Another thing I like about the Charleston Festival is the presence of the old and the wise. In the front row of the stalls at the first event was Jeremy Hutchinson (age 99), the emeritus Professor of Law at the Royal Academy, whose mother Mary was Clive Bell’s mistress. A few rows back was Olivier Bell (age 97), who served in the Control Commission in the second world war and has just been awarded an MBE. One of the best of the speakers was Asa Briggs (age 93) talking about his third volume of autobiography, still pretty alert, a codebreaker in Bletchley and second Vice Chancellor of Sussex University. When it came to questions, someone asked a tough one about the long delay in the publication of the Chilcot Inquiry. Asa Briggs said, ‘Thank you, Phyllis’. The questioner was P.D. James (age 94).
Charleston Festival (1)
Each year we go to the Charleston Festival in Sussex and have done every year (I think) since 1993 when I became a Trustee. I love it: the windy tent, the excessively knowledgeable audience, lounging about in the sun over lunch, and the magnificent unpredictability of the subjects discussed. The pleasure is not just what happens and is said in the tent, but the beauty of the setting: the garden looking brilliantly lush:
Tom Stuart-Smith (1)
It being nearly summer, people are sitting out having lunch in the Keeper’s House garden at the RA. It was designed (at spectacularly short notice) by Tom Stuart-Smith. He has just had an exhibition of his drawings at the gallery at the back of Alan Baxter’s offices in Cowcross Street. Not only does he conceptualise all his projects through drawings, but he requires all his staff to do so as well. He won the contract through a beautifully presented drawing done not by him, but by a member of his staff. It’s a skill which may have lost currency in art teaching, but remains a pleasure to behold:
Liane Lang
This morning I went to a talk by Liane Lang, a German-born artist who studied at the Royal Academy Schools and whose work I very much admire for the way that it combines history, fiction and installation. Her most recent project is based on the Casa Guidi, the Brownings’ house just south of the Palazzo Pitti in Florence and re-imagines Elizabeth Barrett Browning in situ as a doll. I found it slightly spooky because years ago, when I was fourteen, I stayed in the house which the Brownings lived in in Asolo. When I was coming down to dinner one evening as a suggestible teenager, I saw an elderly lady come out of the upstairs drawing room and cross the landing to the bedroom next door. I’ve always assumed that the lady was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Green Park
When it’s sunny, as it is this morning and was yesterday, I take a short detour on my morning walk in order to walk up the side of Green Park. I like the views of the grand mansions which back on to the park, shut up tight after the entertainment of the night before. It starts with Lancaster House, built for the Duke of York in 1825 by Benjamin Dean Wyatt with an interior by Charles Barry and now used by the Foreign Office.
Immediately to the north is Bridgewater House by Barry, where parts of the Orleans collection were hung and could be visited by artists on the recommendation of an RA:
There’s a curious building just south of Bridgewater House which looks as if it’s stranded on the beachfront at Brighton:
The facade of Spencer House is hard to see, protected as it is by shrubbery. But at least one can see bits of John Vardy’s detailing and remember that for much of the postwar period it was converted into offices for the Economist:
Catherine Goodman (9)
I’ve sneaked an extra hour at lunchtime to attend another sitting as time is running out. Catherine said I look completely different, probably because I am in work mode, half way through a difficult day. Hannah Rothschild, who is a fellow sitter, part of the invisible community which flits in and out of Rossetti Studios, aware of one another but never meeting, has asked me why I say ‘I am sitting to Catherine Goodman’ not ‘I am sitting for Catherine Goodman’. The former feels correct. I am sitting to her, as an honour, not performing a service for her, as a task.
The Golden Child
Some time before Christmas, I was approached out of the blue by an editor at Harper Collins and asked if I would consider writing an introduction to a new paperback edition of Penelope Fitzgerald’s first novel, The Golden Child. I accepted because I am a great admirer of The Blue Flower and my interest was piqued. It’s a novel about the internal workings of the British Museum. My text was more severely edited than anything I have ever written and a passage was deleted at the request of the company lawyers. Now, only a few months later, the edition has appeared.
Docklands Light Railway
It’s a long time since I used to use the Docklands Light Railway, travelling in to work on two toy trains from Westferry to Bank, scrunching as it turned the corners on the track. I remember how at a dinner party in the mid-1980s a junior official at the Treasury told me that she had tried to cancel it as a public project on the grounds that there was no possibility of it being of discernible use. Now it extends all the way south of the river, weaving its way through Canary Wharf and past the new huge station designed by Norman Foster for Crossrail. I have been able to travel from Bank to Cutty Sark, past what used to be the wastelands of the Isle of Dogs and the Mudchute, and up Crooms Hill through the rain to the Manor House overlooking London.
Michael Craig-Martin
I’ve been told that my choice of works for the Director’s Cut on the Public Catalogue Foundation is too historical and doesn’t sufficiently convey the character of the contemporary Royal Academy. So, I’m going to add Michael Craig-Martin’s self-portrait, which he gave as his diploma work in December 2007. I like the fact that it’s a self-portrait. I remember one of the RA’s saying how delighted he was that portraits had been eradicated from the Summer Exhibition, so Craig-Martin is characteristically going against the trend. I admire his intellectual rigour and independence of mind, so this is an unashamed tribute:
Photo: R.A./John Hammond © The Artist
Ja-Kyung Shin
We spent much of the day – this year as in other years – at Collect, the Crafts Council’s annual exhibition, now at the Saatchi Gallery. It has the great benefit of being increasingly international with galleries from Amsterdam, Frankfurt and Korea. As last year, we particularly admired a set of teaspoons designed and made by a young Korean silversmith called Ja-kyung Shin in which the bowl of the spoon is replaced by crumpled silver:
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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