We finally made it to Kiefer’s Walhalla , having missed the opening before Christmas.   I kept on thinking of the impeccable orderliness of his living accommodation at Barjac as we contemplated the spectacular pandemonium of the storage space piled high from floor to ceiling with decay.  

Down the central aisle are lead beds:-

Off the aisle is a metal staircase festooned with plaster dresses:-

And the storeroom:-

We admired the wheelchair in a vitrine:-

And the plastercast dresses:-

I walked past Mile End Place this morning in the sleet and remembered that I had taken photographs of it recently in sunnier weather, not least from over the wall to the north in the Jewish cemetery:-

After a bit more investigation of the history of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry online (not difficult because of the wonderful work of the Survey of London), it’s become clear to me that the key to the preservation of the site may lie not so much in the buildings at the front which are of obvious historical importance and are already listed Grade 2*, so theoretically impossible to develop, let alone demolish, but more in the big engineering workshop at the back which was added by James Strike, a conservation architect who worked at English Heritage and was the author of a book on Architecture in Conservation:  Managing Development at Historic Sites (and of a book on Span).   So, preservation of the site may depend not so much on the work of the traditional conservation societies as on the Twentieth-Century Society persuading Historic England to spot list this building.

The fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry continues to be a matter of local, and not so local, concern.   It turns out that the whole site has been sold to an East London property developer who is likely to want to demolish as much of it as he is allowed to in order to maximise the return on his investment.   He may think that this will be straightforward as there is so much redevelopment in the area.   But it would be the loss of a building whose value lies precisely in its continuity of use.   As the GLC said when demolition was proposed in 1972 before the rise of industrial archaeology as a discipline, it’s the home of ‘a unique and important living industry where crafts essentially unchanged for 400 years are practised by local craftsmen’.

We had the amazing experience this evening of hearing Vladimir Ashkenazy talk about the experience of musicians through the aftermath of the Russian Revolution:  how Tchaikovsky remained acceptable throughout;  Rachmaninov was removed from the repertoire when he emigrated to the United States, after leaving on a sled for Finland in December 1917, but reinstated after he expressed support for Russia in the early years of the second world war;  and Shostakovitch fell from favour after being attacked by Pravda for his Lady Macbeth.   All of this is doubtless familiar to musical historians;  but sounds different when described by someone who himself had difficulties with the Soviet authorities.

Then he played.

I am impressed that one of my correspondents knew Roman Jakobson before his death in Boston in 1982.   

I have been trying to find out more about Jakobson’s involvement in Russian avant-garde culture after the Revolution.   The answer is that he was indeed in Moscow at the time of the Revolution, where he was a student in the Historico-Philological Faculty, received his Master’s degree in 1918, and was involved in the Moscow Linguistic Circle which developed the study of semiotics.   He didn’t last long because he migrated to Prague in 1920.   He remained till 1939, when he fled to Copenhagen then Norway and Sweden, where he studied aphasia, before crossing the Atlantic on a boat with Ernst Cassirer, to join the New School with Lévi-Strauss.

Quite a life.

It’s a while since I’ve been round our building project – in fact, I haven’t been since just before Christmas.   It’s making progress, never as fast as I would like, but moving forwards.

The entrance staircase if full of scaffolding:-

The lift has been removed:-

The floor of the Senate Room has been taken up:-

The windows in what will be the Collections Gallery are being repaired:-

The Lecture Theatre is taking shape:-

There is a gap in the middle of the Schools:-

The south west corner tower is taking shape:-

David Hume is under wraps:-

Locke is pensive:-

We had the patrons’ preview of our exhibition Revolution:  Russian Art 1917-1932 last night, the first opportunity to see the reality of an exhibition which has been planned over a long period and was originally expected to try and reconstruct the survey exhibition of Russian painting shown first in Leningrad in 1932 and then in a reduced form in Moscow.   It has been accused in the Guardian of being unduly heroizing of a period of political tyranny, but this was written without Jonathan Jones having seen the exhibition.   In fact, it is just the opposite.   It starts by demonstrating the sense of optimism and opportunity released during the early stages of the Revolution, the experimentation of El Lissitzky and the avant-garde, but then shows the increasing disillusion, the romanticisation of history, the anxieties of social realism, ending with the horror of the Gulag.

In clearing away the debris of last week, I remembered that I had meant to write a post about the Hopton Street almshouses which I saw as a small oasis from above, close to Tate Modern:-

Not much is known of Charles Hopton.   He was born in c.1654, was a member of the Fishmonger’s Company, a bachelor who left the residue of his estate for the establishment of almshouses, which required the demolition of a group of houses to the east of what was then known as Green Walk.   They opened in 1752:-

One of the contributors to my radio programmes about East London said that Margaret Thatcher had been very annoyed when the Independent revealed that the pyramidal roof of Canary Wharf concealed radio transmitters belonging to MI5.   I can find no evidence of this.   But what I did discover, which I had never recognised, but does sound plausible, is that its profile and distinctive shape is modelled on that of Big Ben;  and that the pyramid conceals the machinery for washing the windows:-