In the afternoon of the CAFA Centenary Conference, we were encouraged to focus on the role and responsibilities of University Art Museums.   We started with Geoffrey Ward, the acting Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, talking about the role of the university museum as a social venue, followed by Ernst Vegelin, the Director of the Courtauld Gallery providing a spirited defence of the intellectual responsibilities of university museums, exploring the foothills as well as the mountain peaks of art history, anti-populist in its motivation, driven, like its academic peers, by new research, not visitor numbers. More common is the role of the University Art Museum as a bridge into the local community, as was vigorously expounded by Caitlin Doherty, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Jacksonville, Florida.

Meng Xianwei described an amazing project – the Museum of Contemporary Art at Qingdao – which combines a huge museum with an artist’s village, studios, a park, a wedding hall, dunes, an apartment block, and the Qingdao campus of CAFA, all designed futuristically by Jean Nouvel. An eco museum-cum-holiday resort. A public-private investment serving both the local community, artists and tourists.

Finally, Han Haiyan described the gestation of the CAFA Art Museum in Langfang, one part only of the International Cultural Exchange Center, a huge, new town building in best neo-expressionist style:-

We all piled on to the bus in the morning for what I thought was going to be the half a mile drive back to CAFA again, but turned out to be a mystery ride out beyond the 6th. Ring Road to Langfang, a new township southwest of Beijing, to a conference centre attached to the International Cultural Exchange Center:-

We returned to the topic of new digital developments in museums, including the National Museum of Singapore, where visitors are encouraged to copy photographs from a table where they are all displayed (no copyright) so that they don’t need to take photographs themselves. Not surprisingly, the most impressive and most fully digital museum presented was the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Seoul, where many of the displays are in new media, even when working with old media artists, including Michael Craig-Martin and William Kentridge.

The afternoon session was devoted to the  future of art museums and their role in public and art education, as the way in which most people have their first and most systematic experience of art.   I had said that I would talk about the ideas underlying our recent building developments;  but I realised that much of what we have done is to rectify the omissions of a nineteenth-century building project – its previous nearly total lack of circulation space or proper public facilities, including no lecture theatre.   In China, they have built 600 new museums in the last couple of decades.   One of the issues is how to maintain authentic private experience when there is sometimes overcrowding.   Another is whether digital access, including the ubiquitous photography with mobile phones, enhances or detracts from visitor experience.   Since I like taking photographs myself, I am hardly one to deplore it, but this may not apply to Selfies in front of the Mona Lisa.

The conference turns out to be a gigantic affair, held to celebrate the centenary of CAFA – the Central Academy of Fine Arts – which is China’s leading art school, based on the National School of Fine Arts, founded in 1918.   In amongst the glitzy ceremonial, there was much discussion of new challenges and new methods of teaching, the loss of interest in drawing and in any system of training based on materials and skills.   Best of the papers in the morning was a provocative, but historically well informed talk by James Elkins, the art historian and Professor at the Art Institute of Chicago, about the way that all degree courses in the United States (and presumably Britain as well) bear the traces of previous systems of instruction:  the eighteenth century academic system which privileged drawing and observation;  the nineteenth century German Romantic belief in the master, in creativity and the role of the imagination;  the Bauhaus which tried to start from a tabua rasa and taught visual sensibility;  and the postwar system which encouraged writing and self-analysis.   So the question posed was how much, if any, of this remains relevant to the contemporary practice of art.   I may have oversimplified.

It’s night-time in London, but early morning in Beijing.   I had forgotten how discombobulating it is to fly half way round the world and find oneself in the enormity and incomprehensibility of Beijing, which I have been to three times, but never managed to orient myself in either the urban geography or the culture.

I’m here for what is described as an International Art Education Conference:  Art Education in the New Era, with delegates from art institutions across the globe – Florence, Prague, Moscow and Cape Town.   I’m in the Art Museum Forum and have discovered – too late to change my talk – that its theme is Opportunities and Challenges of Art Museums in the Digital Age.   Not really my special subject, but I can always learn.

At the opening of our Klimt Schiele exhibition, I was reminded of the fact that – long ago – I took a course on the Connoisseurship of Old Master Drawings with Professor Konrad Oberhuber, who, at the time, was an Austrian exile in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but who, later in his career, was persuaded to return to Vienna to be Director of the Albertina.   He was an eccentric, but charismatic figure, who was incredibly confident of his gifts of attribution, based on years of study as a young man in the drawings cabinets of European museums.   The only problem was that he had inherited a pre-war belief that it was possible to identify drawings not simply by draughtsman, but by geographical region.   This may be fine in differentiating Tuscan drawings from Umbrian, but is more problematic in distinguishing drawings made in Utrecht from those of Haarlem.   He regarded all English drawings as absurd, deserving only of laughter.   This geographical determinism became more dogmatic as he got older, and less convincing.   But he had a brilliant ability to describe the qualities and characteristics of Old Master drawings and he taught me a lot from the front of his Volkswagen Beetle visiting Massachusetts private collections.

We were tipped off that Imogen Cooper was playing in King’s Place last night.   Indeed, she was:  an ambitious programme of late works – late Haydn, still playful, late Beethoven, the Sonata Op. 110, ending with the ‘Arioso dolente’, and late Schubert, composed just after Beethoven’s death (I had not known that Schubert attended Beethoven’s coffin to its grave);  in between the Haydn and the Beethoven, she played a short, attenuated piece by Thomas Adès based on a song by Dowland.   Powerful stuff.

At the Whitechapel History Fest, I met Ron McCormick who was selling copies of the small photographic books he has produced with Café Royal Books, based on photographs he took while he was a postgraduate student at the Royal Academy Schools (Peter Greenham was Keeper and allowed him to make a darkroom) and living in Princelet Street:  very atmospheric pictures of Jewish merchants and traders in Cheshire Street, Old Montague Street and Artillery Lane, pre-gentrification when the streets were still darkly atmospheric.   You can see them online.

I got back from the States in time to hear Dan Cruickshank give a bravura final talk in the Whitechapel History Fest, organised by the Survey of London upstairs in the Whitechapel Idea Store.

He described his peregrinations round east London in the late 1960s taking fine black-and-white documentary photographs of buildings which no longer exist, including Wellclose Square, just south of Wilton’s Music Hall, the Circus, Square and Crescent, designed by George Dance the Younger, just north of the Tower in the late 1760s (this is not one of Dan’s photographs), and the London Dock:-

Then, in 1976, he, Colin Amery and others squatted 5 and 7, Elder Street to prevent it being demolished by British Land and established the Spitalfields Trust, which has done nearly as many projects in Whitechapel as in Spitalfields, including (which I didn’t know about) the Durward Street Board School just north of Whitechapel Station.

He ended with a peroration on the risks of damaging new building development, including a startlingly gigantic new building proposed on the corner of Commercial Street and Whitechapel High Street which will dwarf the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

I ended my time in New York by going to TEFAF, an extension of the art fair held annually in Maastricht.   The Armory, designed for the New York militia, is an impressive place for it:-

I always like the way Axel Vervoordt displays objects, using the shabby grandeur of the surroundings:-

This is what I would have bought if I had the money:-

Two alabaster Bactrian bowls at Rupert Wace:-

And a Pietà from Mullany:-