The tulips in the front garden were at their best this morning in the sunshine after the rain and longer lasting because of the cold:-

I read on twitter about a book which has been written by Susannah Walker, a former student on the V&A/RCA MA Course in the History of Design. It’s called The Life of Stuff: A memoir about the mess we leave behind. It’s a beautifully written, profound investigation of her feelings as she clears up the belongings left by her mother after her death in her tragically chaotic house in Worcester: a miniature design history of objects accumulated and hoarded and never thrown away – cutlery and vacuum cleaners, a black basalt teapot and a napkin ring, each of them inspiring a set of memories and thoughts about their design or history, why and how they were acquired and how they fit within her family history. It’s such a powerfully evocative description of her interest in the meaning of things, which she herself describes as partially originating in the seminar room, now demolished, hidden behind the eighteenth-century galleries of the V&A.

In case people hadn’t registered, the day that Viola Michelangelo closed at the Royal Academy Blain|Southern opened a much smaller, more intimate exhibition of his video works down in the basement. There is a Self Portrait of Bill himself, drowning:-

Then a series of not just intimate, but extremely intense works, including Unspoken (Silver and Gold):-

It has been a week of intense activity at Blain|Southern, celebrating Sean Scully.

First, Nick Willing’s admirable and informative film, which showed the nature of his life, career and working methods.

Then, volume 2 of his catalogue raisonné was launched with a conversation at the gallery which showed a different, more intellectual and reflective aspect of his character, as he and Marla Price discussed the significance of each of his major works from the 1980s.

Tonight his exhibition at the National Gallery opened, which shows new work inspired by, or is, in some way, related to Turner’s deep, meditative seascapes, mood paintings, in which the horizon dissolves into pure colour, as represented by Turner’s Evening Star from upstairs. There are three galleries of Sean’s big, adventurous, recent work.

He spoke movingly at the opening of what Trafalgar Square, and the National Gallery, meant to him as a child, coming in from Sydenham on Christmas Eve to see the Norwegian Christmas tree (he did not mention how important Van Gogh’s Chair, then in the Tate, was to his decision to become an artist).

Much of the rationale of the National Gallery is based round the belief thar free access to the collection is an inspiration to children to become artists. Sean is the living exemplar that this policy works.

For those who don’t have convenient access to Twitter, I am posting my recent account of the benefits of the website Art UK, which provides convenient online access to every painting, and now sculpture, in a British public collection, except, sadly, a small number of steadfast refuseniks, including my old college, King’s, which continues to insist, in contrast to nearly every other Oxbridge college, that it does not want to participate in this wonderful intellectual and scholarly resource:

I have been pondering the fact that after having a rather delicious breakfast (poached eggs and bacon) at the Rochelle Canteen in Arnold Circus, I was approached by a man who asked me if the Rochelle Canteen provided breakfast for the homeless. So, the questions I have been pondering are, was he homeless ? And did he think I was too ?

I left out of my abbreviated account of the Geffrye Museum (there is surprisingly little information online) that Molly Harrison took over from Marjorie Quennell as its curator in 1946 and ran it with great passion and enthusiasm till 1969, turning it into a resource for children and education, battling the officials in County Hall in high heels and a pink hat. She wrote a book about her work called Museum Adventure, the Story of the Geffrye Museum (1950). At a time when there is much discussion about how much attention to pay to visitor numbers, it is worth remembering her view that ‘reputation is a fickle guide and notoriety a poor indication’.

I went to see the new building project at the Geffrye Museum, which I like to think of as our local museum – founded as a museum of the furniture trade by the London County Council in 1910 and run by Marjorie Quennell in the 1930s, following the model of A History of Everyday Things in England. A new wing was added in 1998 by Nigel Coates, an early HLF project, and it’s now being totally redone from top to bottom by Wright and Wright, good architects to be doing it, with their arts-and-crafts orientation.

I look forward to seeing the new displays, both period rooms and thematic in the basement, when it re-opens next year:-

We went to a special screening of the long version of Margy Kinmonth’s film about the Hermitage, in which she was given special access to its curators and, most of all, to its Director, Mikhail Piotrovsky, who is the low-key hero of the film, showing off Catherine the Great’s collection of gems, talking about the work of his father Boris, who was Director before him, its history, how he has made it into a global force, all with such obvious pride. The heroine is Larissa Haskell, who was a curator of paintings at the Hermitage from, I think, 1955 to 1965, who describes with great vividness how her family had to eat, first, her father’s leather belt and, then, the family cat during the privations of the Second World War. Through the ups and downs of its extraordinary history, the curators managed to preserve the great treasures of the collection, apart from the forced sales of great paintings by Joseph Stalin to Andrew Mellon.

I liked the tentativeness of the green in the misty morning:-