I read an article last night about the old In and Out Club on the north side of Piccadilly, which is due to be renovated as a hotel.   I hadn’t remembered its history, athough I’ve written about it before, not surprisingly as it’s complicated.   It was originally built for the second Earl of Egremont, who succeeded his uncle, the second Duke of Somerset, in February 1750, when it was known as Egremont House;  it was taken over by the Marquess of Cholmondeley in the 1820s, when it was known as Cholmondeley House;  then in 1829, by Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, when it became Cambridge House.   It was designed by Matthew Brettingham, a building contractor, originally based in Norwich, who was employed as Clerk of Works at Holkham, and became increasingly well known as a safe pair of hands in designing both grand country houses and their London equivalents, being employed by Lord Egremont at Petworth in 1751 and asked to design his London house in 1759.

It’s very hard to photograph as currently boarded up:-

I was tipped off today that the website Art UK has a facility whereby one can find out where works by Royal Academicians are located.   You can indeed.   You google Art UK and then put Royal Academician into the search facility.   You then have the option of searching by artwork or, at least as interesting, by location.   There is a map which shows you how many works there are by Royal Academicians in Cambridge (151) and you can then highlight exactly where they are in more detail (actually, only 40 works in the City of Cambridge itself).   I looked to see what works by Royal Academicians belong to my old college, King’s College, which has a rich art collection and then remembered that it is one of only three institutions in the whole of the British Isles which, in a total dog-in-the-manger-ish way, has refused to participate in this nationally significant exercise in the listing of artworks.   In case you think this odd, I do too.

I have been alerted to a very nice piece in today’s Spitalfields Life by Gillian Tindall, accompanied by photographs her husband took of what it looked like in the early 1960s, still very run down after the war.  It shows that ordinary photographs are actually more useful in recording what a place was like than arty photographs (http://spitalfieldslife.com/2017/12/14/in-stepney-1963/).   And it provides an eloquent description of the consequences of post-war planning on the old, more domestic East End.

As you know, I like rooftop views.   But there are few better than from the roof of 1, St. James’s Place, looking south towards the towers of Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster:-

Each year I am asked to read something at the Friends’ annual carol service in St. James’s, Piccadilly.   I enjoy it, as once a year I am reminded how sunk I am into ungodliness and how much I still respect the language of anglicanism and its music.   This year I was offered a poem Expectans Expectavi by Anne Ridler, who was the daughter of a housemaster at Rugby, went to school at Downe House, and later worked for T.S. Eliot at Faber and Faber.   She belonged to the same school of faintly intense, high church latinity as Eliot, writing with a deep sense of the intelligence of language, informed by her involvement with the University Church in Oxford.

I took the view from the window of my office yesterday as we prepare to pack up from Unilever House.   It is not always so picturesque as it was in the early morning light with the sun rising over Tate Modern and Renzo Piano’s Shard hovering in the distance like the glass church in Oscar and Lucinda:-

I’ve spent the day reading Tom Hoving’s book Making the Mummies Dance, about his time as Director of the Metropolitan Museum from 1967 to 1977.   I was offered a copy when I first went to the National Gallery as a primer in how not to be a museum director (the person who offered it made clear her utter disdain).   But I now wish I had read it then because it actually gives a good and interesting account of his intemperate reformist zeal, looking at ways of encouraging more people into the museum and how they might actually enjoy it.   There were two things I found particularly interesting, neither of which I knew:  the first is that it was Hoving, helped by his architects, Kevin Roche and John Dinkeloo, who introduced the front steps to the Museum, abolishing an automobile drop-off, in order to create the democratic experience of people sitting on the steps outside and making the museum look and feel more physically accessible (Ed Jones wanted to do the same at the National Gallery, but got no encouragement);  and the second is that it was under Hoving that the Met’s distinctive form of semi-compulsory charging was introduced whereby cash registers were introduced to receive what was intended to be a genuinely voluntary (but psychologically compulsory) charge.   I’ve always thought that Hoving was excoriated by the museum community, but he definitely left the Met a much more lively place than it was under Rorimer.

To mark a day spent indoors looking out onto the snow, I am posting the same view as yesterday with snow attached:-

A short session yesterday at the so-called Leica Akademie being taught about the mysteries of aperture, focal length and depth-of-field has made me more attentive to what I was seeing this morning and how to photograph it.   The houses of Stepney Green:-

Stepney Farm:-

And the light indoors:-

We had the opening tonight of our exhibition which looks at the ways in which a very diverse group of artists make use of drawing in their work.   Many of them belong to the last generation who were required to undertake life drawing as part of their training and, for good reasons, rejected it, regarding it, as Jon Thompson described it, as ‘an ideologically loaded tool for making students conform to a certain philosophy of art’ or, as Antony Gormley describes it, ‘At art school, I had a really uncomfortable feeling that we were ignoring the main subject, which was the sensation of living.   The Life Room was denying the most interesting thing’.   But it feels as if it has never completely gone away.   Lucian Freud used drawing as the basis for his paintings.   Hockney has gone on drawing against the tide.   Michael Landy retreated to drawing weeds after destroying all his possessions and drew his penis after one of its testicles had been removed.   The question which hovers over the exhibition and the accompanying book is exactly what the status of drawing is nowadays in the process of looking at, recording and documenting the physical world.   What’s its currency ?  Has it been, and can it be, replaced by new tools for looking ?   Bridget Riley puts it best:  ‘I think – and there is evidence enough from other artists – that this kind of discipline is useful even when you are not actually drawing.   It creates a kind of thinking that feeds right through into picture-making.   It lays an intellectual foundation’.