I have just been alerted to a very good and thoughtful piece about what types of art we might expect to emerge from this period of compulsory, but not necessarily deprived, confinement, written, I’m pleased to note, by Maya Binkin with whom I worked at the Royal Academy and Blain|Southern and who helped me launch my blog on the world.

https://www.theartnewspaper.com/amp/feature/great-art-emerged-from-traumas-of-the-past?__twitter_impression=true

I’m sorry that the concert that I wrote about last night has now apparently gone offline. I wrote my post at speed to enable those who could to catch it. Some did. Anyway, the violinist was a young Norwegian, Mari Samuelsen, who, from the evidence of her recent Deutsche Grammophon recording Mari, available on Spotify, specialises in cool, quite cerebral interpretations of music mainly by contemporary composers like Max Richter and Philip Glass, plus Bach who presumably appeals to the aesthetic of neo-spiritualism. Not being a musicologist, I’m sure what she is doing can be better described.

We were tipped off about a concert performed last night in a private house (or is it a restaurant ?) in Oslo which is apparently only available for twenty four hours. If you can catch it, I strongly recommend it – there is something very moving about their choice of pieces to perform, the quality of sound: Arvo Pärt, Max Richter and Bach. I hope it will be kept available online. If not, time is short.

https://vier.live/acts/c4fbe241-a5ed-4fc6-893f-98e828468dda?lang=en

As a matter of interest, I thought I would look back on what I wrote about Christo after he gave a talk at the RA in April 2014, in the early days of the blog:-

https://charlessaumarezsmith.com/2014/04/09/christo/

Very sad news about Christo. I first heard him speak at the Carpeneter Center for the Visual Arts in early 1977 when he showed images of Valley Curtain, one of his early projects in the Rocky Mountains, and Running Fence, a big project creating a 40 kilometre fabric fence through the countryside of Marin and Sonoma Counties. They were both projects of great and elemental beauty and simplicity, supplemented by his characteristically elaborate conceptual drawing; and I have followed his career ever since as he went on to wrap the Reichstag and the Pont-Neuf and his umbrellas in California. He came and talked at the RA in 2014 and was impressively and authentically still full of projects and ideas.

In the aftermath of the Dominic Cummings affair, I have just read something so extraordinarily distasteful, I feel that I need to draw attention to it just in case it gets lost in the general noise.

I found it pretty distasteful that the Mail on Sunday had chosen to rake up some not very bad muck about the retired chemistry teacher who had reported the fact that Dominic Cummings had been on a day out in Barnard Castle – namely that he had gone to collect his daughter after lockdown rules had changed, as if this was somehow the equivalent of a senior person in government driving to a second home with Covid-19 when both were expressly forbidden. I also found it odd that Boris Johnson was quoted as being ‘miffed’ that the British public was so angry – an oddly Billy Bunter-ish expression for a Prime Minister in the face of a national disaster.

It turns out that the article in question was written by Carrie Symonds’s ex-boyfriend, Harry Cole. Which makes it sound as if the Prime Minister asked his girlfriend to make sure that the retired chemistry teacher’s life was made hell as an act of petty, spiteful revenge. Well, it would be in character, wouldn’t it ? I will lock my door tonight.

I had been tipped off the some of the specialist food shops in Spa Terminus are open on days other than Saturday, so called in on my way back from Greenwich for bread supplies, including croissants, chocolate brownies and, joy of joys, home-made Panforte from the Little Bread Pedlar:-

Next door is Crown & Queue cold meats. I was admiring of the long hours kept and general cheerfulness of these specialist food suppliers:-

I have been singularly unadventurous in my bicycle riding – once round the Olympic Park and back – but this morning I decided to be more adventurous, with a yearning to see the Queen’s House, a piece of admirably calm and ordered Jacobean classicism, and, even more, the view from the Observatory across the park towards London:-

I have been sent an article which appeared in Thursday’s New York Times about another internationally prominent female architect for consideration for the RIBA Gold Medal https://nyti.ms/2ZMVPOO and one not currently on the shortlist drawn up by W: that is Elizabeth Diller, who was responsible for the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, which I have included in my book, and the ICA in Boston which I haven’t, as well as the Centre for Music in London, which I hadn’t realised includes a Collection and Research Centre for the V&A as well. Maybe we can wait till that is finished and meanwhile not forget Eva Jiřičná and Denise Scott Brown until it is too late.

One of the reasons I have got interested in the issue as to how the work of women architects is documented is while going through the copy-edited text of my book on post-war museums (due out next year).

One of the museums which is indisputably important – important in a totally different way to the Centre Pompidou – is the Musée d’Orsay: important as a conversion of a historic building, adopting a more historicist method of display. Yet, in finding out about the work of Gae Aulenti, both in Paris and internationally (she designed the Museum of Asian Art in San Francisco), her work seemed oddly disregarded, not much written about, even though she died quite recently in 2012. If you look at her work and that of Denise Scott Brown and Eldred Evans, there does seem to be a common thread of a tough and intelligent approach to the design of interiors as well as exteriors, which was not valued at the time and has led to them being marginalised in the secondary literature. Or maybe this is just gender stereotyping.