The film of the exhibition:-
Norton Folgate (4)
I have booked myself in for a tour of the newly developed Norton Folgate, an area which has historically been highly contentious. Meanwhile, I walked past it this afternoon and was interested by how it tries to manage the relationship between new build and the surviving historic warehouses:-
Warburg Institute (7)
Of the many articles about the re-opening of the Warburg Institute, I have found the one by Matthew Bowman in the Art Review (see below) the most helpful as to why there is such a revival of Warburg’s ideas at the moment.
What Bowman helpfully makes clear is that the two most obvious disciples of Warburg, Panofsky and Gombrich, actually very much skewed the way he was interpreted in the post-war period: Panofsky because he treated iconography (or as he called it ‘iconology’), as in some way a science, as if the transmission of images could be tracked, whereas Warburg’s Mnemosyne Atlas was much less precise in the way it traced influence; and Gombrich was always felt to be ambivalent, if not hostile, to Warburg’s belief in the subterranean, if not subversive, aspects of Renaissance thought.
Gombrich is viewed as a disciple of Warburg, but he only arrived in London in January 1936, so learned about Warburg’s ideas from Gertrud Bing and Ernst Kris.
Anyway, it’s good that Warburg’s ideas and his Institute are now, as of today, more centre stage.
https://artreview.com/its-art-historian-aby-warburgs-world-were-just-living-in-it/
Henry VIII Gatehouse
I stopped off on my way home from Goldsmith’s Hall to examine the Henry VIII Gatehouse to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. The Board of Governors commissioned it in March 1702 from Edward Strong, one of the family of masons responsible for the construction of St. Paul’s. It’s assumed that he provided the design as well, since the minute book documents that it was to be built ‘according to the model drawn by the said Edward Strong’. The contract was for £550. £1493 had been spent by Michaelmas 1702 and a further £1320 thereafter. Plus ça change.
George and Vulture
I knew about Simpson’s Tavern, now sadly all shuttered up, but not the George and Vulture, an astonishingly well-preserved and authentically Dickensian pub – well, it features in Pickwick Papers – so buried in the heart of the city that I had never seen it or been before. It is even open on a Saturday lunchtime although there were not many takers. I felt I should have known about it. I strongly recommend a visit before it too is shuttered up and scheduled for modernisation:-
The City (4)
In the intervals of attending Goldsmith’s Fair, I like poking about the City or what’s left of it after every vacant block has been redeveloped.
A surviving piece of woodwork from St. Anne and St. Agnes, rebuilt by Wren in 1680:-
Lothbury:-
Tokenhouse Yard:-
Throgmorton Street:-
The Bank of England:-
Birchin Lane (I think):-
Lombard Street:-
St. Mary Woolnoth:-
St. Anne’s, Limehouse (8)
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:-
Warburg Institute (6)
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.
Warburg Institute (5)
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:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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