I called in today on Hazlitt Holland Hibbert to see their small, but choice Peter Lanyon exhibition, organised to coincide with the publication of Toby Treves’ catalogue raisonée.   I’m not that familiar with his work, apart from what was shown recently in the Courtauld Institute Gallery.

I preferred the early work when he was still in Cornwall, a bit drier and more experimental.

Godrevy Lighthouse (1949):-

Farm Backs (1962):-

I nipped back to have another quick look at the Rockefeller Collection, including Picasso’s Fillette à la corbeille fleurie (1905), one of the star items in the sale:-

And Picasso’s drawing of an apple, which is inscribed ‘Picasso Noêl pour Gertrude et Alice’, the nicest possible Christmas card:-

I joined a tour of the Sarabande Foundation, the charitable foundation established by Alexander McQueen in 2007 in support of art, fashion and creativity and which, in 2014, opened a set of artists’ studios in an old stables in Haggerston off the Kingsland Road. I particularly admired the work of John Alexander Skelton, whose work is only available in Dover Street Market:-

I was lucky to have been allowed a sneak preview of the Rockefeller Collection which is being shown in London, before touring the world and being sold in New York in May. I knew some, but not all of the Rockefeller family history: John D. who made so much money out of Standard Oil that he had difficulty giving it away; John junior who established Colonial Williamsburg in the 1920s and the Cloisters in the 1930s and his wife, Abby, who founded the Museum of Modern Art (John junior didn’t really like modern art). They had five sons, a powerful family network, including Nelson, who was Governor of New York and Vice President under Gerald Ford, and David, the youngest, who came to art late, but was encouraged to take an interest in modern art by sarcastic comments about his taste from Marga Barr, Alfred Barr’s ebullient wife. We must be grateful to Marga Barr.

We went to the nicest possible concert at the Wigmore Hall, where Melvyn Tan was performing Erich Korngold’s Piano Quintet with the Škampa Quartet, as well as Janáček’s Kreutzer Sonata.   I love the Wigmore Hall, so eastern European in character, with its murals by Gerald Moira, who was the son of a Portuguese diplomat who became an English miniature painter.   He was trained at the Royal Academy Schools where he received financial help from Queen Victoria, owing to work done for the crown by his father.   He made his reputation with the murals of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King in the Trocadero restaurant in Shaftesbury Avenue and, in 1900, became Professor of Mural and Decorative Painting at the Royal College of Art.   Just the place for Janáček.

It was suggested that, now that spring has arrived, I should revert to colour. So, I have done so, at least for today:-

I have photographed Stepney Green often enough;  but it is hard to resist on what feels like the first day of spring:-

I have been asked by Bendor Grosvenor for my thoughts on the long-standing idea of a National Acquisitions Fund, either on or off-the-record, in the light of the Art Fund’s report Why Collect ?  I am happy for my views to be on the record, which are that many people have forgotten that when the Heritage Lottery Fund was first established in 1993, it was hoped that it would end forever the endless short-termism and crisis management in major museum acquisitions and provide a systematic national source of funding for acquisitions alongside the National Heritage Memorial Fund.   I remember John Murdoch, the then Deputy Director of the V&A, saying that it would not take long for the Treasury to commandeer it for its own purposes, and this indeed is exactly what has happened:  it is used as a source of replacement, rather than supplementary funding, on the capital side.   So, the lack of a National Acquisitions Fund remains and one of John Major’s hopes of the lottery was still-born.

I forgot to post the pictures I took of what was called The Switchhouse, now the Blavatnik Building, as I arrived yesterday for the launch of Why Collect ?   Very fancy brickwork:-

I am much less involved than I used to be in the politics and funding of museum acquisitions, but I was nonetheless pleased to hear David Cannadine launch his Art Fund report Why Collect ? which documents the massive reduction in active collecting, particularly in regional museums during the past decade of austerity as a result of under-funding.   What became clear is that nearly all museums, including the nationals, now tend to engage in a small number of high-profile, sometimes politically motivated acquisitions by major contemporary artists, far less so in a consistent and intellectually coherent way across a broad field of collecting.   This may be the new reality, but Cannadine is right to draw attention to it and – to an extent – lament it.