On a very rare trip into the west end, partly to deposit books at the London Library, I was able to catch the beautiful, choice exhibition Memories, devoted to the work of Howard Hodgkin. They are nearly all small works – deeply intense and atmospheric recollection of things seen, mainly while travelling in Venice, America and Tangiers, the distillation of the ways in which they are half remembered and half abstracted in the mind.

Leaves (1987-88):-

Venice Sunset (1989):-

Italian Landscape (1990-91):-

After Degas (1993):-

Chinoiserie (1994-7):-

I am posting a formal letter I have just received from Professor Toshio Kusamitsu in Tokyo who has been following the plight of the Bell Foundry from afar. I knew that he was deeply knowledgeable as to what the Bell Foundry represents in terms of its industrial history, but I was moved by the amount of feeling which has gone into his plea to the Inspector to save it at all costs:-

To whom it may concern,

Sir Charles Saumarez Smith has asked me to write to you an appeal for the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. I am very happy to express my deep concern about the building of the oldest manufacturing company in Great Britain. Charles has been a very good friend for nearly thirty years and I have been following his blog in order to catch up what’s going on in Britain. Recent posts have been rather discomforting, namely about the future of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. I am a historian of the British Industrial Revolution and received a PhD from Sheffield University which discussed the relationship between crafts and industrialisation. I lived most of my stay in the U.K. in London and three years out of six I lived in Spitalfields in the East End of London. I used to explore in the near by area, and I came across the dignified and a little austere building and admired its historically heavyweight presence. I think that Britain is a country which values and protects the historically important monuments together with the private sector organisations such as the National Trust. I remember during my period in Britain that the Ironbridge Gorge Museums won the Museum of the Year Award in 1977 and the same award went to the Quarry Bank Mill in Styal in 1984. I am stressing this because Britain has been a pioneer of preserving and protecting the heritage of industrial sites and buildings. When I was at the University of Tokyo I took about twenty students on a  tour to industrial and literary places including both the Ironbridge Gorge Museums and Quarry Bank Museums. I am happy to say that the students were very impressed by their histories and in particular the way they were preserved. As a student myself of John Ruskin (I am a councilor of the Ruskin Library in Japan) and William Morris, I am a strong believer in protection and preservation of historical relics and especially important legacy that would teach the future children of their pride in history.

The Whitechapel Bell Foundry is significant historical evidence which will teach us and future people how the history was made, although bell making may be a small-scale industry. But you should listen to the bells ringing at the Big Ben and other places where the products of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry are still living examples of the superb quality. It is my belief and indeed desire that the Whitechapel Bell Foundry should retain its building as a whole and should be retained by the worthy hands to create its manufacturing function as well as museum like facility to those who are interested to observe the process and crafts of British manufacturing industry. I sincerely hope that the strong voice against American company’s ugly redevelopment on the site of Grade II building should be heard and the future of the building would be saved. I ask you to consider that the saving of the historical building would benefit the appreciation from the people in future.

Yours faithfully

Professor Toshio Kusamitsu PhD (Sheffield), FRHistS, Emeritus Professor of the University of Tokyo 

For those of you like me who are enthusiasts for Old Town Clothing (https://www.old-town.co.uk/), I strongly recommend the closest they will ever get to marketing, which is a short film shot in Super 8 by the filmmaker Jamie Muir on the marshes by Salthouse church in north Norfolk close to Holt where Old Town is based (once upon a time, it was in the old town in Norwich). It says nothing to indicate that the only thing they all have in common is that they are dressed in Old Town from head to foot, but those who know will know:-

https://jamiembrixton.wetransfer.com/downloads/0561a677c8afcde080c8b800b08bba7d20201021172521/f56dd81c9e0c58983b1075dce68b1e6720201021172521/214370

I’m posting the details of a round table discussion I’m involved with in ten days time, partly because you would have to be fairly eagle eyed to find it and partly because it’s such a good and interesting topic – the Frick as presented by Marcel Breuer, hard to imagine:-

https://www.tefaf.com/initiatives/programs/129-old-masters-new-spaces-historical-art-in-modernist-buildings

I follow American politics vicariously and not in any detail, because I love the country and don’t want to be distracted by its current political turmoil, but the attached photograph told me much more than I ever need to know about the current total corruption of its belief in liberty and free elections. It tells you more than any image I have ever seen of the corrosion of its values:-

I have allowed my blog to rest for a bit, mainly because I spent most of last week absorbed by watching the Inquiry on which the fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry depends and have been discouraged from commenting in any detail on it.

