I was putting the finishing touches to an account I have written of the 1949 Summer Exhibition for the Paul Mellon Centre’s annual chronicle of the exhibition which is due to be published online later this month.   At the time that I wrote it, I did not know that John Rothenstein had reviewed the exhibition in The Tablet as Director of the Tate.   He was pretty dismissive, describing it as ‘one of the most dispiriting he remembered’, but, on the other hand, was full of admiration for the work of Winston Churchill.   His conclusion was that, ‘One thing, at least, is unambiguously apparent:  towards academic standards the selection committee show – I should rather say parade – an indifference which makes nonsense of the insistent claim of the Academy to represent “Tradition”‘.

Now that Johnnie Shand Kydd’s amazing group photograph of the majority of RAs lined up on the grand staircase of Burlington Gardens has been published by the Evening Standard, I hope it’s all right for me to document the amazing scene as they all lined up in the March cold:-

I have spent the last couple of days watching architectural photographers trying to work out how and where to photograph it in order to convey its essential characteristics and by chance this evening came across some photographs of its difficult, ornate, high Victorian, classical façade which I always think might as well be in Berlin as London:-

We had our first, all-staff meeting in David Chipperfield’s new, hemispherical lecture theatre in Burlington Gardens this morning.   At 7.45, the place was still under wraps, the leather seats by Bill Amberg still covered by plastic sheeting.   By 9.00, two hundred or so people were sitting in the steeply raked amphitheatre, individually visible because the space is daylit, like a Renaissance anatomy theatre, or as David Chipperfield thinks, like the Teatro Olimpico in Vicenza (he is lecturing there this Saturday).   It’s a very different experience from talking in a darkened lecture hall:  the sense of assembled, proximate faces, each of whom is in an unexpectedly individual relationship with the speaker.   I still can’t post photographs, but will soon.

There are ten days till our building opens to the public.   I took a stroll round it last night, admiring the cleaned façade in the evening sun:-

I now know when the film about the Royal Academy is going out on television – this Saturday at 9 p.m. and thereafter available on i-player.   Having digested it and heard many comments, I can strongly recommend it as a view behind-the-scenes of the RA and how it operates:-

We walked out to the beach at Winchelsea, all shingle, to the Mary Stanford Lifeboat House, unused since its crew went out to save a Latvian boat in the English channel in the early hours of 15 November 1928, the boat capsized and all seventeen were lost.   The lifeboat house has not been used ever since:-

We wanted to have tea in the Ashmolean, but it was closed for repairs, so we sat in the garden of the Old Parsonage Hotel, looking out over the Denys Wilkinson building, one of Philip Dowson’s less lovely projects, designed in 1967 for the Department of Astrophysics:-

But we were consoled by the graveyard of the church of St. Giles and the fine architecture and unexpected rusticity of the street itself:-

We went out to Oxfordshire – to that bit of rural Oxfordshire between Oxford, Thame and the Chilterns – to Albion Barn to see the current exhibition of Richard Long and the Boyle Family.   But I only managed to take a photograph of a grandly ornamental bird house by the tennis court:-

And a sculpture in a field and forgot to ask the sculptor’s name:-

I have been reading the fascinating and revealing new biography of John Rothenstein by Adrian Clark, which by dint of good research in the Tate Gallery archive, Treasury papers and Douglas Cooper’s correspondence does much to elucidate why Rothenstein was such an extraordinarily divisive figure at the Tate in the early 1950s:  starting well on his appointment in June 1938 aged 37, helped by his family friendships with artists;  mysteriously taking a prolonged trip to the United States in the early years of the war;  making a succession of disastrous appointments, including a South African adventurer, Le Roux Smith Le Roux;  getting rid of Humphrey Brooke, who became Secretary of the Royal Academy and an implacable enemy;  and persecuted by a gang led by Douglas Cooper and Denis Mahon.  It makes the twenty-first century art world seem comparatively peaceful.