I have been catching up on the discussion surrounding the decision to axe A level art history from 2018.   I am a product of A level art history and really appreciated the opportunity to learn in depth the canon of quattrocento art and sculpture, which made a deep impression on me at the time (it was very well taught) and led me to study the subject at university.   People were sniffy about it as a subject even then, part of the British belief that people could perfectly well know about the subject without having to study it.   But this wasn’t true.   Most people didn’t know much about art and didn’t have the language, critical apparatus or familiarity to be able to study it effectively.   So, it has been a huge public benefit that there has been a much wider knowledge and appreciation, particularly of contemporary art, of which A level art history is certainly not the sole cause, but a symptom of a more widely diffused understanding of, and interest in, the study of visual histories.  

We went to Melvyn Tan’s 60th. birthday concert at the Wigmore Hall in which he played Beethoven, Czerny and Liszt’s Piano Sonata in B minor, all examples of what the programme described as pianism (ie requiring playing of great technical virtuosity).   He performed with appropriate and sometimes theatrical vim, enjoying his birthday with style.

I was asked to a memorial event at the Courtauld Institute to commemorate Anita Brookner.   It may have been assumed that I knew her, but I didn’t, although I read her art historical books as a student, including her study of Greuze: the rise and fall of an 18th. century phenomenon, which had been the subject of her PhD. published in 1972.   Her grandfather was a Pole who established a cigarette factory which supplied cigarettes to Edward VII.   She studied at the Ecole du Louvre, at the Courtauld under Blunt, who she admired for his integrity, and where she lived on marmite, cigarettes and slimming biscuits.   Her life fell so clearly into two parts:  the first half as an art historian, teaching at the Courtauld, writing reviews for Benedict Nicolson at the Burlington, the first female Slade Professor at Cambridge, an inspiring, if psychologically reserved teacher;  then the moment when she wrote her first novel over the summer holidays and created an alternative, and fictional, identity.

I’ve just been to the launch of a volume of essays called London’s global neighbourhood – the future of the west end by the Centre for London.  The key issue discussed was how to retain the character and prosperity of the West End.   As I walked back down Newburgh Street, Broadwick Street and across Golden Square, I thought that the answers are fairly obvious:  pay close attention to the character of the original eighteenth-century streetscape and the fact that the majority of houses in Soho and offices are still small scale;  encourage an environment in which small and independent shops continue to flourish (ie don’t just wack up the rates);  acknowledge the generally benign effect of the big estates like Grosvenor, Pollen and Howard de Walden;  reduce the traffic flow;  prevent homogenisation.   This may seem obvious, but it is exactly the opposite to what has happened in the City where ever bigger corporate blocks have killed off the character of a localised environment, except in Faringdon:-

St. Paul’s Cathedral was packed for the Memorial Service for Zaha Hadid, an impressively international occasion, with a reading in Arabic, a Gospel Choir and a particularly memorable address by Peter Palumbo, remembering her upbringing in the shifting sands of the Iraqi desert, her time as an undergraduate reading maths at the American University of Beirut and at the AA under Alvin Boyarsky, where she was influenced not just by Malevich, but by Arp and Lino Bo Bardi.   Odd to think that under current plans someone like her might not be given a visa to study in London, let alone stay here to work.

It’s rare for me to be anywhere near the City at the weekend, but, since I was, I thought I would explore its northern section round Guildhall, which is much less familiar to me.

I started with St. Anne and St. Agnes, what’s left of a small Wren church designed in 1680, maybe with help from Robert Hooke, designed on the model of Greek Cross and damaged by bombing in December 1940:-

An odd capital on a café next door:-

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I finally made it to Romilly’s exhibition at Goldsmith’s Hall, including much ornate jewellery and a new line in small boxes:-

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I left out of my bulletin of last week that I was asked to speak after dinner at Strawberry Hill.   I gave as my title ‘Horace Walpole and the Royal Academy’, knowing that he had annotated his catalogues of the early Academy exhibitions with peppery comments, which survive in the Lewis Walpole library in Farmington.   The only problem was that these are nearly the only bits of Walpole miscellanea which have not yet been published and that he otherwise had very little contact with the early Academy, sitting to Reynolds in 1756, but not making friends with him, complaining about the queues and high prices at Academy exhibitions, detesting the work of Benjamin West, refusing to be introduced to Samuel Johnson at one of the Academy dinners, and preferring the company of old widows and his Gothic library out at Twickenham.   So, it was a short speech.

I was walking through Whitehall last week – it must have been early evening Monday – when I passed the old War Office building, one of those bits of grand late Victorian swagger which it’s easy to ignore.   But as the evening sun caught its upper stories, I for once admired its baroque magnificence, designed, as so often in these years, by a Scot, William Young, the son of a Paisley bootmaker and trained at the South Kensington School of Design.   He was given the commission for the War Office as consolation for not winning the competition to design the South Kensington Museum, produced the design in 1898, and died two years later, leaving his son Clyde to complete the project.   The sculpture was the work of Alfred Drury, who did the statue of Reynolds in the Burlington House courtyard:-

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I was asked to give a lecture last night in South Creake church, a surprisingly large rural church in a village south of Burnham Market.   I had decided to talk about the twin phenomena of the post-war period:  the gradual loss of religious faith and documented decline in church-going (now less than 2% of the population go to church);  and the corresponding rise of museum-going (in May alone, 3.6 million people went to one of the national museums).   So, the question is whether or not these two phenomena are in some way connected and that, as a consequence of radical secularisation, people are, to some extent at least, seeking meaning in art.   As often happens on such occasions, there was good, and rightly sceptical, discussion afterwards.

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