I have been mourning the death of Gillian Ayres, an RA, although in recent years not a very active one, because in Devon and temperamentally not at all keen on committees or, indeed, organisations (she briefly resigned over Sensation);  but even in Devon, and especially on her occasional visits to show work at Alan Cristea, she managed to convey a smoky joie-de-vivre, vitality and moral support.   I wrote an introduction to an exhibition held not long ago in Beijing and realised what a life force and art force she had been from the time she went to Camberwell alongside Howard Hodgkin, teaching at Corsham, again alongside Hodgkin, working on the Lleyn Peninsula in north Wales (I sadly missed her recent exhibition at the National Museum of Wales), before moving to north Devon.   A great painter and a great loss.

I am a touch discombobulated having flown to São Paulo overnight, following a generous invitation to visit SP-Arte, the annual South American art fair.   So, a new country, a new continent.   So far, so good.   It’s as if Los Angeles had mated with New York (the infinite extent of Los Angeles and the high-rise energy of New York).

We started with a visit to Pivô, a small experimental space in the ground floor of Oscar Niemeyer’s great curved, Corbusian Edificio Copan, designed in 1951 as apartments for singles and as a leisure complex as well:-

Steak in Figuera Rubaiyat, a local restaurant in Jardins under a tropical fig tree:-

Then to SP-Arte, which is held in the pavilion designed by Oscar Niemeyer in 1957 for the Bienal de São Paulo. It is an art fair which is much more fun than its European equivalents because the art is (to me) so totally unfamiliar and because I was introduced in succession to nearly all the gallery owners who talked me through the work on display.

The biggest and most unexpected surprise was in a back room of Rafael Moraes on the top floor, where there was a display of eighteenth and nineteenth-century slave jewellery – something I had never seen or heard of before – apparently given as gifts from owners to their slaves:-

I waa pleased to find a place in the back row of the stalls for the memorial service of Jeremy Hutchinson – the brilliant, clever, funny and sharp advocate who was apparently regarded by Mrs. Thatcher as representing everything that was wrong with liberal Britain, but more likely represented everything that was right about 1960s liberal culture (when, according to Grey Gowrie, the British changed from being Romans to Italians).   Even Lucy Winkett did the Blessing with theatrical flouish;  and then the whole congregation accompanied Nick Hutchinson singing Que Sera.

One of the pleasures of coming back from Portugal is finding a dishevelled copy (it has been mashed by Amazon) of the new book of photographs by Janet Stone (Through the Lens of Janet Stone: Portraits, 1953-1979), which have been selected by her son-in-law, Archie Beck, and published by the Bodleian Library, custodians of her archive (including the many love letters from Kenneth Clark which have been embargoed for thirty years). She was a very good amateur portrait photographer and had the benefit of an amazing number of well-known friends (as Sylvia Townsend Warner described, ‘she is a bishop’s daughter and has lion hunting in the blood’). John Bayley is photographed eating breakfast in bed. There’s an amazing photograph of Siegfried Sassoon in old age. Laurence Whistler is seen lying beside a tennis court with a donkey grazing next door. There’s a particularly impressive photograph of Kenneth Clark looking like an egret and a picture of the young Daniel Day-Lewis in plastic armour. I thought that all her best photographs were held by the NPG, but these have been apparently printed from the original negatives and appear very fresh. It’s a treat.

We’ve really enjoyed staying in Casa no Tempo, a project by Aires Mateus, making use of the Alentejo vernacular tradition, but giving it a sense of neo-Palladian geometry:-

These were the views from our bedroom window:-

Last of my Alentejo posts is the Igreja do Salvador inside the keep of the castle at Arraiolos:-

In the town square at Pavia, a small town west of Estremoz, is a second dolmen church, one of the oddities of the region whereby a pagan monument was converted to Christian use by being made into a chapel dedicated to São Dinis:-

We spent our last day in the Alentejo in Estremoz, a large-ish market town where the main square leads up by narrow streets to the medieval castle.

We went partly to the Saturday morning market which turned out to be mostly junk, apart from the excellent Alentejo meats and cheeses:-

The route up to the castle is highly picturesque:-

Within the Castle keep itself is the post-Manueline Igreja de Santa Maria:-

Back down the other side are more deserted streets, punctuated by roadside shrines:-

We ended up at the Merceria Gadanha and had, for once, an excellent lunch.

One of the characteristics of the Alentejo, besides the cork trees, are the rocks beautifully strewn round the landscape creating spaces like sacred groves:-

Since it’s raining in Portugal, I thought I would check when it was that Aby Warburg gave the lecture that Kenneth Clark heard at the Biblioteca Hertziana (as Edward Chaney correctly said, in Rome, not Florence) which so changed his approach to art history. The answer is given in an article by Elizabeth Sears in an article in the Burlington Magazine on Clark’s correspondence with Gertrud Bing. It took place at five o’clock on Saturday 19th. January 1929 and lasted two hours. In a BBC broadcast in 1948, Clark described Warburg’s manner: ‘When he read a passage from Savonarola, one felt that one could hear the Frate’s high, thin, passionate voice ringing in the vaults of the Duomo; when he read a verse from Politian, his voice became courtly and fantastical’; and in one of his letters to Bing, he described how ‘the Warburg lecture did liberate me from the two chief influences of my youth – the ‘pure aesthetic sensation’ of Roger Fry & the attribution game’. This is presumably partly why (pace the Burlington Magazine’s current editorial), Clark’s approach to art in Civilisation was as much historical, including music, as conventionally art historical (and, equally, I don’t see why Schama’s training as a historian precludes him from having well developed critical and interpretative skills when writing, as he often has done, about art).