Seeing the fine pre-first world war portrait by Henry Lamb RA on the Offer Waterman stand at Frieze Masters reminded me that my predecessor but five was Sir Walter Lamb, who took office as Secretary of the Royal Academy in 1913 and served until 1951, service of very nearly forty years, through two world wars. He was born in Adelaide, the son of Sir Horace Lamb FRS, a pure mathematician who became Professor of Mathematics in Manchester in 1885. In his youth, he was a friend of Clive Bell, in love with Virginia Woolf and rejected as a suitor. Bespectacled and bald and author of a book about the history of the Royal Academy published after his retirement, Walter Lamb was, I assume, an effective administrator because it was in the 1920s that the Royal Academy began its programme of major international exhibitions. He was Henry Lamb’s older brother.

After coffee, I wandered up the aisle with galleries selected by Norman Rosenthal, including The Gallery of Everything in Chiltern Street which is showing rather fascinating late nineteenth-century pots by George E. Ohr, a potter from Mississipi who was rediscovered in the sixties by an antique dealer called Jim Carpenter and sold to the likes of Jasper Johns, who depicted them prominently in his paintings:-

Next door is Waddington’s wonderful reconstruction of Peter Blake’s studio showing the rich cornucopia of his obsessive collecting:-

We’re doing an exhibition of Oceanic art next year, so I was pleased to see the work shown by Galerie Meyer in Paris.   A Kapkap:-

I hadn’t known (nor is it apparently referred to in our exhibition) that Matisse went to French Polynesia in 1930.

Before I sign off, I strongly recommend Emanuel von Baeyer’s stand which this year, as last, is exemplary, including such unexpected pleasures as a picture of Georges Braque in his studio in September 1944 and – I’m fascinated to see – the preparatory drawing by Philip Core of his Chance Meeting of Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp which is in the Arts Council Collection:-

It’s my annual day at Frieze Masters, scouting round in the morning in order to be able to do an introductory tour for RA Patrons in the afternoon.

Sam Fogg always has my favourite stand right by the entrance, where one can see medieval works which in theory I could see in Cork Street, but in practice don’t.   I start with a late fifteenth-century Spanish Lamentation:

There’s a very beautiful English alabaster of the Coronation of the Virgin:-

And I like the more primitive thirteenth-century Head of an Apostle:-

I’m keen on the work of Axel Vervoordt, ever since I saw his installation at the Palazxo Fortuny in the summer.   He does exactly what Frieze Masters is supposed to encourage – the juxtaposition of old and new, including an Egyptian palette (c.3100 BC):-

On Bernheimer’s stand, there’s a terrific Horst P. Horst of Salvador Dalí:-

I’m always impressed by the quality and range of antiquities which are still available, not too expensively, in spite of the strict rules on provenance eg (on the Kallos Gallery stand) A Roman Marble Hand 2nd. century AD:-

A Limestone Model of a Ptolomaic King:-

Next door, Georg Laue has another 14th. century alabaster:-

Offer Waterman has very good twentieth-century British:  an unexpectedly good Henry Lamb, dated 1909:-

And a wonderful Barbara Hepworth (1963):-

I’m now desparate for a cup of coffee.

I had my first comprehensive tour of Burlington Gardens – basement storage space and rooftop offices.   I found it more encouraging than expected, given that we’re planning to move into the new offices early in the New Year.

They’re pouring the concrete on the bridge:-

One can appreciate the full and generous volume of the Lecture Theatre:-

This will be the Collections Gallery:-

I went to a big dinner at the ICA last night to celebrate Bryan Ferry. Michael Bracewell gave a talk about his career. I hadn’t realised that Ferry had studied fine art at Newcastle under Richard Hamilton. He was a contemporary of Stephen Buckley and was influenced by Mark Lancaster, who had come back from New York where he had made friends with Jasper Johns and others of Johns’s generation. Ferry then taught pottery for a year at Holland Park before establishing his first band called the Gas Board. He’s a big collector of modern British art, but this wasn’t mentioned.

I like the walk across the park at this time of year when the sun is low and the trees are turning:-

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect of our exhibition, Dalí Duchamp, which opens to the public on Saturday.   They were unlikely friends:  Salvador Dalí, the great mustachioed Catalan showman;  and Marcel Duchamp, the conceptual ironist.   But there is a photograph of them chatting together in New York and they were friends, Duchamp renting a holiday apartment in Cadaqués during the 1950s.   And their art fits together interestingly:  both relentlessly experimental, dressing up, using new materials, enjoying the erotic and exploiting surrealism.   Duchamp exhibited a urinal (‘The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges’).   Dalí stuck a lobster on a telephone.   I also hadn’t realised that when I visited the Dalí Museum in Figueres in the early 1980s, he was still alive.

In honour of Romilly’s exhibition at Goldsmith’s Hall this week (opens Tuesday), I took some photographs of the workshop upstairs where all the work is made:-

I went to get my shoes mended yesterday, not for the first time (I wear them constantly) and was impressed to find the shop filled with sacks of shoe lasts on their way from the third floor to storage in South London, where they are sent after fifteen years of being unused:-

Javier Pes, the now former editor of Art Newspaper, has reminded me that there was an exhibition held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art called The Steins Collect which tells one everything one wants to know about Gertrude’s collection of Picassos:  how Leo arrived in Paris in December 1902, rented an apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus and embarked on art classes at the Académie Julian;  Gertrude, described by Mary Berenson as ‘a fat, un-wieldy person, the color of mahogany..but with a grand, monumental head, plenty of brains & immense geniality’ came the following autumn;  they acquired their first works by Picasso, The Acrobat Family and Girl with a Basket of Flowers, in 1905;  Picasso was ‘so attracted by Mlle Stein’s physical presence that he suggested he should paint her portrait’.   From 1906, they held a Saturday evening salon which is where so many Americans first encountered the work of Picasso and Matisse.   Roger Fry and Duncan Grant visited in 1909, Clive and Vanessa Bell in 1914.   ‘Some came to mock and remained to pray’.

This is what they looked like in 1907:-