I’m not sure that I want to say where we had lunch because it feels like an invasion of privacy: only to say that it’s very nice to be able to visit an unrestored Tudor house, one room deep, with exemplary brick pilasters and remote from the twentieth century apart from the distant noise of the dual carriageway:-
I love the campus at UEA with Denys Lasdun’s strange space age ziggurats rising out of the parkland and Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre still astonishingly modern in the way that it combines large-scale, semi-industrial space with the intimacy of examining small-scale objects from different visual cultures arranged informally in vitrines across the floor plane:-
We went on a quick day trip to the Sainsbury Centre to see the exhibition Francis Bacon and the Masters: a wonderful exhibition not just because it helps to demonstrate Bacon’s astonishing visual eclecticism. It’s a completely convincing demonstration of the way his imagination fed on imagery of past art, not only Velázquez, but Titian and Van Gogh and Soutine and Hellenistic sculpture, never copying, but always adapting pose and composition. It’s also a wonderful exhibition for the wealth and range of work lent by the Hermitage, which Bacon never actually visited, but which is able to supply examples of every sort of art that Bacon might have devoured.
We went to the exhibition Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery last night. I hadn’t realised how key to a knowledge of Impressionism in London was the comprehensive exhibition held by Paul Durand-Ruel and Sons in the Grafton Galleries in 1905, when Roger Fry became an advisor; nor how large and spacious the Grafton Galleries were, with top-lit exhibition galleries as grand as the galleries at the Royal Academy. Originally in Grafton Street, it is said to have moved to Bond Street, although there is a picture of its grand premises, described as being in Bond Street, in Building News on 6 May 1892 and it is still listed as being in Grafton Street in 1899. It held miscellaneous exhibitions, including Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910.
We went to COLLECT at the Saatchi Gallery, as we do every year. I have spent the week puzzling about where the boundary lies between the Crafts and Luxury Goods. It’s true the demarcation lines are being blurred as the Crafts go upmarket, are more expensive, are used for purposes of display, and lose the puritan and utilitarian tradition. It’s probably because there are high charges to exhibit, but I miss a gallery like Cold Press in Holt, which would introduce a touch of desirable austerity. We liked the work of a Japanese jeweller called Kimiaki Kageyama, represented by SO Gallery in Brick Lane:-
I have realised that, without exception, my analysis of the likely result was wrong. But I am intrigued that in the sweepstake that I took part in a fortnight ago everyone else was right. Did they know something I didn’t ? I assume it was that, based on the 1992 election, they knew to ignore the polls; that people will wilfully mislead the pollsters; and that when deciding whether to vote with their heart or their wallet, they will always vote with their wallet.
I was asked by a friend where he could best see, and possibly buy, Old Master drawings. I thought the best place would be Colnaghi’s, one of the oldest established dealers. I hadn’t realised that it goes back to 1760, when Giovanni Battista Torre opened a shop in Paris which sold books and prints alongside barometers and fireworks. His son Anthony opened a print shop in London in 1767, just before the Royal Academy was founded. It was acquired by Paul Colnaghi in 1788. Originally based at 132, Pall Mall (in the eighteenth century the art trade was based round Waterloo Place and only moved north of Piccadilly when the RA opened in 1868), Colnaghi moved to Cockspur Street in 1799, where he held three o’clock levées for the world of fashion. In 1911, the firm moved to 144/6 New Bond Street when Otto Gutekunst was making a fortune, working with Berenson in supplying paintings to the great American collectors. They are still in Bond Street, but now upstairs.
I walked to the polling station without any clear sense of what the outcome of the day might be. If my guess in the sweepstake of 282 votes for Cameron is remotely correct, then it looks as if it will be hard, if not impossible, for him to form a government. But, equally, government by a party which doesn’t get a majority of the vote and relies on a coalition with the Scottish Nationalists looks and feels impractical in the long term. I voted for the party which believes in, and will campaign for, staying in Europe; the party which will be crucial to making any coalition government work; and the party which still has vestiges of nineteenth-century liberalism at its core.
I’ve just been to the launch of London Craft Week, an initiative on the part of Guy Salter to raise consciousness of the crafts (or is it Craft ?), alongside COLLECT held annually at the Saatchi Gallery. It’s about London Craft, not British Crafts, and the aim is to acknowledge the relationship between traditional craft practice, based on specialist skills in making, and the increasingly competitive world of luxury goods, in which high prices are justified by the use of the highest quality materials and expensive manual skills: as much about cordwaining and perfumery as weaving and pottery. But there is an obvious paradox at its heart, which is that traditionally the crafts have been anti-materialistic (back to William Morris) whereas luxury goods are necessarily and deeply materialistic.
I was walking past the Garrick Club last week and stopped to admire the grandeur of its façade, now that it is no longer covered in soot and grime. It was no wonder that I could not identify its architect, a man named Frederick Marrable, a pupil of Blore. He was architect of the Metropolitan Board of Works, responsible for settling claims, laying out Burdett Road and the design of Holborn Viaduct. The Garrick is a more than halfway decent piece of Clubland classicism, with its high entrance, its dining room remote from the street and surprisingly good stone detailing:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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