Every so often I get a glimpse of what post-war Stepney was supposed to be, not the planners’ wasteland lamented by Ian Nairn, but carefully considered yellow brick, low rise and green, as in the Cleveland Estate, named after the Earl of Cleveland who owned the estate up until 1720 and tucked behind the chapel at the end of the almshouses on Trinity Green.   I had never walked through until this morning;  it has an unexpectedly arcadian sense of privacy, helped by the allotments in its middle:-

Prompted by the Hauser and Wirth’s display at Frieze Masters about Stephen Spender’s interest in art – a friend of Henry Moore, took drawing classes with William Coldstream at the Euston School in the late 1930s, bought work by Auerbach at his first gallery show in 1956, travelled to China with David Hockney in the 1980s – I have been reading his son Matthew’s account of his parents and his upbringing in A House in St. John’s Wood:  In Search of My Parents.  It doesn’t tell one much about their interest in art (she taught Visual Perception in the Department of Cultural Studies at the RCA), but it does a great deal about their respective love lives.   I was intrigued by the story that when Anthony Blunt discovered that he was being investigated by MI5 for spying, he simply went to their offices and removed his file, thereby considerably slowing the investigation;  and his description of his wife Maro’s ‘habit of treating a secret as if it were a delicious substance to be spread over a large area, like anchovy paste on toast’.

The discussion round the legibility or otherwise of Cathy de Monchaux’s new sculpture at Newnham (is it a vulva or is it a tower of books ?  The answer – very appropriately – is that it’s both) made me intrigued as to what exactly had been demolished in order to allow the construction of Walters and Cohen’s new brick building facing onto Sidgwick Avenue.   The answer is Lyster & Grillet’s mid-1960s Strachey building, named after Pernel Strachey, the suffragist Principal who tried, but failed, to get degrees awarded to women in 1921.   I can understand why it was better that it went than a new building constructed in the garden, but I remember rather admiring its hexagonal contextualism at a time when these characteristics were so unfashionable.   This is what the building looked like (not my photo):-

https://goo.gl/images/FAvYNQ

We spent the day immured in the crypt of the chapel at the Royal Naval College, listening to different types of classical revivalism: the messianic belief of Sandy Stoddart who has kept the flame of Thorvaldsen alive in Glasgow; Craig Hamilton who has designed a neoclassical chapel in Culham talking of his admiration for Lutyens; Pablo Bronstein who has a Rex Whistler-ish pleasure in the fantasies of neoclassical decoration; and Oliver Wainwright talking about the dictator neoclassicism of Pyongyang. Wainwright implied that all forms of neoclassicism bear the taint of fascism, maybe forgetting that, at least up until the second world war, the majority of American democratic institutions, including libraries and museums, were still designed as beaux arts monuments and, indeed, David Chipperfield’s forthcoming concert hall in Edinburgh is nearly pure Ledoux.

It was a relief to be able to escape upstairs into the pure eighteenth-century neoclassicism of Athenian Stuart’s Greenwich Chapel:-

We went to Pallant House to see Cathie Pilkington’s latest, and elaborate installation on the first floor of the old house, playing with works from the collection, including works by Edward Burra, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Hans Feibusch and Paula Rego, reinvigorating, and getting visitors to engage with, their imagery .

The first room is devoted to surrealism and is relatively conventional with a case full of miniatures from the 1930s, made for an exhibition ‘Children Throughout the Ages’ held at Chesterfield House in 1934. Her work fits seamlessly with this era:-

It’s a version of a larger work shown in the same room, her diploma work:-

The second room Good-Bed-Bad-Bed gives the title to the exhibition, with a Hepplewhite bed which has been dressed for the occasion:-

The third room, Playing Dead is less dark, responding to Henry Moore’s Suckling Child:-

The fourth room is Still Life:-

I was rootling round Clerkenwell Green earlier in the year when I came across 15, Clerkenwell Close, a curious and unexpected new building development, fairly conventional in its overall architectural form, but highly unusual in having a secondary, load-bearing structure made out of rough-cut French limestone, looking as if it has recently emerged, which it has, from the quarry.   This building has since then become a cause célèbre because Islington Council has asked for the building to be demolished on the grounds that it does not in all respects meet the original planning permission.   It seems that the Council failed to upload the approved revisions to the original planning permission and neighbours objected.   Now the Council has acknowledged that the stone façade was approved, but is still asking for the entire building to be demolished.  It feels like a test for taste.   Is an architect nowadays allowed to make an emphatic architectural statement or must everything be politely clothed in brick, as has become the default position for the new urban vernacular ?  What is obvious having now looked at the building more carefully is how serious it is:  a considered statement of stone construction, not just playful, and very beautifully detailed:-

John-Paul Stonard said that the best thing in this year’s Frieze  was an exhibition by Jodie Carey at St. Cyprian’s, Clarence Gate.   Since I was familiar with neither church nor artist, I thought I would check them out.

I should know St. Cyprian’s because it apparently in Nairn, described as ‘a sunburst of white and gold and all-embracing love’.   Opened in 1903, it was designed by Ninian Comper in his best pure gothic style ‘to fulfil the ideal of the English Parish Church’:-

The installation by Jodie Carey works well in the space – spiky and suitably gothic too:-

Having been remiss in posting pictures of Romilly’s work at Goldsmith’s Hall, I am making up for it by posting some photographs of her work which is being shown in a special vitrine at Duro Olowu’s shop/gallery in Mason’s Yard (they’re my shoes):-

I have been pleased to re-encounter the work of Avigdor Arikha again on the Blain Southern stand at Frieze Masters.   At the time that I was working at the NPG in the 1990s he was a prominent figure:  a Romanian who was able to escape to Palestine because of the quality of his drawing, started as an abstract painter, but abandoned it, concentrating on the immediacy of drawing and painting, which he liked to complete in a single session in order to convey the ‘instant décisif’.   Not only was he a painter, but a writer on art, and a close friend of Samuel Beckett and Henri Cartier-Bresson:-

I finally made it to the little exhibition of Denise Scott Brown’s photographs in Betts Project, a small gallery on Central Street in what used to be Finsbury.   Her first husband, Robert Scott Brown, a fellow South African, had a Leica and was used to processing photographs.   She does not pretend to be a professional photographer:  ‘I’m not a photographer.   I shoot for architecture – if there’s art here it’s a byproduct’.   But she has a good eye for the culture of the American southwest, including, not surprisingly, Las Vegas:  ‘In 1965, after ten years of urbanism, my foci were automobile cities of the American Southwest, social change, multiculturalism, action, everyday architecture, “messy vitality”, iconography, and Pop Art.   Waywardness lay in more than my eye’.