Happy Easter !

My book is published in the States on April 13th. I had hoped to be there to help launch it in New York at the time of the Frieze Art Fair in early May and even to see some of the museums I haven’t in New England, not least because so much of the book is an American story. It begins with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and includes the Guggenheim (of course), the Whitney and the glories of the Kimbell and the Yale Center for British in its first chapter; then going on to such great monuments as the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Menil Collection in Houston and the Getty Center in Los Angeles; I included the Neue Galerie in New York, one of my favourites, and Dia:Beacon upstate; and, in the last chapter, I look at the reinvention of the Barnes and the Whitney and the building of The Broad in LA. Now, I am really pleased that the book has been picked up by Publisher’s Weekly, which I hope will give it a boost:-

Nonfiction Book Review: The Art Museum in Modern Times by Charles Saumarez Smith. Thames & Hudson, $39.95 (272p) ISBN 978-0-500-02243-6 (publishersweekly.com)

I know the Gentle Author has beaten me to it, but the quality of the blossom in the streets of East London is briefly spectacular, so that the dullest of local streets looks Japanese:-

I just got an email checking that the attached photograph is indeed of me. It definitely is. It was taken by Simon Bonner on a photography course and I just happened to stray into the picture. But it is a nice record of my bicycling life during lockdown and the graffiti on the towpath in Hackney Wick:-

There are beautiful fritillaries in the garden. First, fritillaria meleagris, apparently one of only two species of check in nature alongside guinea fowl:-

We’re not sure of the other (not apparently uva-vulpis):-

More about changes in museums in the current issue of Art Newspaper as the reality of the post-COVID environment becomes clearer: cuts everywhere; redundancies; reorganisation; restitution. I was asked just now on a forthcoming Thames & Hudson podcast how COVID will influence the operation of museums and remembered the extent to which the 1950s was devoted to reconstruction: few new museum buildings; putting things out which had been in store; patching up old buildings. New ways of thinking and making better use of existing collections is not necessarily a bad idea.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/uk-museums-covid-19-crisis-cuts

Maxwell Museums is a weekly newsletter produced by Maxwell Blowfield, a press officer at the British Museum. It looks like a good way to follow what is currently happening in museums and today carries an interview about my book and quite a bit else. It’s funny how it is assumed that life was easier in the past. I don’t remember it feeling like that at the time.

https://maxwellmuseums.substack.com/p/charles-saumarez-smith-interview

This is such a great project: that Grayson Perry has agreed to make a bell to celebrate the potential end of the pandemic and – let’s hope – the revival of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a proper working Foundry, using the skills of artists, not just a vacuous tourist attraction, funded by a New York venture capitalist and annexed to an upmarket hotel.

We just await Robert Jenrick’s verdict.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/grayson-perry-is-casting-a-bell-to-mark-end-of-covid-19-pandemic

I had temporarily forgotten that the RIBA Journal had kindly said that they would reproduce the section of the book on ‘The Role of the Architect’ in which I have tried to summarise their changing role over time, based on the work that I had done in writing my case studies (43, unless I have miscounted). It’s necessarily a bit oversimplified and doesn’t include what I think of as the rogue element: Daniel Libeskind’s fine, symbolic Jewish Museum in Berlin; Zaha Hadid’s MAXXI National Museum of XXI Century Art in Rome.

Ed Jones has suggested I should have included Rafael Moneo’s building for the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston – admittedly a good model of exemplary galleries for its permanent collection and Alvaro Siza’s Galician Art Museum in Santiago da Compostella. The list of those I need to visit is growing longer every day.

https://www.ribaj.com/culture/role-of-architects-in-the-art-museum-in-modern-times-charles-saumarez-smith

This morning, you could have listened to my conversation with Ed Vaizey. This afternoon, you can read what his mother, Marina Vaizey, the former long-standing critic of the Sunday Times, thinks of my book, which I know is a bit parti pris because as Ed revealed, and as I already knew, she is an enthusiastic reader of, and occasional commentator on (vide her comments yesterday on the Guggenheim Museum), my blog. But she adds her own interesting perspectives on many of the buildings I’ve written about.

Thank you, Marina !

https://www.artlyst.com/reviews/architectural-envelopes-the-modern-art-museum-charles-saumarez-smith/