I went back to the V&A to the leaving party of Katrina Royall who I recruited as Course Adminstrator to the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design in July 1987 and has remained a pillar of the Course ever since, looking after the needs of students, not just intellectual, but also social and organisational, and particularly the annual study trips. I remember Clive Wainwright, the V&A’s great furniture historian, telling me about a theory of organisations that they are dependent on people who are gatekeepers. Katrina was a gatekeeper.
New European Galleries
I missed the opening of the new European Galleries at the V&A eatlier this week, so took the opportunity of a visit to South Kensington to see them. They have been designed by ZMMA, who were responsible for the redesign of the Watts Gallery. I liked the range of objects on display, including a lot of fabrics and also the very faint austerity of the display which offsets the luxe of the objects themselves. The galleries always felt darkly subterranean, but not any more. And it’s particularly nice to see clothes in what were the Jones Galleries as they give a human dimension to the furniture.
This is a very beautiful Spanish sculpture c.1720:-
I liked this Goan ivory:-
Winterreise
I wasn’t expecting to enjoy a modernised version of Winterreise as I like my Schubert uncontaminated. So, I approached the performance of Hans Zender’s 1993 version of the original in St. Leonard’s, Shoreditch with trepidation. I was quite wrong. It was an astonishing, electrified, theatrical version of the original, as performed by the Aurora Orchestra, which made it more vivid, including making one pay more attention to the language, but also amplified it. Both shocking and intense, not least in the way it used the decayed interiors of George Dance’s church:-
Eating with the Eyes
I have just been to the launch of a book by Harry Pearce whose title Eating with the Eyes is based on a Japanese epigram ‘Me de taberu’. The book, which consists essentially just of photographs, combined with very brief typographic reflections on the location of the image and its associations, is based on a Japanese belief that ordinary everyday objects – their colour, their texture and their degradation – are worthy of intense visual attention. So, the photographs are of nothing obvious – backstreets, forgotten images, lost objects. I love and admire it as a book and strongly recommend it.
Portcullis House
I am doing a post rather belatedly of my visit on Friday to Portcullis House. I was there to see Adam Dant’s Election Special in which he trailed the politicians and recorded not so much them as their public in a large graphic collage based on Leeds Town Hall. But I was also taken upstairs to see the run of recent political portraits, including Tony Benn by Andrew Tift which I had seen before, Margaret Beckett in egg tempera by Antony Williams, and, most impressively, Michael Foot as a snowy white magus by Robert Lenkiewicz, the eccentric painter of Plymouth.
Sainsbury Centre
I love the Sainsbury Centre for its strange mixture of the pre-Columbian and the contemporary such that you never quite know what will be in the next case. It had begun to look a bit shabby, but has been completely renovated, everything except the original system of display lighting.
A memorial head from the Celebes:-
A pot by Rupert Spira:-
Newfoundland (2)
We went back in the calm of Sunday morning without visitors to see the exhibition and try to take better photographs (but I should point out that one of the pleasures of the exhibition is Verdi Yahooda’s silver gelatin prints).
Some photographs came out. Do they convey the quality of the work ? Probably not:-
Morley St. Peter
Andrew Sayers
I have wanted to write about Andrew Sayers for some time, ever since his premature death aged 58 in October. He was the Director of the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra from 1998 to 2010, built it up as an institution, and was responsible for overseeing their immensely impressive new building. He was from Yorkshire, worked for a long time at the National Gallery of Australia, was a scholar of Australian art, and made the Australian National Portrait Gallery into an institution at the heart of Australian life (Australians have a different relationship to portraits). He left Canberra for Melbourne after a brief and probably unsatisfactory period as Director of the Museum of Australia and devoted himself to painting which he did with total single mindedness. I last saw him for lunch at Heide. After being diagnosed with cancer, he travelled through Europe visiting the greatest works of art for the last time. Today there is a memorial event in the NPG in Canberra. I wish I could be there to honour him.
Norwich Roller Skating Rink
We were taken to admire the old roller skating rink in Norwich with its magnificent Russian pine ceiling. It was opened on 19th. September 1876 at a cost of over £9,000 with music provided by an automatic piano and closed the following year when it was turned into a Vaudeville Theatre. This didn’t last either and in 1880 it was turned into a store for tinned meat:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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