Some of Issye Miyake’s obituaries, but by no mean all, mention 21_21 Design Sight, the experimental gallery which he established in a small lightweight building designed by Tadao Ando in the heart of Roppongi, the most fashionable part of Tokyo. I remember being incredibly impressed by the adventurousness of its programme, the fluidity of its boundaries between art, craft and fashion – what it classifies as ‘everyday life – at a time when experiential exhibitions were much less common than they have since become. If I had had more space in my The Art Museum in Modern Times, I maybe should have included it for pioneering the cross-fertilisation of design ideas, of which Miyake was a, now much lamented, master.

There’s a very nice interview with Chris Dyson in BD today, assuming it’s not behind a paywall (I managed to read it). I knew that he had worked with Jim Stirling (Stirling’s office attracted a lot of historically minded architects, not least, Léon Krier), but not that he had been trained by Isi Metzstein in Glasgow. As is clear from.the interview, there is no-one more knowledgeable about Spitalfields and its urban environment and he has also been a great supporter of artists, hosting exhibitions in his gallery in Princelet Street which I hope might one day be re-established:-

https://www.bdonline.co.uk/buildings/interview-chris-dyson-listen-to-what-the-site-and-place-have-to-say/5118652.article

A big day for me today with the appearance through the morning post of an advance copy of my book about John Wonnacott. One never knows quite how a book will look in the flesh so-to-speak, on paper – good paper, slightly parchment-like – rather than on screen.

The design is by two designers, Luke Hall and Jason Wolfe, based in Walthamstow and they have done a really beautiful job of it, using two fonts, one Starling, a classical font designed by William Starling Burgess in 1904, and the other Quadrant Mono, which is like a typewriter font and gives a liveliness and immediacy to John’s many emails which I reproduce. Printed in Estonia.

It’s not a big book. I wrote it with a great deal of help from John in the early stages of lockdown as a way of documenting his long career, which has been so much less visible since Agnew’s shut up shop. I hope it will enable people to rediscover the great variety and strength of his work.

You can order it online via https://www.lundhumphries.com/products/john-wonnacott or https://www.amazon.co.uk/John-Wonnacott-Charles-Saumarez-Smith/dp/1848225911:-

I went on one of the tours of Spitalfields organised by – and currently still delivered by – the Gentle Author, who has published the blog Spitalfields Life since August 2009 when he pledged to write a post a day for thirty years.

I found the tour incredibly moving because he knows the area so intimately and cares about it so passionately, not least from fighting so many campaigns to save it (he is currently awaiting the verdict on the judicial review of the battle round the Truman, Hanbury and Buxton site in Brick Lane).

We started at Christ Church.

Then The Soup Kitchen for the Jewish Poor:-

Then, down Parliament Court, a passageway I don’t know:-

We walked at a fantastically brisk pace through Spitalfields Market to Elder Street:-

Then, to Hanbury Street, down Fournier Street, Puma Court and back to Christ Church with stories at nearly every street corner animating its past. I thought I knew the area reasonably well, but as nothing:-

https://www.thegentleauthorstours.com/

I somehow missed seeing Oslo City Hall last time I was there, although it is very dominant on the harbour edge, a fine example of the Scandinavian abstracted classicism which was so influential in England as an alternative to French and German modernism. The result of a competition held in 1918, it was largely completed by 1936, although not inaugurated till 1950:-

Upstairs on the first floor where the fine art collections are displayed is as impressive as the ground floor: the same attention to a broad narrative, interspersed with occasional display cases holding decorative arts, a reverse of the policy on the ground floor; some sculpture; they decided to keep a broadly chronological layout.

Johan Christian Dahl studied in Copenhagen, taught landscape painting in Dresden and encouraged the establishment of Norway’s National Gallery:-

Caspar David Friedrich, Greifswald in Moonlight (1817):-

Adolf Tidemand, Portrait of a Farmer from Vossevangen (1855):-

I like Karl Jensen-Hjell’s portrait of the artist Kalle Løchen, At the Window (1887):-

Christian Krohg, Sick Girl (1881):-

I don’t recommend trying to see it all at once !

