I looked in yesterday at Alan Cristea’s gallery at the far end of Cork Street to see the work of Jane Dixon, which has been included in an exhibition of the work of five artists, all of whom work in the area of detailed observational drawing, including the work of Emma Stibbon, who has recently been made an RA. I strongly recommend the exhibition because it represents a form of traditional art practice being taken seriously and shown in a major art gallery, which I more normally associate with the work of Gillian Ayres and Howard Hodgkin.
Glenthorne (1)
We spent the weekend staying at Glenthorne, one the most romantic houses in England. One approaches it by turning off the top road which runs across Exmoor and then making a steep and twisting descent down a rough track, through woodland, past a small gothic lodge and through gates until the drive opens up to a view across the Bristol Channel towards Wales:
The house itself is late Georgian gothic, built for a squarson, Walter Halliday, and with the atmosphere of Thomas Love Peacock:
Hughie O’Donoghue
I was asked to the opening of a set of three paintings in the Chapter House of Westminster Abbey entitled The Measure of all Things. I had heard that he had done a set of paintings commemorating the first world war for Eton College. These may belong to the same genre, thoughtful and reflective meditations on death, realist, but not over so, and made poignant by his family’s own experience of war. I couldn’t quite work out the technique, which is nearly photographic:
Hauser and Wirth in Somerset
We were invited to the opening of the new Hauser and Wirth gallery in Somerset. I mistakenly thought that the opening was at lunchtime, so we were nearly the first people there. It’s a fascinating phenomenon of an ultra sophisticated, international, avant garde art gallery opening on the outskirts of Bruton. Its galleries are now in London, New York, soon to be in Los Angeles, and Bruton. It’s been very beautifully done, with an old medieval house converted by the Argentinian architect Luis Laplace as a guest house for artists:
New Art Centre
Because we were travelling down to the west country, we thought we would call in at the New Art Centre, a private house east of Salisbury which shows contemporary sculpture in the garden. I thought that they had an exhibition of the work of Richard Deacon and Bill Woodrow. It turned out that they were just opening a new exhibition of a single work by Bridget Riley installed in a single gallery like a private chapel and sculpture by Toby Ziegler. So, instead of just wandering around, the only people there, there were two coach loads from London, a speech by Andrea Rose, and lunch. We saw a horse by the President in the kitchen garden:
A figure by Antony Gormley lost in the wood:
Matisse: The Cut-Outs
We went on a Friday evening trip to Tate Modern to see Henri Matisse:The Cut-Outs, a nice scale of exhibition, some of it deeply familiar, but not all, demonstrating Matisse’s discovery of, and pleasure in, the very simple medium of coloured paper cut out with scissors and then sometimes twirled about to make a pattern and often stuck on a wall: partly decorative, but done with extreme deliberation, as was evident from the two clips of original film, which showed him as an old man working with purposeful deliberation as he snipped away and ordered exactly how the pieces were to be placed on the wall. I liked the early experimental work which went into the book Jazz, when the medium was new to him, and the beautiful book covers which he did for a volume of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s photographs, The Decisive Moment, published in 1952, and for the original edition of Alfred Barr’s Matisse: His Art and His Public, first published in 1951.
James Bradburne
One of my greatest pleasures in recent years has been chairing the Advisory Board of the Palazzo Strozzi. I was asked to do so by James Bradburne, a highly intelligent and entrepreneurial Canadian, who was trained as an architect and ran the Museum für Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt. Known for his floral waistcoats, he ran the newly established independent institution with great chutzpah, organising a whole series of memorable exhibitions, including a wonderful exhibition on Bronzino in 2010, a recent exhibition on Renaissance sculpture which travelled to the Louvre and a current exhibition on Pontormo. Now, according to the Art Newspaper, he faces the chop. What has he done wrong ? Was he too independent minded ? Or insufficiently ingratiating with his board ? If asked by Saxton Bampfylde, the headhunters who have been employed to find a successor, who should be the next Director, I will recommend Bradburne.
Mary Beard and Grayson Perry
We have just had an event in which Grayson Perry talked to Mary Beard (or was it vice versa?) about her latest book, based on her Sather lectures, on Laughter in Ancient Rome. What struck me most forcibly is what a difficult subject it is to talk about academically, whether in the present or in ancient Rome. If treated analytically, then there is a risk of it seeming humourless, but if discussed with levity, then it doesn’t succeed in being a proper academic study. They brilliantly circumvented this problem with a mixture of good humour, anecdote, information, and jokes from the ancient world.
Queen Alexandra
Every morning I walk past a grand and ostentatious statue in Marlborough Gate, which I have always studiously ignored. I was quite wrong. Looked at more closely, it turns out that it is a late work by Alfred Gilbert, the sculptor of Eros, former student of the Royal Academy Schools and of the École des Beaux Arts in Paris, who was forced to resign from the Academy in 1908 else be expelled (he took money for commissions which never materialised). The monument is wonderful, a grand work of late flowering art nouveau, with cobwebbed figures of Faith, Hope and Love, commemorating Queen Alexandra, the Danish wife of Edward VII. She had pleaded Gilbert’s cause with the King, sent him funds in exile and caused him to be reinstated as an RA. It’s not surprising that the monument is full of feeling:
Queen Anne’s Gate
It being a warm summer’s evening, I walked back to the tube across St. James’s Park. Queen Anne’s Gate, originally known as Queen’s Square, the haunt of wealthy politicians and the best preserved group of early eighteenth-century town houses in London, looked magnificent with its grand, ornamented door hoods and replica statue of Queen Anne:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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