Liane Lang, an artist who has spent her entire career thinking about and making work based on public statuary, wanted to post the following Comment on my post, but I think it deserves more than that so am posting it with her permission:-

I have been thinking about these colonial men on display across Britain and lots of people have asked me what I think should be done to/with them. It occurred to me that there is a lot of momentum right now and perhaps it should be used to campaign for a museum of colonial history. It would be a fitting place to line up the great beneficiaries of Empire in the context of well researched and documented displays on slavery, commercial exploitation and the continued prevalence of white supremacist views. It would be an amazing institution for London to have and perhaps could be sold to the conservative section by way of its gainful existence as a major tourist attraction. Think of Budapest’s Memento Park or Terror Haza or the Jewish Museum in Berlin of course, all major projects in aid of Vergangenheitsbewältigung. A museum of colonial history might be an alternative to having the ethnographic collection hidden in the basement of the British Museum. If a museum is too ambitious, perhaps we go all the way of Memento Park and bung Colston and co in a muddy field outside Slough playing ‘There’ll always being an England’ on a squeaky tannoy…

Of all the multiple things I have been reading about Edward Colston, Cecil Rhodes and what to do about public statuary, the subjects of which were until recently conspicuously ignored, I thought that one of the most sensible comments was from John-Paul Stonard who pointed out that, of course, we are not the only country which has had to grapple with, and come to terms with, monstrous things in our history and that the Germans even have a word for this. I wasn’t familiar with the word and now that I have looked it up I can understand why, but I still think that it’s a very sensible suggestion that we should learn from the ways in which Germany has dealt with its past.

I know it’s a relatively small thing in the great scheme of things with a mass of more important and contentious public issues, but I felt a great twinge of sadness and nostalgia when I read about the closure of EAT, one of several chains of sandwich shops which opened in the 1980s and 1990s and brought good quality and affordable sandwiches to lunchtime eating. EAT was always one of the best (and I always liked its graphics), so much so that I remember investigating whether they might open a franchise in the basement of the renovated NPG. I assume that many other restaurant chains are at risk of going under, but this doesn’t make it any the less dispiriting.

https://eat.co.uk

The excellent radio programme about Anthony Blunt on Saturday has made me think more and re-read Miranda Carter’s biography about his actions in the war. On the one hand, his actions as an art historian were remarkable and entirely laudable. He had been appointed as a research fellow at the Warburg Institute in 1937, helped establish the Journal of the Warburg Institute which first appeared in 1938, wrote articles for it on the Hypnertomachia Poliphili and Blake, and completed the research and writing of his book on Artistic Theory in Italy which was published in 1940 with its acknowledgement to Guy Burgess for ‘the stimulus of constant discussion’. Even during the early years of the war, he was able to write and publish a pioneering monograph on the work of François Mansart. And yet, at the same time, and with equal diligence, he was shovelling huge numbers of top secret documents into his briefcase on a weekly basis and handing them over to Boris Kreshin, his contact in the Russian Embassy, so that they could be copied over night, collected by him in the morning and returned to MI5. There are various excuses which are used for this action: that he was motivated by ideology, but he doesn’t seem to have been particularly ideological at this or any other point in his life, except perhaps briefly in 1933; that he was sucked into it by his friendship with Guy Burgess and once involved found it hard to escape, but this doesn’t entirely explain the skill and persistence with which he did it; that he enjoyed it as an intellectual game, demonstrating that he was much cleverer than his colleagues in MI5. Years later, after he had been exposed, he said to his brother Wilfrid, with whom he had remained very close, ‘You must admit I’m a very good actor’, a comment which suggested that he enjoyed the intrigue, irrespective of the consequences.

