I have been thinking more about the film about the life of Merce Cunningham. One is the extent of his self-belief. He didn’t mind if audiences didn’t like or appreciate what he was doing or how he was dancing, which they didn’t. He just carried on, criss-crossing America in a Volkswagen bus with his troupe for the pure pleasure of the performance until, in London, he first received international recognition. The second is the extent to which his generation of artists – he was an artist in dance – came not from the east coast, but from the mid-west and west coast. He was born in Washington State and was educated in Seattle. They were self-consciously free of, and opposed to, received tradition. The film brilliantly encourages an understanding of him and his achievement in an utterly unconventional way, not by interpreting him, but by just showing who he was and the way he danced.

If you are going to be in Cambridge next Wednesday, do please come to my talk at Wolfson College as part of the Cambridge Festival of Ideas, assuming that it’s still possible to get tickets (although I won’t cover all the topics I planned to):-

https://www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk/speaker-spotlight-charles-saumarez-smith-former-director-national-portrait-gallery-and-national

We went to an early screening of Cunningham, a film directed by Alla Kovgan, about the life and work of Merce Cunningham, using documentary film footage, quotations and reconstructions of original dance sequences in an astonishing and literally three-dimensional film biography (one watches it through 3-D glasses). I had very little idea of Cunningham’s life – his relationship to John Cage, the way his belief in radical pure movement and abstraction was appreciated and, in the 1960s, supported by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, with Rauschenberg involved in making sets for the company. All of this is shown, but in a way which is brilliantly inventive and creative, not at all a conventional documentary. Distributed by Dogwoof and coming to our screens in February. See it if you can in 3-D.

We went to the opening of Eileen Hogan’s beautiful exhibition at Browse and Darby, a smaller-scale version of her big retrospective held at the Yale Center for British Art over the summer, which sadly I didn’t see. Nobody is better at painting the spray of water, a view of Chiswick House seen through the trees or the atmosphere of a deserted sports field.

Hyde Park, Plane Trees (2018):-

Victoria Park, 7 February 2016:-

Kensington Gardens, 17 May 2017:-

Chiswick House (Study):-

Amongst the most impressive pictures in the exhibition are the oil sketches of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall, an incredibly difficult genre, but handled with admirable informality:-

I don’t mind how often I go to Blenheim, Vanbrugh’s greatest masterpiece, but one for which he has never really got the credit – partly because, from the very beginning, the Duchess of Marlborough vilified him for his extravagance, partly because it ended up costing far more than parliament allowed, partly because British taste has never really warmed to its full-blown, palatial magnificence and because, more recently, it has been thought that much of the detail was carried out by subordinates. But I remember going through Vanbrugh’s detailed correspondence when it first arrived in the British Library and how devoted Vanbrugh was to all aspects of the choice of stone, building management, and supervision not just of the design, but its construction as well. He was much more proud of it, more involved and less buccaneer than has sometimes been thought, not least by the odious Duchess.

The entrance courtyard:-

The Hall:-

Details of the interior:-

The library:-

The parterre:-

I enjoyed the Maurizo Catalan exhibition at Blenheim – playful, provocative and subversive and, in an odd way, works well with Vanbrugh’s architecture which itself has playful and theatrical aspects.

The Great Hall has a copy of Emmanuel Frémiet’s statue of Joan of Arc:-

We’ll Never Die (2019):-

Here is Catalan himself, perched on a ledge next to the first Duke of Marlborough:-

He hangs himself in the Green Drawing Room:-

Novecento (1997):-

There are two of him in the Saloon:-

La Nona Ora (1999):-

Ego (2019):-

The tomb of the Duke is bedecked with pigeons:-

I finally made it to the Queen’s Gallery for the last week of their astonishing exhibition of Leonardo drawings, the first time that so many have been displayed since they were shown at the Royal Academy in 1952. I should have known and expected the range of his different subjects, from his early Florentine studies of details of composition while working on paintings, but I don’t remember ever seeing his amazing anatomical studies, except in reproduction.

A skull (1489):-

The cardiovascular system (c.1509):-

The gastrointestinal tract and bladder (c.1508):-

The bladder (c.1508):-

I’m very pleased for Tim Marlow that he is moving to the Design Museum as its Chief Executive and Director. I always admired the energy, knowledge, extraordinary articulacy and enthusiasm which he brought to the role of Artistic Director at the Royal Academy, where he was a wonderful and supportive colleague:-

https://amp.ft.com/content/2874c584-e8e0-11e9-85f4-d00e5018f061?__twitter_impression=true

I went to the celebration of the re-hang of Gallery 3 at the Fitzwilliam, the so-called Founder’s Gallery at the top of the staircase at the heart of Basevi’s original scheme, but completed by C.R. Cockerell after Basevi fell through the floor of the bell chamber in the West Tower of Ely Cathedral:-

In 1848, when the Museum was first opened, the gallery was hung floor to ceiling. Sydney Cockerell added a balcony for the display of drawing. When Michael Jaffé became Director in 1974, he hung it with tomato coloured silk. Now it has been hung with a more sober and darker coloured purple fabric (they call it maroon). Anyway, it looks very fine and the ceiling has been converted from a colour which Luke Syson described in his speech as somewhere between toenails and a pub saloon to a more pristine white. It’s a suitable setting for the Gallery’s amazing collection of seventeenth-century portraits, including Carlo Dolci’s portraits of Finch and Baines:-

Hard not to be impressed by the early morning sky:-