I have just been to a talk by Jeff Koons, who is over for the opening of an exhibition at the Almine Rech gallery.   What I most enjoyed was the discussion afterwards in which he revealed a detailed knowledge of, and interest in, the work of mannerists in the collection of the Hermitage, including the work of Pontormo, at which point many of the characteristics of his work – its extreme attention to finish and its sometimes sentimental appeal to the emotions – slipped into place.   He’s a late modern mannerist.

I was walking across Hungerford bridge – the new one designed by Lifschutz Davidson – and looked out towards the west and saw, not the pinnacles and towers of the Palace of Westminster, but a wilder and more unexpected roofscape of the new Vauxhall, dominating the skyline with a chimera of international wealth.   I find it odd to remember that it was Ken Livingstone, not Boris, who dreamed that his native city could become Dubai-on-Thames.   Now that his dream is being realised, does he – should we – congratulate him on the viagra of redevelopment ?

I don’t often have a chance to explore the City Churches, but was passing St. Vedast, Foster Lane en route to buy a sandwich.  It was originally built by Wren in the 1670s, with payments amounting to £1,853 15s 6d between July 1670 and October 1673.   The steeple was added during the 1690s, designed by Wren, but a revised draft by Edward Wilcox, a carpenter, was subsequently approved by the parish.   Bombed in the war, it was rebuilt by Stephen Dykes-Bower, with John Betjeman listed as a church warden:-

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I have been reading Minoo Dinshaw’s long, magnificently scholarly and perceptive biography of Steven Runciman.   Dinshaw is very good at exploring the ambiguities of Runciman’s personality:  on the one hand, the child of a family of wealthy, lowland Scots with puritanical instincts (guests at Elshieshields were always advised to bring their own drink);  and, on the other hand, someone with a great taste for louche company and subversive gossip.   Occasionally, as with his subject, there is slightly too much information about obscurer members of the Almanac de Gotha (Runciman called his chickens after members of the French aristocracy), but the rich information pays off in explaining who his friends were in 1930s Cambridge and what his contribution was to the study of the Bogomils.

I have been meditating on the full impact of the William Kentridge exhibition Thick Time at the Whitechapel:  a set of six installations consisting of film, music, history, animation, humour and memory, owing as much to a sense of thoughtfulness about the nature of history as to drawing and art.   Best of all is the first grand installation, The Refusal of Time, partly because of its length and epic scale and the relationship between the machine in the middle like a printing press, and the confidence of the changing imagery on the walls around, beginning with a metronome and ending with a people’s march:-

Both Marina Vaizey and Edward Chaney have reminded me of the writings of William Gaunt.   As a teenager, I remember reading his books about Victorian art, particularly The Aesthetic Adventure, which was a pioneering and extremely well written account of the aesthetic movement, and Victorian Olympus about Victorian classicism, both written at a time when Victorian art was still deeply unfashionable.   He was, as Marina has pointed out, representative of an era when studies of British art were written by men of letters, rather than academics.   Gaunt was the child of a chromolithographer, fought in the first world war, and then studied modern history at Oxford where he was a friend of Cyril Connolly and John Rothenstein.   He then went to the Ruskin and worked as a freelance artist.   Unlike Whitley, he doesn’t get an entry in DNB, presumably because he was an amateur.

I have been at a workshop held by the Paul Mellon Centre on the history of the Summer Exhibition.   What was clear is how important it has been to the history of British art:  a place for professionals and amateurs to show work from the first exhibition in April 1769 (and presumably to sell it, although the mechanism for sales in its early years is unclear);  also, the first place where architecture was exhibited, possibly in Europe, as an art form instead of a trade.   Landscape was exhibited as a genre from the beginning and the work of women artists, with up to 10% by 180o.   Only sculpture was relatively neglected, with no space for it to be displayed until Flaxman was elected as Professor of Sculpture in 1810 and the Model Academy was set aside for sculpture in 1811.

The move of the Academy to its new building next to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square in 1837 may have made it possible to show larger and more monumental paintings in juxtaposition with the Old Masters next door, as well as having a larger dedicated room for sculpture (I think on the ground floor behind the entrance staircase).    Continue reading →

I have always wanted to know more about William Whitley, a pioneer historian of British art, whose book Artists and their Friends in England 1700-1799 is often written off as antiquarian because it is so obviously based on primary sources, but not footnoted because he wanted to be cited, rather than the original from which he drew his information (there is apparently a footnoted copy of the book amongst his papers in the British Museum).   I have discovered that he trained as a painter, submitted works to the Royal Academy, and only later turned to writing about British art, publishing a biography of Gainsborough in 1915 and his series of books about British art in the late 1920s, when he was in his seventies.   He was awarded a pension, but died destitute in Farnborough.

Occasionally, I am an unabashed tourist as when tonight, after the private view of Antony Gormley’s new exhibition, where I was not allowed to take photographs, I walked across Tower Bridge and saw the whole city laid out in front of me, with every light blazing from the Shard to the Walkie Talkie:-

I have just been to the launch of James Stourton’s biography of Kenneth Clark.   I was told by someone who had read the published version (I only read an early draft) that his great achievement was to convert a view of Clark from being arrogant to being shy;  but the answer surely is that he was both – a classic Wykehamist, knowedgeable, intelligent, bookish and oddly diffident.