We have just been listening to the programme about Anthony Blunt, looking back at the moment when he was unmasked as a spy in the House of Commons in 1979, although it was not a particular surprise in art historical circles. Most of it covered ground which is fairly familiar from Miranda Carter’s biography – his time as an Apostle in Cambridge, his friendship with Guy Burgess, his Marxist sympathies in the Spectator, apart from the contribution by Christopher Andrew, who fleshed out in more detail the secrets that Blunt did reveal:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000jszt

I’m re-posting Max Anderson’s thoughtful and heartfelt article on how museums should respond to current circumstances in the United States, not least because it contains such a vigorous denunciation of any view that museums might be considered places of contemplation and reflection, but instead should be recognised for what they have become – market-driven and increasingly privatised entities – and that they should ‘collect and present art that is not a mirror of art market fashion’. I look forward to the response.

https://www.apollo-magazine.com/expressions-of-empathy-are-not-enough-its-time-for-us-museums-to-act/

I’ve been studying this year’s RIBA Awards with interest, as I find it’s a good way of seeing what’s being built. Lots of small projects for a change, quite a few in very sensitive locations, and fewer obvious big-time potential winners. My tips:

OMA for Brighton College, just because it’s interesting to see such an internationally well-known practice doing a school project.

Carmody Groarke for the Windermere Jetty Museum. Good architects, good clients (Lakeland Arts), what looks like an intelligent building in a sensitive setting.

Wright and Wright for the Library and Study Centre at St. John’s College, Oxford. I was meant to go to the launch, but didn’t. Oxford and St. John’s, in particular, have a good track record as clients, helped by being so rich. Look at the detailing of the banisters.

6a architects for MK Gallery. This is a renovation, not a new build, but looks more interesting than many of the more tasteful, but often bland public projects.

Ney & Partners for Tintagel Castle Footbridge. Hard not to admire the elegant simplicity of the bridge in such an amazing setting.

TAS Architects for Woodside Mews. I feel that the judges should pay attention to the better quality work in housing, in order to recognise where developers have taken trouble with good design and use of materials. This is not the only one, but looks the best.

Grove-Raines for Kyle House, Sutherland. The aim was apparently to create ‘an emotive piece of architecture’, an unusual description for a project in such a remote setting.

Martin Edwards for a House in North Wales. I’m very prejudiced in favour of this project and pleased to see it shortlisted.

https://www.ribaj.com/awards

I am posting the obituary of Guillaume de Rougemont, who we knew long ago, stayed with in the pavillon of his family’s chateau at Parfondeval and whose funeral we were unable to attend in Oxford recently. The obituary well conveys his debonair charm and passion for beetles:-

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/5e4b8404-a4fb-11ea-a585-dcb14d2bcd47?shareToken=e0e8d6b2d49d6f2e746eddcb3086c487

I said to my cousin, Sophy Newton, that I would like to publish the obituary she wrote of her mother, Jane de Falbe, when it appeared in print in the so-called Brown Book of Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, because I liked and admired Jane who was married to my father’s first cousin and because it successfully documents her vanished social world:-

