in fact, I’ve kept two copies, easy to find, because they’re too large to shelve).   It’s slightly spooky to see a picture of me as I was a mere twenty two years ago, wearing a tie that my brother clearly disapproved of, and a ridiculous hat.   I am described, which I like, as ‘le benjamin’.   

But I realised that I could not necessarily reproduce it.   I am now indebted to the Avedon Foundation who have sent me a good quality digital image and allowed me to post it, which I will hope to do alongside Richard Avedon (2) later today.

In the interests of historical truth, I feel that I should reveal that Avedon took not one, but two photographs of my brother and me.   The first sitting was held in Heywood Hill, a difficult and cramped setting for Avedon’s style of pared down focus on the physical and facial features of the sitter, with the books on the shelves a distraction.   So, he was dissatisfied with the result.   That was why we were invited to what was in fact a second sitting in a South London studio where the background had been whited out.   The reason I suppressed the account of the first sitting was that Avedon gave a lecture to a packed audience in the Queen Elizabeth Hall (I had been asked to book it) in which he stated proudly that he had never had to retake a photograph and I did not want to reveal that he had done so nearly the day before.

I happened to spot a picture of Unilever House I had taken when we first moved here a couple of years ago freely available on Google Images and am now posting a picture of it as we prepare to leave:  a fine piece of grand 1920s triumphal classicism, designed by James Lomax-Simpson, with Burnet and Tait as executant architects (but I don’t encourage you to look up at the façade because you will very likely be mown down on the mad traffic junction):-

Writing about Richard Avedon last week reminded me that I had been photographed by him at the time of the exhibition and I remembered that I had written about the experience, but never published it.   I wondered whether I could locate what I had written.   I could.   Here it is, unedited, a document of a particular moment and what it was like:-

The message on the answering machine was that we were to present ourselves at a studio somewhere in Clapham at eleven o’clock on Tuesday morning.   After a weekend in Dorset and a long week ahead making the final arrangements for the opening of the Richard Avedon retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, I had not expected to accommodate being photographed by him as well;  but ever since we had first met after the opening of his exhibition in Cologne and he had discovered that I was the younger brother of the proprietor of Heywood Hill, the Curzon Street bookshop where he had been a customer since the late 1940s, he had had it in mind that he would like to take a photograph of the two of us.   He had been encouraged in this thought by Nicole Wisniak, the editor of L’Egoiste, an expensive and very grand French photographic magazine;  she wanted to run an article on us.

So, at half past ten on Tuesday morning I picked my brother up in a taxi from his shop.   We got to the studio with great ease and were ushered into a large, black, completely neutral room dominated by the studio set-up of lights and white background.   Avedon was the master of ceremonies.   Coffee was served.   In the line before us was Kazuo Ishiguro, who was being photographed for a profile in the New Yorker.   We talked of Ishiguro’s forthcoming book and the process of publication and pre-publicity.   Avedon asked me to come into the dressing room in order to show him the extra clothes which Nicole Wizniak had suggested I should bring.   Then he set to work.

Kazuo Ishiguro was asked to enter the arena of the studio set-up.   He did so with admirable casualness and ostensible lack of self-consciousness.   He had come in a perfectly nondescript mackintosh with a long, red, woolly scarf, wrapped around his neck.   It was regarded as the perfect expression of who he was, because the symbolism of clothes – as is obvious for someone who has worked for so much of his life as a fashion photographer – is clearly important to Avedon.

Ishiguro stood there with his feet on the little cross of black masking tape, quite cool in the blaze of studio lights.   Avedon stood just to the left of the large plate camera.   He talked, making one or two fastidious suggestions about pose.   Then he suggested that Ishiguro might lift his hand.   Ishiguro lifted his hand in a twist of exceptional elegance.   He has unusually long fingers.   The pose was right.   The picture was taken.   The expression was in the movement of the hand, the machinery of Ishiguro’s writing.

I have thought about this experience a lot in the course of the week in which the exhibition opened, because it has helped me interpret the photographs which Richard Avedon has taken during a lifetime beside the camera.   He has been accused by journalists of cruelty.   It does not seem to me to be cruel to adopt a method of such subtle coaxing of the sitter to reveal an expressive characteristic.   My sense is that he works with a genuinely eclectic curiosity about different types of people, who they are, what they represent, what they wear, how they want themselves to be recorded, and then, pop, pop, pop, they achieve a form of mildly idealised immortality.

One of the criticisms of the exhibition has been that the photographs show too strong a sense of control.   This seems to me to be a ridiculous criticism.   Of course, they are about control.   They are about the reduction of the complex means of photographic composition into one click.   He removes his sitters out of their world, out of their environment, and into a position of formal abstraction.   Then he allows them to settle down into being who they are, but rather more intensively, because they have nothing around them in support and so are reliant entirely on the marks of age, the lines on their face, an expression;  and, of course, the ability of the viewer to read intensively character into an isolated face.   I would say that his photographs achieve a remarkable degree of control over the vocabulary of his art, which is a compliment.   It derives from a democracy of interest in the potential of any single individual, whether they are a bank manager who is an amateur apiarist or an abdicated king or a fashion model, to be rather more than what they are.

It was our turn next.   We were much more difficult as sitters, being far from relaxed.   Also, I don’t think that I have ever stood so close to my much older brother so that our cheeks were nearly touching.   Nor would I normally expect him to straighten my tie.   I stood there, looking, I gathered from Richard Avedon afterwards, as if England had just lost India, while my brother was asked to adjust his pose constantly, so that it was different for every picture, hand under cheek, on cheek, nearly but not quite picking his nose.   The effort was to get the picture to work and it was strenuous for everyone.   I did once smile, but was told not to show my teeth, which are a monument to 1950s dentistry.   How many pictures were taken ?  I lost count.   At the end, he took my pulse.   My hand was sweating.

Of course, it is a moment of theatre, trying to express a lifetime of common, but different experience, where the viewer has nothing to indicate any blood relationship, although I suppose it is physiognomically evident.   In the end, he is going to select the only moment when I was smiling, in spite of the teeth.   My brother is grimacing, because I think he found the whole experience almost as bad as I did;  but then we were not born to be photographed, nor do we have much previous experience of it.

Then we drove back to the Connaught.   Ever since I have felt that I have been subject to an art which is half voodoo and I mean that as a compliment as well.

Photograph by Richard Avedon, © The Richard Avedon Foundation