What they think of gentrification in Shoreditch:-

There is something wonderful, but also faintly surreal about seeing Hélène Binet’s austere, black-and-white photographs of St. Anne’s, Limehouse inside St. Anne’s, Limehouse itself.  They are now properly spotlit which makes a big difference to their presence and the sense of juxtaposition between church and photography:-

St. George’s, Bloomsbury looks like a fragment of Rome:-

St. Mary Woolnoth:-

And St. George-in-the-East:-

Glad to see that the repurposing/representation of the Warburg has made it suddenly more mainstream – as was intended by its redesign; but slightly odd to see it now regarded as a place for the study of the arcane.

When I first went as a postgraduate in 1977, someone had told me that it held the papers of Aleister Crowley, but in those days Warburg’s interest in magic, let alone Aleister Crowley’s, had been somewhat sidelined: it was more about language and text and the transmission of ideas.  Maybe it was something about the different floors.  It’s the ground floor stacks containing books relating to Bild (Image) which have expanded most.

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/sep/25/occult-worlds-weirdest-library-warburg-institute?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other

It was the press view for the new look Warburg Institute this morning, the renovation done by Haworth Tompkins with extreme sensitivity to what was required – opening it up, creating a new exhibition space, but retaining its original atmosphere.  I have written about it at greater length for the November issue of The Critic.

Meanwhile, I am posting a photograph of the Coade stone cast of the Nine Muses which was retrieved from the previous house on the site after it was bombed in the War, a good example of cultural memory, the central purpose of the Institute:-

I have just been sent a copy of Svetlana Alpers’s writings Is Art History ? beautifully produced by the Hunters Point Press. The book is due to be launched on Thursday at Rizzoli at 1133, Broadway. There was a time when I hoped to be there, but am at least pleased now to have the full range of her writings, including on museums:-

https://www.hunterspointpress.com/product/is-art-history-selected-writings-by-svetlana-alpers

I have been reading Sue Stuart-Smith’s very wonderful book, The Well-Gardened Mind, about the therapeutic value of gardens to all forms of disease, misanthropy and melancholia while sitting on the verandah of our back garden, gradually realising that I was myself living through the experience of one of the chapters of her book: the benefits of close observation of flowers, particularly in the fierce light after heavy rain, surrounded by a wealth of natural forms, which I have not necessarily have paid attention to in the past given my general botanical ignorance, but will obviously need to more closely in the future:-

I am taking the liberty of posting a photograph of Elizabeth Esteve-Coll as she was in 1982, not long before I first met her. It comes from the University of Surrey Archives (Photo credit: @UniOfSurrey Archives (US/PH/2/7/10 ©University of Surrey).

All the photographs of her when she was at the V&A show her, not surprisingly, looking vastly much more worn down and harassed:-

I have been interested by the comments on my post on Elizabeth Esteve-Coll which have inevitably made me think again about the issues surrounding her still highly controversial re-organisation of the V&A.

I notice that she is described on Wikipedia as a librarian and in retrospect I think she did bring some of her views as a librarian from the National Art Library to the wider collection of the V&A: that the core responsibility of the museum was not ‘scholarship’ in the abstract, but to look after and care for the collection, catalogue it digitally, and make it freely and widely available to the public. At the time, I remember the staff of the British Museum were very critical of this attitude, but in the light of what has happened at the British Museum more recently, this switch in resources to collections care was not only necessary but highly desirable.

She inspired fierce loyalty in a way which was non-hierarchical and indeed anti-hierarchical.

We have been having an Alison Wilding fest – or, more to the point, she has.

We first went to her exhibition at the Heong Gallery at Downing, the perfect space for her drawing and a small, highly select group of her smaller works:-

Then, the monograph on her drawings On Paper appeared, a very beautiful piece of book production with essays on her work.

And tonight the opening of her exhibition Testing the Objects of Affection at Alison Jacques:-

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/sep/17/sculptor-alison-wilding-testing-the-objects-of-affection