JANE DE FALBE (née MARRIOTT), 1927–2019

On 19 October 1953, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh went to tea with the Australian High Commissioner and his wife, Sir Thomas and Lady Vera White. Four months after the Coronation, the purpose of their visit would have been to seek advice and introductions for their upcoming state visit. But the Whites had been left in the lurch by an unreliable parlour maid, so they were attended upon by an Oxford graduate, Jane Marriott, who had accepted the temporary post and whose heavily scribbled line around ‘Queen – tea’ on that day in her diary also marked, as she recalled years later on, her ‘First Encounter with Australia Fair’. Her second encounter, less than three weeks later, was with Bill de Falbe, great-great-grandson of Governor Philip Gidley King of the First Fleet, who shortly thereafter became her husband: ‘The Whites,’ she writes, ‘were thrilled.’ One can well imagine the truth of this, for Jane made genuine friends wherever life led her. Upheavals, encounters and dramas in early years nurtured her curiosity for people and places. Born in Bishops Stortford in October 1927, Jane was taught ballet by Tamara Karsarvina in London in the early 1930s; she met W. B. Yeats when the family lived at Steyning next to the poet’s last mistress, Edith Heald; and when her father, Rowley Marriott, was sent by MI5 to Northern Command in Leeds and the family evacuated to a remote farm cottage, she remembered driving a tank on Lindley Moor with soldiers from the regiment at Farnley Hall. Downe House was an educational milestone, with the influence of Olive Willis providing anchor, resilience and a sense of aspiration, and helping to secure her place at LMH to read Modern Languages (French and Russian) in 1946. Undergraduate life after the war burst with colour and connections. Tutorial appointments seem noticeably sparse in her diaries, otherwise teeming with names and social engagements. Life now alternated between Oxford and Cotesbach, Leicestershire, where the Marriotts had moved back to their roots: hunting, cousins and aunts now entered the mix. Jane made lifelong friends. Two of them, Pam Blackmore (Maxwell Fyfe 1946 PPE) and Biddy Wells (Haydon 1946 History), in recent conversation, both remember her vivaciousness, illegal alcohol smuggled in for Biddy’s 21st, her peers Jamie (Jennifer Robinson, née Ramage, 1946 Modern Languages) and Jo (Joanna Langlais, née Money-Coutts, 1946 PPE), their boyfriends, and others who mingled on the fringes of the ETC and OUDS in non-speaking roles, with eccentrics, thespians and musicians who later became household names: Sandy Wilson, Ken Tynan, Donald Swann. It provided a cultural panorama, and stories for life. Resisting parental expectations of finding a suitor, she became sub-editor to the fashion editor of Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal intending to pursue a career in fashion journalism. The parlour maid episode demonstrates things didn’t exactly go according to plan! Following her marriage to Bill de Falbe and their move to Thundridge, Hertfordshire, in 1961, Jane adapted to the complexities of family life, educating her children in subjects she loved – reading, music, riding, gardening – while maintaining her friendships and cultural pursuits. She took a PGCE as a mature student in the 1970s and taught French privately and in state schools. She went travelling to exotic places: Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Archangel, China, Iran, fascinated by connections, by change, and by people. Family associations with the Australiana at home became a bridge to historical research, a reason to journey to Australia with Bill and, after he took early retirement due to a war wound and they moved to Somerset, the opportunity to work on family papers. Her book My Dear Miss Macarthur (1988) is based on memoirs of Emmeline de Falbe (1828–1911), née Macarthur, granddaughter of Philip Gidley King, and Bill’s grandmother. Emmie’s first husband George Leslie and his brothers’ settlement of the Darling Downs is a cornerstone of Queensland history, and their story became her own, shedding barriers of time as she became involved with these people through her research. As Alan Atkinson (University of Sydney) describes: ‘There is a wonderful balance of liveliness and rigour, humankindness and detachment. I like the unapologetic way she deals with the vital small detail of people’s lives. That shows real delicacy and skill. What mattered to them mattered to her, which makes her a true historian’.
Returning to Cotesbach in 2008 she adapted to family and community in true party spirit, yet continued her historic and personal quest, ever the intrepid traveller, to St Helena, aged 88, leaving everyone nail-biting to see her safe return. Fresh clues would surface daily, like Thomas White’s book Guests of the Unspeakable left nonchalantly at the top of a pile eliciting a question, and her reply: ‘Oh, someone I did a job for once.’ She played her pieces confidently as she would in her notorious game of Scrabble, waiting patiently for others to play theirs, for all would fit together in the end.
She had an eye for beauty and a nerve of steel, never took things for granted, and displayed courage and determination to her last breath of rose-scented June air.

I have just been alerted to a very good and thoughtful piece about what types of art we might expect to emerge from this period of compulsory, but not necessarily deprived, confinement, written, I’m pleased to note, by Maya Binkin with whom I worked at the Royal Academy and Blain|Southern and who helped me launch my blog on the world.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/feature/great-art-emerged-from-traumas-of-the-past?__twitter_impression=true