Of all the short clips of music which seem to be a feature of lockdown, this is definitely the most bizarre and oddly moving, of a blind elephant being played Beethoven on an upright piano in Thailand:-

As is the way of these things, I’ve got more interested in the influence of the Warburg in the Second World War and in photography. It has become clear to me from an article in The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, which fortunately is available online, that one of the reasons Fritz Saxl was so keen on photographic exhibitions was because, having served as an officer in the First World War, he was then employed by the army to organise morale-building photographic exhibitions to tour what was left of Austria, so retained an interest in this form of adult education. And the quality of the Warburg’s photographs of the tombs in Westminster Abbey was so high, as taken by Helmut Gernsheim (but unattributed), that Kenneth Clark gave his set to the Queen, who used them in turn to encourage the young Princess Elizabeth in an interest in art, Clark writing to Saxl in July 1943 that ‘I have given away the original set of photographs of the bronze effigies in Westminster Abbey to the queen.   She is enchanted with them, and they are being used in the history lessons of Princess Elizabeth’. Interesting – at least, it is to me.

My post about the exhibition on Women Refugee Photographers at the Four Corners Gallery has apparently encouraged several people to look the exhibition up online. It has also prompted me, rather belatedly, to find out a bit more about the exhibitions apparently organised by the Warburg Institute during the war and Heidi Heimann’s role in taking photographs for them.

The best known was the one on ‘English Art and the Mediterranean’ which was, I think, shown at the National Gallery and round the country before appearing in published form in 1948. Two photographers are thanked in the printed volume. One is Otto Fein, who was on the staff of the Warburg and was involved with Walter Gernsheim in photographing drawings and manuscripts. The other is Walter’s brother, Helmut (Mr. H. Gernsheim), who had trained at the Bavarian State School of Photography, came to London in 1937, and worked freelance before being interned in Australia and returning to work for the National Buildings Record. No mention of Adelheid Heimann.

What I didn’t know is that this was just one in a much wider programme of travelling exhibitions, including one on Greek and Roman Art which opened in January 1939 at the Warburg and then travelled to the Courtauld, Tonbridge School and Eton. In 1940, there was an exhibition on Indian Art which travelled round the country and, in 1943, an exhibition on ‘Portrait and Character’. Not only Gernsheim, but both Wittkower and Otto Fein were involved in working for the National Buildings Record documenting major London buildings, including 10, Downing Street, Westminster Abbey, and Chiswick House. But little mention that I can find of Heidi Heimann until she joined the staff of the Photographic Collection part-time in 1955, storing her shoes in the cupboard reserved for uncatalogued photographs.

For my foreign readers, I should perhaps clarify the UK’s current policy, which is obvious as I look out of the window. Get the workers back to work, whatever the risks of a second wave of re-infection. Meanwhile, encourage all those who can to stay at home for as long as possible, home working to avoid the risk of disease. I can see the logic of it, but I can’t say that I applaud it.

There is surely something odd about the criteria for re-opening. Where we are in East London, everything has now pretty well re-opened – chicken shops, cafes, food shops, hardware stores, bicycle repair shops – and the street outside is busy as normal. I now read that commercial galleries and auction houses can re-open on June 1st, subject to the rules of social distancing. But museums, cathedrals, concert halls and churches – great cultural and public therapeutic spaces – which ostensibly can be visited relatively safely (it’s all relative), with high ceilings and established conventions of social distancing, remain shuttered and closed. I suppose it’s a reasonable way of re-booting the economy, but it doesn’t feel like the best way of controlling the spread of the disease, nor rational in terms of the risks involved.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/news/uk-galleries-and-auction-houses-can-reopen-from-1-june-government-says?__twitter_impression=true

Yesterday, I re-posted Tristram Hunt’s collection of objects in the V&A. Today, the thing that has caught my eye is the set of attached judgments on the success of Tate Modern. I wish I had had it to hand when writing my book on museums because it helps explain how deeply influential Tate Modern has been on other museums internationally. The thing I did enjoy which I read only recently was Karl Sabbagh’s book, Power into Art, about the process which led to it, which gives a remarkable insight into how it happened, including all the problems during its construction. Hard to believe how difficult it was. Twenty years ago today.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/how-tate-modern-transformed-london-and-beyond/

I was struck by Tristram Hunt’s good and interesting choice of objects from the V&A, but even more by his singularly apposite quote from Henry Cole that unvisited museums ‘dwindle into very sleepy and useless institutions’ and wondered about the circumstances which led to Cole saying this. The answer is that the quotation comes from Henry Cole’s first big speech at the newly opened Museum of Manufactures in Marlborough House on 24 November 1852 and published the following year in his Addresses of the Superintendents of the Department of Practical Art, delivered in the Theatre at Marlborough House, p.32 (I owe this information, as I’m sure Tristram Hunt did too, to Anthony Burton’s brilliant and invaluable history of the V&A).

https://www.theguardian.com/focus/2020/may/10/the-va-in-10-objects-from-brexit-vases-to-beyonces-butterfly-ring?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_WordPress

I love the article below. After all the information which has been spewed out in the last two months about how to avoid infection, this article describes the risks, and how to avoid them, and why, with admirable clarity.

https://erinbromage.wixsite.com/covid19/post/the-risks-know-them-avoid-them?fbclid=IwAR0rLNMdYJlXeIhIWNwiP8BvCO0poSrPBfF_X_Mw6TJPNtxO3avOsMRsMx0

For some reason, Google has decided that I should be plied on a daily basis with stories about Peter Zumthor’s plans for the new LACMA – maybe because they have correctly realised that I am indeed deeply interested in the plans and proposals for the new building, due to open in 2023, not least because it represents an extreme version of a number of current trends in museums: the focus on the quality and character of the architecture at least as much on the display of the collection (hence the selection of Peter Zumthor as its architect, whose Kolumba is one of the most brilliant museums in the last two decades); and the idea of treating a permanent collection as a resource to be displayed not systematically, but thematically.

Today, Google has alerted me to an article in Curbed, an online magazine, which gives much the best and most detailed account of the issues and the controversy it has caused, including introducing me to the idea of ‘Googie Architecture’ which is highly relevant to the style which has been chosen for the building (see below).

The one thing which the controversy misses is that the old buildings have now been demolished, so mourning their loss is beside the point. Also, to add my halfpenny to the discussion, the so-called chapel galleries have been abolished and the ceiling heights have been reduced to 14 foot. If I was Christopher Knight, who has just won a Pulitzer Prize for his criticism of the scheme, these are the two key issues I would be focusing on, which are almost certainly the result of so-called value engineering, in which project managers and cost consultants remove the very best characteristics of an architectural design.

https://la.curbed.com/2019/4/8/18300919/lacma-redesign-peter-zumthor-wilshire

I’m sad not to be able to visit the exhibition of Women Refugee Photographers, which would be at the Four Corners Gallery, close to us on the Roman Road, if it was able to open (I did try to go just before lockdown). Now that the exhibition is available online, I’m fascinated that one of the photographers is Heidi Heimann who used to turn up for lunches in the Warburg Institute in the 1970s and who I now realise had not only worked there, but had been a student of Panofsky in the early 1930s, trained as a photographer in Berlin, and was a photojournalist for Picture Post before joining the staff of the Warburg in 1954. How little one knows of one’s elders. I only remember her as rather shy and silent.

https://www.anothereye.org/