I realised that Eva Rothschild’s exhibition at Modern Art in Vyner Street was about to close, so arranged to see it.   The gallery is at the far end of Vyner Street, as reticent and indistinguishable as it’s possible to be, but with beautiful top-lit space inside:-

The first work on entry is a textile piece made at West Dean:-

Downstairs, I admired the big punch bag, nearly, but not quite touching the floor:-

And upstairs a work made of cast styrofoam, playing on the ambiguity of different types of material and colour and the way styrofoam fragments into craters:-

I have got into trouble with everyone who has so far seen the film The Private Life of the Royal Academy for not knowing the history of the so-called ‘Red Collars’ who run the security of the institution and for saying that I thought that they were based on the eighteenth or nineteenth-century uniform of the domestic servants at Buckingham Palace.   I seem to have been wrong on most counts.   The RA has employed porters from the beginning, who doubled as models in the Life School.   John Russell did a beautiful pastel of one of them, thought to be John Withers, which was exhibited in the Summer Exhibition in 1792 (and will be exhibited again in our exhibition The Great Spectacle which opens in June).   Meanwhile, Paul Sandby, the watercolour painter, is depicted in Zoffany’s portrait of the Academicians wearing what is called ‘The Windsor Uniform’, which was introduced by George III and consisted of a blue jacket with red facings.   Apparently, the Porters of the RA first wore a version of ‘The Windsor Uniform’ at Reynolds’s funeral, which was held in St. Paul’s Cathedral on Saturday 3 March 1792 (I owe this usefully recondite information to a chance conversation with Mark Pomeroy, our archivist, at the London Original Print Fair). 

I am very much hampered in writing about  our building project in Burlington Gardens, owing to the blanket ban on the posting of any photographs in order to maximise the impact of the public opening which is on Saturday 19th. May.   But having been round two and a half times today, it’s getting on.   Sydney Smirke’s vaulted undercroft under the main floor galleries is particularly amazing with a cast of the Farnese Hercules installed where the goods lift used to be.   Architectural casts are being hung in the Dorfman Architecture Court outside the lecture theatre.   And the Thornhill copies of Raphael’s Cartoons are being touched up before three of them are hung in the Collections Gallery.   Oh, and the Laocoön has appeared, too.

I was struck by the stillness of the water on the canal this morning and took a photograph from under one of the bridges, but instead of the water it shows the reflection of a 1970s block of flats, an odd optical illusion:-

I have been reading Martin Gayford’s admirable and extremely readable Modernists & Mavericks: Bacon, Freud, Hockney & the London Painters which has taught me a great deal about the London art world in the 1950s and 1960s, which I didn’t know. Not least, it has made me understand the milieu in which Gillian Ayres was trained, as depicted in a photograph of her sitting in a Camberwell pub surrounded by earnest (and possibly admiring) young men:-

And later in her studio in Chiswick Mall:-

I like the description of Carnaby Street by the Menswear Association as ‘codswallop fashion of perverted peacocks’ and Francis Bacon’s quotation of Paul Valéry that ‘modern artists want the grin without the cat’. It gives as a whole a sense of the interrelatedness of the London art world, its smallness, and how some of the great figures, including Freud and Hodgkin, took so long to be recognised.

A week ago, we were invited to lunch by some people who were going the next day to Hong Kong. They offered us a bouquet of flowers which they were not going to be able to enjoy of such extraordinary magnificence that I wish to preserve its memory:-

Although I’ve never actually succeeded in logging on to the Times account, there is a good and clear account of the fundraising involved in our great building project in this morning’s Saturday Review by Richard Morrison, the Times music critic and a veteran of arts reporting (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/raising-the-curtain-on-the-new-royal-academy-hhglf77f7). It makes clear that we are still a bit short on the final amount we need to pay for the building. As of yesterday, we had raised £2,658,159 of the £3 million public appeal. 89%. It’s not too late to give on https://makeyourmark.royalacademy.org.uk

In answer to the question as to who were Cotton, Ballard and Blow, who designed Grosvenor House on Bennets Hill in central Birmingham, the answer seems to be that they were a firm of successful speculative architects, originally based in Birmingham, where Jack Cotton, one of the partners, was a well known property developer, without architectural training, who was said (by the Spectator in 1959) ‘to have done much building in Birmingham, little if any of which is said to have improved the look of that city’. They also worked in London where they were ‘responsible for much of the unimaginative and uncoordinated building in the new Notting Hill Gate’, as well as a scheme for developing the north side of Piccadilly. A member of the firm, Major ‘Trof’ Trofimov, the son of the Professor of Russian at Manchester, worked for them before taking over their practice in Newcastle. It sounds like they were prime suspects in the murky world of 1950s property development, but, like Seifert, were capable of producing occasionally interesting – as well as frequently appalling – buildings.

I had dinner last night in an amazing piece of Birmingham constructivism, not Festival of Britain, but Czech cubist.   It might have been lifted straight from Prague.   It was a speculative office development, designed by Cotton, Ballard and Blow (Cotton was a property developer), dated 1953, and originally occupied by Shell-Mex BP:-

Strange how the wetness of the day brings out the character of the Burlington House façade.   Or is it just that I’ve become more alert to it, having lectured on it at the Barber Institute last night ?   Pennethorne was sufficiently impressed by it to have partially modelled his Burlington Gardens façade on it, after parliament had torpedoed his horrid gothic design (it was already three foot above ground before being vetoed):-