Last day of Week One tomorrow:-

The Critic has kindly posted my article on this year’s Stirling Prize well in advance of the announcement of the winners on Thursday 13th. October.

I wrote the article before the bookies had declared their odds-on favourite as Mae Architects’ Sands End Arts and Community Centre which I recognise as being attractive in a low-key, community oriented way, entirely worthy and estimable. But I don’t feel it has the considered and heavyweight seriousness of Niall McLaughlin’s new library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, which strikes me as an extraordinarily impressive achievement in inserting a new building into a very tricky site and doing it with such intelligence and integrity.

I will repeat two pleas.

The first is that the RIBA makes the judging process wilfully opaque. How come the regional winners are all knocked out in favour of a shortlist of which four of the six projects are in London ? Who chooses and on what criteria ? The judges were only announced in early September long after the shortlist had been drawn up.

The second is that the RIBA does nothing to encourage visiting the projects which is a good way of seeing new architecture. Could they not in future do an online map and visiting arrangements ? I can’t be the only person who enjoys seeing them.

https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/october-2022/stirling-work/

The other thing which Jill Nicholls’s film about Charles Jencks conveyed very clearly was his career switch in the mid-1990s, following the death of his second wife, Maggie Keswick and his own prostate cancer, when he stopped being so much of an architectural writer and critic, apparently a bit disillusioned by what had become of postmodernism (this was demonstrated by Michael Graves’s Swan Hotel for Disney World), and devoted himself instead, first, to the commissioning of the Maggie’s Centres, an astonishing achievement – there are now thirty three – and to the construction of grand earthworks, of which the first was at Portrack, their house in Dumfriesshire. I had not appreciated how many there are: there’s the one outside the Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh and another I haven’t seen in Jupiter Artland, and one in South Korea. But there is also one I didn’t know about at Crawick near New Cumnock in Ayrshire which looks properly prehistoric. A visit calls.

I went to the several times deferred event to celebrate the life and work of Charles Jencks, who died on 13 October 2019 and had wanted to be celebrated a year later, but COVID thwarted that.

A film had been made of his life by Jill Nicholls which was extraordinarily informative about all aspects of his life: his upbringing in Connecticut, not Baltimore as I thought; his summer holidays on Cape Cod which he went back to at the end of his life to look out of the window towards Provincetown; his time studying English at Harvard and then the move to architecture, inspired by the work of (late) Le Corbusier; then, a Fulbright Scholarship to the Architectural Association where he started teaching and lecturing, much more knowledgeable than his peers about history and influenced by semiotics, passionate about the belief that there was more to architecture than merely function; maybe, a bit of a hippy, but in an intellectual way. You learn so much more about someone from seeing them on film than obituaries.

Then he became a superstar, the advocate for post-modernism. But that part of his life is better known. A critic and writer, but, most of all, an incredibly passionate enthusiast for everything he did.

For anyone like me who is mildly obsessed by the curiously hypnotic and I occasionally think over-seductive piano playing of the Icelandic pianist, Vikingur Ólafsson, I strongly recommend the first fifteen minutes of a recent episode of Music Matters as below, in which he explains the thinking which has gone into his new album, From Afar, in which he plays the same music on an upright and a grand piano to differentiate the nature of the experience. The upright is like being inside the piano. He talks nearly as intensely as he plays:-

https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001c71k?partner=uk.co.bbc&origin=share-mobile

I have been prompted by the Freud exhibition at the National Gallery to look back on his long relationship to the collection, which hangs over the exhibition implied, but unexplored.

The answer to one of my questions is given in William Feaver’s admirable biography, vol 2. Freud did a Painter’s Eye exhibition in 1987. Few Italians: ‘ Most of the paintings in the National Gallery are Italian and I was made more conscious of the fact that they weren’t the things that I felt were essential to me’. A wall-full of Rembrandt’s – ‘Seven Rembrandts on one wall in natural light’. Chardin’s The Young Schoolmistress. The Rokeby Venus. Ingres. Whistler and Vuillard. Freud wrote, ‘I have been asked to give the reasons for my choice of paintings. The paintings themselves are the reasons’.

The Freud exhibition at the National Gallery – Lucian Freud: New Perspectives – looks pretty amazing, insofar as I could judge in the hurly-burly of a private view: so many paintings, so many of them unfamiliar, at least to me, from private as well as public collections: the full span of his career from the early works, painted when he was still a student under Cedric Morris, through to the big, late works and including many wonderful, unknown portraits, as well as more ambitious compositions. So good to see them in the grand galleries upstairs where Freud was said to roam late at night.

One of the pleasures of going back to King’s was a piano recital in the Provost’s Lodge by Susan Tomes of work by female composers only – Hélène de Montgeroult, Fanny Mendelsssohn, Judith Weir (she was the year below), Amy Beach – very fine -, Cécile Chaminade and Raise da Costa. Now I am reading Susan Tomes’s book on The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces, which includes detailed analysis of the music in a way that even I, not very musical, can half follow, as well as a lot of historical information which I can and am very much enjoying:

https://yalebooks.co.uk/page/detail/the-piano/?k=9780300253924

Beautiful medlars on the tree in our garden:-

I spent some of the time at dinner trying to figure out the pictures hanging on the other side of the hall, many of which were easily recognisable, but not all.

They were, from right to left:-

Montagu Rhodes James, artist not identified.

Goldworthy Lowes Dickinson by Roger Fry. They were friends and both Apostles.

Eric Milner White, the Dean of King’s from 1918 to 1942, responsible for the Service of Nine Lessons and Carols.

Lydia Lopokova, painted in 1923 by Duncan Grant in a dress that he had designed based on Ingres’s Portrait of Mademoiselle de la Rivière.

Julian Bell playing chess with Roger Fry, painted by Vanessa Bell presumably at Charleston c.1930.

Maynard Keynes by Duncan Grant (1908). This was the one I didn’t immediately recognise, less familiar than other later portraits of Keynes.

Dadie Rylands by Romi Behrens, an artist based in Cornwall.

Morgan Forster by Edmund Nelson, a strong portrait. Nelson had trained at Goldsmith’s, lived in Hampstead, and painted quite a few portraits of Cambridge figures after the war.

A.C.Pigou, the economist, also by Nelson

It’s a pretty impressive group, so much better than the Victorian worthies who used to be hung in the hall, and demonstrating the close links between King’s, the Bloomsbury Group and the Apostles from just before the First World War through to the 1920s, maintained into the 1960s by the presence of Rylands and Forster.