I was told that if I only went to one museum in Madrid, I should go to the Museo Geominero, Spain’s geological museum, founded as a result of its Comisión para formar la carta geológica de Madrid y la general del Reino.

It preserves in a very pure form the idea of a museum as an instrument of scientific classification and knowledge:-

I went to see Edmund de Waal’s exhibition Breath at Ivorypress. At the heart of the project is a single book, which is a homage to Paul Célan.

It starts with a complete case:-

This converts into a reading desk:-

Then the book itself is bound in vellum (Shepherds):-

The text done by Book Works, uses different papers, first Japanese, then English, then German (the poems are printed on German paper overlaid by Japanese):-

It’s a big, complex, and very beautiful collaborative project involving poetry, print, bookmaking, typography, binding and craft:-

Next door are works inspired by Zurbarán and Lorca. One piece in marble, porcelain and aluminium:-

It was a pleasure to be back in Factum Arte, whose Foundation has put in the bid jointly with the United Kingdom Historic Building Preservation Trust (UKHBPT) to run the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. The place was humming – evidence, if evidence is required, that it is perfectly possible to run an efficient and profitable foundry and art workshop (it happens that two other foundries have also put in bids to run Whitechapel, so the idea that it cannot be retained as a foundry is absurd):-

I visited Factum Arte in an eastern suburb of Madrid in order to see Factum Fetishes, an exhibition of fine photographs by Mariana Cook. They are based on the objects and tools she encountered in the Factum workshops – a painter’s vest, a plastic bucket, a rubber glove – all rendered with the surreal precision which is now possible with the highest standards of digital printing on a dense aquatint base, such that the artefacts float free in pictorial space:-

I went to a forum at ARCO in Madrid about the topic of ‘Art Museums in the Public Realm’. It began with Dani Levinas, the chairman of the Phillips Collection, founded in 1921, a private museum surrounded by the state museums of the Smithsonian; then Marcela Guerrero of the Whitney, which I don’t really think of as a private museum, except in so far as it doesn’t receive any public funding, so technically is; Jeremy Strick, the Director of the Nasher Museum; and Margaret Conrads, the Curatorial Director of Crystal Bridges. What became clear is that private museums which may begin out of the private passions in individual collectors, like Patsy and Ray Nasher, quickly develop ambitious public responsibilities, as at Crystal Bridges, which has very ambitious programmes of showing work by women artists (up to 40% of the collection) and native Americans.

I don’t know why I have never previously noticed the plaque to William Blake on the west side of South Molton Street, half way down at no.17, where Blake lived when he returned from Felpham in 1803 until 1821 – the bulk of his adult life, occupying a set of rooms on the first floor, above a man who sold whalebone corsets, writing poetry in the middle of the night:-

I called in on Pilar Ordovas’s very nice small exhibition, based round a single great Freud of his daughter, Rose Boyt, painted when she was eighteen and doing a foundation degree at Central. The picture is called Rose rather than The Artist’s Daughter, as he wanted to avoid any suggestion of incest:-

It’s supplemented by a single formal photograph of him she took for an exhibition of his at Anthony d’Offay’s gallery in Dering Street:-

Much more rewarding are the casual and informal photographs of him and his other model at the time, Raymond Jones, which show him younger, more informal and more playful than he was later:-

I have often been stuck in a traffic jam on Shaftesbury Avenue and admired the 1930s murals on the side of what was once the Saville Theatre, opened on 8 October 1932, and is now the Odeon Cinema, Covent Garden. The murals are by Gilbert Bayes, a student of George Frampton, apparently known for a ceramic frieze which he did for Royal Doulton and is now in the V&A.

It shows drama through the ages:-

Daffodils in Stepney Green:-

Croci in the churchyard:-

Blossom in Victoria Park:-

And a weeping willow on the canal:-

I have seldom seen it so misty as it was down by the river this morning – the buildings of Canary Wharf and its surroundings swathed in cloud and tug boats, a police launch and the ferry in the distance:-

Closer to Canary Wharf, the mist began to clear revealing the full extent of new building:-