I went off to do some weekend food shopping in Eataly, a massive, and possibly monstrous, new food emporium strategically placed right next door to Liverpool Station. I have been often to their branch outside Pinerolo, but am not quite sure what to think of its sense of massive super-abundance immediately post-lockdown. It feels more than faintly immoral. But I’m not averse to that feeling of being in an Italian supermarket, even if it’s a Hollywood version of one:-
I’m doing an online talk tomorrow evening, organised jointly by the Harvard Art Museums and the Harvard Department of History of Art and Architecture, where I was a Henry Fellow in 1976. I have been nervous about it because I never did my Generals, but I have now written the talk on three of my case studies, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Bilbao and the new Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
There is still time to sign up.
I don’t normally get to hear Start the Week – it’s when I’m working – so it was quite a treat to hear the episode this morning in which Andrew Marr dexterously juggled topics and ideas between Cynthia Saltzman at home in New York, Francesco da Mosto in Venice, and me sitting immediately opposite Andrew in Portland Place, as we roamed from Milan to Venice, to Paris and Berlin in search, first, of where Napoleon seized the greatest pictures to build up the collections of the Louvre and then, how the Louvre itself helped to inspire a great era of national, if not nationalist, museum-building:-
Tomorrow morning, I appear on Start the Week, together with Cynthia Saltzman, who has written a magnificently detailed account of how Napoleon and his army marched through northern Italy, compelling each of the major cities – Milan, Parma, Mantua – to sign treaties compelling them to give up their twenty best works of art to the Louvre (in Rome 100); and Francesco da Mosto, who has the advantage over us in that his ancestor was a Senator at the time that Napoleon arrived in Venice to demand works by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, including the Wedding Feast at Cana which was brutally stripped off the wall of the Refectory next door to S. Giorgio Maggiore, rolled up and transported to the Louvre never to return. It makes what Elgin did just a one-off piece of plunder by comparison.
The news of the death of Eli Broad yesterday has made me read his brief newspaper autobiography, published in the LA Times in May 2019 – pre- COVID. It’s an interesting and in many ways impressive life, making a great deal of money out of real estate and then getting involved in the arts: first, by establishing the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, with its building by Arata Isosaki on Bunker Hill, run to begin with by Pontus Hultèn; then Temporary Contemporary in 1983, designed by Frank Gehry, which he doesn’t mention; then the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, designed by Renzo Piano, definitely not his best building; and finally The Broad itself on South Grand Avenue, right next door to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro. He made his fortune out of tract houses, but then spent it on civic monuments for his adopted city.
For the last couple of months, I have inhabited a fairly non-stop Zoom world – doing lectures, conversations and podcasts about my book, The Art Museum in Modern Times. Quite early in the process, I was interviewed for a podcast to appear on the Thames & Hudson website. I was asked good questions. Listening to it just now, I’m conscious that it is the product of a long period of reflection as a result of lockdown, thinking about the issues that I had written about in the book, but had not previously had much of a chance to talk about: the nature of the relationship between architecture and collections; changes to museums; the impact of the digital; what will happen post-COVID. Normally, I hate listening to myself, but on this occasion I felt like I was listening to someone else:-
I’m glad that getting the day wrong for my visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi over a year ago counts as a news story (of sorts) in amongst the Pandemic:-
I am very touched to have been sent a picture of my book on sale in bookshop of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, currently celebrating its 150th. anniversary and itself undergoing a radical transformation by the Japanese architects, SANAA, due to open next year:-
I had planned to go and visit some of those East Coast art museums next week and take in Cambridge, Massachusetts en route. But no more. The Harvard lecture survives on Zoom:-
https://harvardartmuseums.org/calendar/the-transformation-of-the-art-museum
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
You must be logged in to post a comment.