I have been trying to digest the character – and quality – of the new National Museum in Oslo. Its architect, Klaus Schuwerk, is not modest about it. ‘I’ve always wanted to design my own pantheon’, he is deeply interested in the proportions of the rooms, he views himself as working in a tradition going back to Michelangelo and Frank Lloyd Wright, and he has required the museum to issue a disclaimer, making clear everything for which he was not responsible (see below). Actually, by the standards of most museum architects, he has achieved an incredible amount of control over the quality of the materials, the quality of the construction and its detailing, including shallow marble sinks in the Gents and a beautiful long, Neapolitan café, looking out onto the square outside:-

https://www.nasjonalmuseet.no/en/visit/locations/the-national-museum/clarification-from-the-architect-klaus-schuwerk/

I have come to Oslo to see its new National Museum, which opened in early June after a long period of design and construction.

The competition for a new building on a new site down by the docks behind the old West Station was held in 2010 and won by a relatively young German architect, Klaus Schuwerk, born in 1967, trained in Stuttgart, Zurich and Madrid and now with offices in Naples and Berlin. As with all such projects, it has taken a long time, approved by the Norwegian parliament in 2013, construction starting in 2014, scheduled to open in 2020, but delayed because of COVID.

It is deliberately and wilfully austere, constructed out of dark Norwegian slate from Oppdal in central Norway, with a luminous, temple-like structure, the Light Hall, made out of translucent marble, for temporary exhibitions.

Room 1 is classical antiquities, drawn from the collections of the former National Gallery, one of several institutions which have been joined up to create the new National Museum – also, a museum of applied arts, part of a museum of architecture and adopting the role of a museum of modern design, as if the V&A, the Design Museum and the National Gallery were compulsory amalgamated.

Room 2 is a gallery of casts, shown as an integral part of the sequence, originally the Kristinia Sculpture Gallery, which itself apparently preceded the National Gallery:-

Then, a sequence of decorative arts galleries, laid out by Italian museum designers, Guicciardini and Magno, beautifully done, with sculpture from Trondheim:-

And wood carving from one of the stave churches:-

It manages the difficult balance of being beautifully laid out and lit, and also lightly didactic – such an amazing privilege to do it all, all-at-once, in a consistent style, everything carefully and freshly considered, a model of how to present a collection:-

Work by Kändler, staggeringly kitsch:-

There’s a small amount of theatre, including a simulated ball at the back of an early nineteenth-century ballroom, and a lot of music – and fashion. It’s a project on the same scale as the British Galleries at the V&A, but a bit lighter in feel, a touch less academic, to its benefit, I think.

As you may have detected, there is a lot to see, far too much for a single visit, so there will be more tomorrow.

I have done a summary version of my book about John Wonnacott for the ArtUK website, based on the fairly numerous works by him in British public collections (we would have also included the picture by him in the Metropololitan Museum, but copyright is complicated). I hope it might encourage people to read the longer version in the book, and perhaps even pre-order it. Lund Humphries and their designers, Wolfe Hall, have done a really beautiful job designing it. Publication date is September 5th. and we are showing a small number of his works in our dining room from September 5th. to 7th. to celebrate (please let me know if you are interested).

https://artuk.org/discover/stories/shining-a-light-on-the-figurative-painter-john-wonnacott

Olympic Park is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend and Rowan Moore has published an account of its architectural legacy which is conspicuously more generous than that of Oliver Wainwright. I’ve done an analysis which will appear in the August/September issue of The Critic, which has the advantage or disadvantage of having been delivered before I had read theirs, but won’t appear online for a month or so. Yesterday I took a photograph of Stratford from the north (there is an area of nondescript land immediately north of Olympic Park).

One thing I will say, which I don’t say in the article, is that it’s very good for bicycling:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2022/jul/24/london-olympics-site-10-years-on-the-kind-of-place-planners-have-dreamed-of-stratford-queen-elizabeth-park-legacy?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other