As part of my background reading about Brazil, I have learned a great deal from the recently published book by Lilia Schwartz and Heloisa Starling, Brazil: A Biography, published by Allen Lane earlier this year.   One of the chapters I found particularly interesting was the one on the 1964 coup d’etat which led to over twenty years of military dictatorship.   Much of it was planned and organised by a privately funded thinktank called the Research and Social Studies Institute, which engaged in subversive propaganda against the democratically elected government in order to support the free flow of international capital, with the help of generous funding from big business and the CIA.   The incoming government had access to information on the ideas and political beliefs of 400,000 Brazilians, assembled by the Situation Analysis Group, a sub-department of the Research and Social Studies Institute, which gave the government the tool to repress opposition.   One does not wish to be melodramatic, but there are familiar elements in this narrative:  the existence of privately funded right-wing think tanks influencing public debate and trying to curb public broadcasting;  illegal influence over a democratic referendum;  the assembly of massive amounts of data about voting intention;  and the involvement of a foreign government influencing the domestic political debate.   Maybe this is irrelevant, but it gave me a faint frisson as I read about it.

Since getting back from São Paulo, I have been reading more about the gestation of the Glass House, Lina Bo Bardi’s great house which she designed on what was then an open hillside in Morumbi where she and her husband, Pietro Maria Bardi, bought two vacant lots in 1949, thinking that they might establish artists’ studios equivalent to the Meisterhäuser of the Bauhaus.   It was not only Lina Bo Bardi who was deeply knowledgeable about all aspects of international modernism (she had published an article on ‘Case sui trampoli’ – houses on stilts – in Domus which she co-edited in 1944), but also her husband, who had tried to persuade Mussolini to adopt modernism as the appropriate style for a Fascist State and organised exhibitions on the work of Richard Neutra and Le Corbusier in the early years of the São Paulo Museum of Art.   Early photographs of it, standing on stilts and bereft of vegetation, make it look vastly much more programmatic than it does now.   As she herself wrote on its completion:-

In the thick of rambling foliage, she lightly dropped a house of crystal.   In its Swiss-precision finishes, its steely textures, its respectful perch, nothing obscures the fact that it is an artificial outpost.

This is the picture she used to illustrate her article:-

And this is roughly the same view as it is now:-

I had been told that a new bakery had opened under the railway arches off Vallance Road, so I went to investigate.   The railway arches are themselves under threat after being sold off by Network Rail which is perhaps what allows small entrepreneurial businesses to flourish – at least for the time being.   The sourdough bread (or Breid as it is apparently known in Scotland) is delicious:-

I have already written about this project on Twitter and have realised that – quite rightly – there is a great deal of interest in it, but hitherto not much awareness that the British Library has been documenting and recording the lives not just of artists, but of those in the art world over a very long period of time, such that it now provides an invaluable oral history.  

They have just put together a series of studies of aspects of the art world, based on, and making use of, the original, often very lengthy, recordings, which I hope will raise awareness of the project, not least because much of the work is privately funded:-

https://www.bl.uk/voices-of-art

I had breakfast at Tate Britain to see the work of Zarina Bhimji, who explores the imagery of, on this occasion, the stamps, die-stamps and typography of the old colonial Empire in Africa, drawn from its documentation now preserved in archives across the world:-

I went early to a Trustee meeting at the Garden Museum in order to have lunch at its excellent café, which has just, rather amazingly, been awarded a prize as the ‘Restaurant of the Year in a Cultural Destination’.   This is not just best in the UK, but best in the world, beating the in-house restaurants in the new National Gallery of Singapore and the Broad in LA:  a pretty impressive achievement for the two chefs who came to Lambeth by way of Padella and St. John Bread and Wine.   The food is not cheap, but delicious:-

I have just been to the leaving party of Linda Lloyd-Jones, who has been Head of Exhibitions and Loans at the V&A for a mere 30 years – an unsung and under-recognised heroine of the V&A’s long rejuvenation.   She arrived in November 1988.   I don’t remember her arrival, but do remember working closely with her from 1990 as chairman of the Exhibitions Committee.   When she arrived, there were no big exhibitions.   They had been axed to focus on the display of the permanent collection.   There were only about 800,000 visitors a year (now nearer 4 million) and no accountant was employed.   She has worked quietly, invisibly and tirelessly to put big popular exhibitions at the heart of the V&A’s public programme.   I greatly admire her creative tenacity and the applause she rightly received.

We went in to see our Klimt/Schiele exhibition, which I haven’t really had a chance to study.   Klimt, so elegantly stylised, the President of the Secession:-

Schiele, the son of a stationmaster, with an early talent for drawing locomotives, enrols at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste and hates it.  A beautiful ability to draw in outline:-

And with watercolour and gouache heightening:-

I like the comment that Schiele made about the extent to which he was influenced by Klimt:  ‘I went through Klimt until March.   Today I think I am entirely different’.   Indeed.

We spent yesterday morning at Buckingham Palace.   I was being dubbed.   I just about managed to kneel down in the right way, but needed a bit of practice.   The best bit was the chilled glass of Champagne Jacquesson at the Wolseley afterwards:-

We started up Bramante’s Staircase, commissioned by Pope Julius II:-

The Apollo Belvedere:-

The Laocoön:-

The Three Graces (again):-

Venus and other antiquities in the Room of the Masks:-

The Room of the Animals (I am not confident of the naming of the rooms in the Museo Pio Clementino or, indeed, the works of art):-

The Sleeping Ariadne:-

Through to the Rotunda:-

Through to the Stanza della Segnatura and the School of Athens:-

We ended up in the Sistine Chapel. It’s so hard to retain a memory of the totality of the composition, particularly in the ceiling, the relationship of the individual figures to the larger lateral scenes above, the scale of the figures below, their sense of energy and authority, so surprisingly early (1508 to 1512) and so muscular and large if one compares them to the work of his contemporaries. No photography, of course. Just looking and trying, but failing, to remember the intensity of the experience.