This, post is really for my American readers. In advance of the publication of my book, I am involved in a seminar this afternoon (Eastern Summer Time) organised by my friend, Ivan Gaskell, Professor of Cultural History and Museum Studies at the Bard Graduate Center in New York (https://www.bgc.bard.edu/events/1216/07-apr-2021-museum-conversations). I will be discussing the book with Ivan and Richard Rand, the Associate Director of Collections at the Getty Museum. I wasn’t sure how far it was a private event, but have now learned that others are allowed to join if interested, but you need to register in advance before 3pm (EST). Of course, it is possible to join this side of the Atlantic as well, but you will need likewise to register and it starts at 10pm (BST).

This is a slightly esoteric post, but I have been writing something about the historiographical difficulties of writing about museum architecture and was about to exempt the two great art museums by Louis Kahn – the Kimbell in Fort Worth and the Yale Center for British Art, both of which have been already much studied and are admirably well documented, partly thanks to an art historian, Patricia Cummings Loud, who wrote a big monograph on the Kimbell and then a subsequent book on The Art Museums of Louis Kahn, published by Duke University Press, of which I luckily have a battered copy. I have discovered that she only died quite recently (https://www.sah.org/about-sah/news/member-news/2021/03/09/obituary-patricia-cummings-loud-(1930-20212)), not, it appears, of COVID, so I salute her memory as a notable pioneer in the study and documentation of museums and I wish there had been more like her.

Happy Easter !

My book is published in the States on April 13th. I had hoped to be there to help launch it in New York at the time of the Frieze Art Fair in early May and even to see some of the museums I haven’t in New England, not least because so much of the book is an American story. It begins with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and includes the Guggenheim (of course), the Whitney and the glories of the Kimbell and the Yale Center for British in its first chapter; then going on to such great monuments as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Getty Center in Los Angeles; I included the Neue Galerie in New York, one of my favourites, and Dia:Beacon upstate; and, in the last chapter, I look at the reinvention of the Barnes and the Whitney and the building of The Broad in LA. Now, I am really pleased that the book has been picked up by Publisher’s Weekly, which I hope will give it a boost:-

Nonfiction Book Review: The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith. Thames & Hudson, $39.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-500-02243-6 (publishersweekly.com)

I know the Gentle Author has beaten me to it, but the quality of the blossom in the streets of East London is briefly spectacular, so that the dullest of local streets looks Japanese:-

I just got an email checking that the attached photograph is indeed of me. It definitely is. It was taken by Simon Bonner on a photography course and I just happened to stray into the picture. But it is a nice record of my bicycling life during lockdown and the graffiti on the towpath in Hackney Wick:-

There are beautiful fritillaries in the garden. First, fritillaria meleagris, apparently one of only two species of check in nature alongside guinea fowl:-

We’re not sure of the other (not apparently uva-vulpis):-