I don’t normally get to hear Start the Week – it’s when I’m working – so it was quite a treat to hear the episode this morning in which Andrew Marr dexterously juggled topics and ideas between Cynthia Saltzman at home in New York, Francesco da Mosto in Venice, and me sitting immediately opposite Andrew in Portland Place, as we roamed from Milan to Venice, to Paris and Berlin in search, first, of where Napoleon seized the greatest pictures to build up the collections of the Louvre and then, how the Louvre itself helped to inspire a great era of national, if not nationalist, museum-building:-
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Plunder, power and prestige
Tomorrow morning, I appear on Start the Week, together with Cynthia Saltzman, who has written a magnificently detailed account of how Napoleon and his army marched through northern Italy, compelling each of the major cities – Milan, Parma, Mantua – to sign treaties compelling them to give up their twenty best works of art to the Louvre (in Rome 100); and Francesco da Mosto, who has the advantage over us in that his ancestor was a Senator at the time that Napoleon arrived in Venice to demand works by Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese, including the Wedding Feast at Cana which was brutally stripped off the wall of the Refectory next door to S. Giorgio Maggiore, rolled up and transported to the Louvre never to return. It makes what Elgin did just a one-off piece of plunder by comparison.
Eli Broad
The news of the death of Eli Broad yesterday has made me read his brief newspaper autobiography, published in the LA Times in May 2019 – pre- COVID. It’s an interesting and in many ways impressive life, making a great deal of money out of real estate and then getting involved in the arts: first, by establishing the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, with its building by Arata Isosaki on Bunker Hill, run to begin with by Pontus Hultèn; then Temporary Contemporary in 1983, designed by Frank Gehry, which he doesn’t mention; then the Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, designed by Renzo Piano, definitely not his best building; and finally The Broad itself on South Grand Avenue, right next door to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, designed by Diller Scofidio & Renfro. He made his fortune out of tract houses, but then spent it on civic monuments for his adopted city.
What should an art museum be ?
For the last couple of months, I have inhabited a fairly non-stop Zoom world – doing lectures, conversations and podcasts about my book, The Art Museum in Modern Times. Quite early in the process, I was interviewed for a podcast to appear on the Thames & Hudson website. I was asked good questions. Listening to it just now, I’m conscious that it is the product of a long period of reflection as a result of lockdown, thinking about the issues that I had written about in the book, but had not previously had much of a chance to talk about: the nature of the relationship between architecture and collections; changes to museums; the impact of the digital; what will happen post-COVID. Normally, I hate listening to myself, but on this occasion I felt like I was listening to someone else:-
Not getting into the Louvre Abu Dhabi
I’m glad that getting the day wrong for my visit to the Louvre Abu Dhabi over a year ago counts as a news story (of sorts) in amongst the Pandemic:-
The Art Museum in Modern Times (3)
I am very touched to have been sent a picture of my book on sale in bookshop of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, currently celebrating its 150th. anniversary and itself undergoing a radical transformation by the Japanese architects, SANAA, due to open next year:-
The Transformation of the Art Museum
I had planned to go and visit some of those East Coast art museums next week and take in Cambridge, Massachusetts en route. But no more. The Harvard lecture survives on Zoom:-
https://harvardartmuseums.org/calendar/the-transformation-of-the-art-museum
Views of Spitalfields
In walking round Spitalfields this morning, I was a bit amazed and shocked by the recent gigantism of the City, lowering over its surroundings, ready to trample over everything round about.
You can see the old chimney of Truman’s brewery and the tower of Christ Church, Spitalfields:-
You get increasingly strange juxtapositions of the old and the new:-
I like the old myself – it’s precious and not just in isolation, all sanitised like Spitalfields Market, but as part of the texture of the city as a whole:-
Save Brick Lane
I haven’t got involved in the current battle to Save Brick Lane because I couldn’t figure out where the proposed development of the Truman Hanbury & Buxton site is going to be and exactly the nature of the damage it will cause. So, I went to look this morning.
It looks like a classic battle between big-time property development and the local community. Brick Lane has been gradually changing in character because of changing property values. Now, whoever owns the Truman Hanbury & Buxton site immediately opposite the historic site of the eighteenth-century brewery plans to develop it. Since it’s currently just a car park, it’s not surprising that it is viewed as a site for development. The question is: will what is built pay any attention to the character of the surrounding neighbourhood ? The answer is surely no, to judge from available illustrations.
The Tower Hamlets Planning Committee meets tomorrow. Can they not request that the developer works with an architect who has some interest and sensitivity to the surrounding neighbourhood ?
It happens that Assemble, the Turner-prize-winning architectural practice are working in the neighbourhood. Could the developers not be required to hold an architectural competition ?
Development always seems to be as big as can be, without regard for character, which is rapidly eating away at Spitalfields, a neighbourhood of extraordinary historical and architectural importance. The ecology is fragile. Tower Hamlets seems spineless. So is Historic England. It is not just depressing, but tragic.
This is the car park:-
This is what is planned for the site:-
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