We have been watching Adam Curtis’s latest series of documentaries Can’t Get You Out of My Head: An Emotional History of the Modern World one at a time, because each one seems more than enough in terms of a great morass of footage, alternately illuminating and bewildering, as if one is going to learn about the intellectual construction of the modern world, but instead that it is invariably and everywhere the product of malice and conspiracy. I have now been alerted to an interview with him in this week’s New Statesman (Adam Curtis: “Big Tech and Big Data have been completely useless in this crisis” (newstatesman.com)). I am not sure that it makes his thesis any clearer, but it at least makes clear that there is no thesis, but instead is wilfully nihilistic, deliberately provocative and wide-ranging, using old footage often arbitrarily: both admirable and perplexing, which is exactly what we feel at the end of each evening.

I am so sorry to hear of the death of Trevor Dannatt, a lovely, thoughtful and intelligent architect, who always seemed much younger than he actually was, having died on Monday aged 101, still with a good head of very white hair. He was encouraged to take an interest in the work of Le Corbusier while still at school, trained at the Regent Street Polytechnic before the war, then worked for Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry, before joining the LCC in 1948 to work on the design of the Royal Festival Hall, as well as a bar which only served tea for the Festival of Britain. I had forgotten that he did quite a bit of design work for Bryan Robertson at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, including 20th. Century Form in 1953 and the exhibition on Jackson Pollock in 1958. Hard to think that he thought of Peter Smithson as one of ‘Les Jeunes’. There are very good interviews with him by Alan Powers available in National Life Stories.

My views of the Secretary of State’s invitation to cultural leaders to be told how to celebrate ‘our history’:-

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/oliver-dowden-british-history-meeting-museum-leaders/

This will be an extraordinarily interesting and important project for whoever wins the competition: the next generation on from Dixon Jones and Venturi Scott Brown, given the task of reshaping the experience of visitors as they arrive and enter the building, which, as always happens, has become over elaborate and cluttered, handicapped by the need for bag searches and a bit confused by the brightness of the adjacent shop, luring the visitor sideways. I will look forward to hearing who is chosen.

https://www.bdonline.co.uk/news/national-gallery-seeks-architect-to-remodel-sainsbury-wing/5110421.article?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily%20Building%20Design%20%20Breaking%20news&utm_content=Daily%20Building%20Design%20%20Breaking%20news+CID_3a6717266124293ca2e117343ba0d972&utm_source=Campaign%20Monitor%20emails&utm_term=National%20Gallery%20seeks%20architect%20to%20remodel%20Sainsbury%20Wing

The croci are out in the garden – such a pleasure to see in the warmth of the afternoon sun:-

I opened a copy of the Christ’s College Newsletter this morning and found, to my great surprise, an article about my step grandmother, Hélène Jeanty-Raven, who spent the Second World War incarcerated in a German mental asylum in an attempt, which failed, to secure the release of her husband, Paul. She then spent her life working for international reconciliation, including attending the Nuremberg Trials and, late in her life, corresponding perhaps too warmly with Albert Speer. I had not known that she had established a fund to help impoverished students because I had always understood that she lived on £5,000 pa, having misread the amount which was available to her, which was £50,000 pa. She was in many ways a remarkable woman and I’m pleased to find she is remembered.

I am not sure that I had ever actually seen the portrait bust of Michael Jaffé by Elisabeth Frink, which shows him grizzled and, as indeed he was, in the guise of a Roman Emperor. It was turned down by the National Portrait Gallery, not, I think, anything to do with the quality of the bust, which is remarkable, but because Jaffé was one of those people who made enough enemies in his life probably to have been blackballed. A pity, not least, because the genre of the modern portrait bust is so seldom convincing.

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/professor-michael-jaffe-19231997-cbe-littd-frsa-267278/view_as/list/search/makers:elisabeth-frink-19301993/sort_by/date_earliest/order/desc/page/1

As has been pointed out by Richard Bram, this recent article about the Nordic Pavilion has very good photographs of it as it was relatively recently, with three of the surviving internal trees:-

https://www.archdaily.com/784536/ad-classics-nordic-pavilion-in-venice-sverre-fehn

I was asked by the publishers, Lars Mueller, to review a new book by Mari Lending and Erik Langdalen about the Nordic Pavilion in Venice. I explained that there was nowhere I could review it except on my blog, but they have sent it anyway – a beautiful and thoughtful documentary description of the circumstances which led to the construction of a single pavilion for the Nordic countries – Norway, Sweden and Finland (but not Denmark or Iceland) – in the Giardini Napoleonico in Venice and the incredibly complicated Nordic politics that entailed (it makes the politics of the EU seem simple by comparison).

What I like about the book is that it conveys the extreme messiness of building projects, in contrast to the idea that they spring fully formed from the mind and pencil of a famous architect: the piles of boring committee minutes; the fact that so many decisions about buildings are concealed in discussions and debates between architects, clients (in this case, multiple clients), engineers, cost consultants and contractors and so are often very hard to recover from the piles of surviving documentation. So the drawings for the project by Sverre Fehn are published in double-page spreads, but then you are thrown into the minutes of the first meeting with all their indecision and circumspection about the location of gas pipes and whether or not they should hold a meeting in Helsinki. Then there is a mass of information about the detailed discussions which led to the construction of the building, which was sandwiched on a very narrow site between the neoclassical Danish pavilion – the Danes never did agree to collaborate on the project – and the French (the Swedes had had their own pavilion, but sold it to the Dutch in 1932). The problem of the site was that it had lots of trees, nearly all of which the Venetian authorities insisted on being preserved, so the finished pavilion consisted of a concrete structure with a slate floor, which caused never-ending problems, an open roof, which caused equally never-ending problems, and large number of trees growing in the middle of the building, distracting from the experience of whichever country had been chosen to exhibit. It would be good if every building project was subject to the same deep description because it would cumulatively give a very different sense of how architecture, even great architecture, comes into being.

Indeed, one of the things I have found in writing about museums is how poorly many of them are documented. Few people want to record the problems that building projects often cause, so it is a pleasure to find one described with such remarkable, beautiful fidelity.

I have been trying to reproduce the entry I have written about Michael Jaffé for the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which has just been posted online, but I have discovered that, not surprisingly, it is only available to subscribers and I don’t want to risk breaching copyright by doing a copy and paste. I realise that someone reading it may assume, wrongly, that I was a pupil of his, but I wasn’t, merely knew of him as the formidable Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. He interviewed me to read history of art at his house in Kensington. I was seventeen, very naive and had never been to a house like his. He asked me whether I had any opinion on the attribution of a bronze which he had just purchased that afternoon. I had never seen a Renaissance bronze and I certainly had not the faintest idea as to its possible attribution. Quite quickly he lost patience with my apparently total ignorance and asked me if I had anything whatsoever to recommend me. I said that I had been editor of my school magazine, which I was rather proud of. He drew himself up and told me that he had been editor of the Eton Chronicle and knew that editing the school magazine counted for nothing. That was the end of the interview. It didn’t stop me feeling that he deserved commemoration.