The main presentations finished on Friday. I could not help but notice an imbalance between the presentations by the professional advisers working for Raycliff who have presumably been paid very large sums for their work over the last three years and ours who have mostly been working pro bono, but who were subjected to at least the same level – actually much greater – cross questioning over the details of their cost plans.

I very sadly missed the presentation by Adam Lowe on Thursday which was by all accounts brilliant, authoritative and funny, refusing to dance to the hostile lawyer’s questioning and demonstrating how superbly well qualified the Factum Foundation would be to running the Foundry as a working foundry, which is what we all want.

Now there is a day on the 27th. for public witnesses, a day of summing up, and a day when the Inspector visits Middleport. Then we wait and pray.

We still need £15,000, not least to pay our advocate who has done an absolutely brilliant job – tough, but invariably polite, and worth every penny. Any suggestions, please contact c@charlessaumarezsmith.com.

I haven’t got a picture of Tom Krens in my book on museums because on Google every picture looked the same – the picture of an archetypal businessman, which I thought I could live without. But looking further, I have discovered a picture which I would have liked to use, but didn’t spot, from the Bennington Banner some time in the mid-1980s. It shows Joe Thompson on the left, who has just stood down as Director of Mass MoCA after 22 years, Tom Krens on the right, and I assume it is the young Michael Govan in the middle, making plans for Mass MoCA, which developed into the global expansion of the Guggenheim, the opening of Dia Beacon, and now the demolition of LACMA – a very evocative image of three people planning a museum revolution:-

The other wonderful long interview in Living Museums is with Tom Krens, the charismatic ex-hippy, ex-Director of the Guggenheim Museum. In writing my book, I knew that he was important, but it was very hard to find out about his thinking. For Living Museums, he has been interviewed at great and revealing length, talking about where his ideas came from, many of them while smoking pot, as he describes it, and going through the Williams College slide collection night after night in the late 1970s. As I had assumed, but didn’t have straightforward evidence, many of his ideas came from Deconstructivism: ‘The 1970s were, of course, the golden age of French Deconstructivism, and Minimal and large-scale land-based art were mounting a challenge to the traditional norms of how art was made, exhibited, and transacted. The aesthetic and structuralist discourse could be applied to museums, and here was a real world, real-time opportunity to direct some of that thinking to a tangible endeavor that had just fallen into my lap’.

I have just received too late to include in the bibliography of my museums book, let alone any reference it it in the text, a very fascinating collection of interviews of the most important recent museum directors by Donatien Grau, who works at the Musée d’Orsay, under the title Living Museums: Conversations with Leading Museum Directors. It begins with interviews with Michel Laclotte and Alan Bowness – Bowness fascinating on his collecting philosophy- and includes an interview with Irina Antonova, the remarkable Director of the Pushkin Museum, who started working there in 1945 and only retired in 2013. I have just got to Peter-Klaus Schuster on the subject of the Neues Museum: ‘Chipperfield’s Neues Museum is a ruined temple with almost Piranesi-like qualities, a temple of remembrance like a palimpsest, with its damaged pieces of archaeology that directly reveal to Museum Island visitors the dignity, beauty, and sense of transience from antiquity to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. All the archaeological fragments are combined in a great collage that belongs to the archaeology of modernism – a very intelligent reconstruction concept, in my opinion !’

I have been included in the mailing for Romilly’s next exhibition, which, like the Goldsmith’s Fair, is organised wholly online by a new and interesting online gallery called Living Object, which happens to be based nearby, but since it is purely online could be based in Timbuktu. I particularly admire the Madagascan ammonite extruding gold and diamonds:-

https://mailchi.mp/875fb999c858/goldsmiths-fair-online-4640601?e=9dc0f9b85b