In case people hadn’t registered, the day that Viola Michelangelo closed at the Royal Academy Blain|Southern opened a much smaller, more intimate exhibition of his video works down in the basement. There is a Self Portrait of Bill himself, drowning:-

Then a series of not just intimate, but extremely intense works, including Unspoken (Silver and Gold):-

It has been a week of intense activity at Blain|Southern, celebrating Sean Scully.

First, Nick Willing’s admirable and informative film, which showed the nature of his life, career and working methods.

Then, volume 2 of his catalogue raisonné was launched with a conversation at the gallery which showed a different, more intellectual and reflective aspect of his character, as he and Marla Price discussed the significance of each of his major works from the 1980s.

Tonight his exhibition at the National Gallery opened, which shows new work inspired by, or is, in some way, related to Turner’s deep, meditative seascapes, mood paintings, in which the horizon dissolves into pure colour, as represented by Turner’s Evening Star from upstairs. There are three galleries of Sean’s big, adventurous, recent work.

He spoke movingly at the opening of what Trafalgar Square, and the National Gallery, meant to him as a child, coming in from Sydenham on Christmas Eve to see the Norwegian Christmas tree (he did not mention how important Van Gogh’s Chair, then in the Tate, was to his decision to become an artist).

Much of the rationale of the National Gallery is based round the belief thar free access to the collection is an inspiration to children to become artists. Sean is the living exemplar that this policy works.

For those who don’t have convenient access to Twitter, I am posting my recent account of the benefits of the website Art UK, which provides convenient online access to every painting, and now sculpture, in a British public collection, except, sadly, a small number of steadfast refuseniks, including my old college, King’s, which continues to insist, in contrast to nearly every other Oxbridge college, that it does not want to participate in this wonderful intellectual and scholarly resource:

I have been pondering the fact that after having a rather delicious breakfast (poached eggs and bacon) at the Rochelle Canteen in Arnold Circus, I was approached by a man who asked me if the Rochelle Canteen provided breakfast for the homeless. So, the questions I have been pondering are, was he homeless ? And did he think I was too ?

I left out of my abbreviated account of the Geffrye Museum (there is surprisingly little information online) that Molly Harrison took over from Marjorie Quennell as its curator in 1946 and ran it with great passion and enthusiasm till 1969, turning it into a resource for children and education, battling the officials in County Hall in high heels and a pink hat. She wrote a book about her work called Museum Adventure, the Story of the Geffrye Museum (1950). At a time when there is much discussion about how much attention to pay to visitor numbers, it is worth remembering her view that ‘reputation is a fickle guide and notoriety a poor indication’.

I went to see the new building project at the Geffrye Museum, which I like to think of as our local museum – founded as a museum of the furniture trade by the London County Council in 1910 and run by Marjorie Quennell in the 1930s, following the model of A History of Everyday Things in England. A new wing was added in 1998 by Nigel Coates, an early HLF project, and it’s now being totally redone from top to bottom by Wright and Wright, good architects to be doing it, with their arts-and-crafts orientation.

I look forward to seeing the new displays, both period rooms and thematic in the basement, when it re-opens next year:-

We went to a special screening of the long version of Margy Kinmonth’s film about the Hermitage, in which she was given special access to its curators and, most of all, to its Director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is the low-key hero of the film, showing off Catherine the Great’s collection of gems, talking about the work of his father Boris, who was Director before him, its history, how he has made it into a global force, all with such obvious pride. The heroine is Larissa Haskell, who was a curator of paintings at the Hermitage from, I think, 1955 to 1965, who describes with great vividness how her family had to eat, first, her father’s leather belt and, then, the family cat during the privations of the Second World War. Through the ups and downs of its extraordinary history, the curators managed to preserve the great treasures of the collection, apart from the forced sales of great paintings by Joseph Stalin to Andrew Mellon.

I liked the tentativeness of the green in the misty morning:-

We walked by the sea in Rottingdean, which I have not visited since playing away matches at St. Aubyns (they dropped the apostrophe in 1940), one of those prep schools, which chose the bracing sea front to stiffen the sinews of its pupils, although I read that it has now been closed, in spite of having educated Vaughan Williams, no doubt for the huge commercial value of its site:-

An additional pleasure not to be missed in Jamie Fobert’s new gallery at Charleston is Cressida Bell’s beautiful and highly appropriate exhibition on Colour: Sickert to Riley. Her work is genetically imbued with her grandparents’ escape from the safety of English art. She has painted the galleries in fierce and intense, bright colours. And she has made an intelligent selection of partly Bloomsbury-era art, including Roger Fry’s The Farm Pond at Charleston, borrowed from Hepworth, Wakefield, and a bold Portrait of Eve Kirk by Augustus John, and partly post-Bloomsbury, including a beautiful Howard Hodgkin and a Bridget Riley whose colours dominate the third room.

The exhibition is unorthodox in the ways that it has been selected and hung, but all the better for it.