I went to hear Yinka Shonibare discuss the new exhibition of his work with Duro Olowu at the Stephen Friedman Gallery just along the road from his Royal Academy wrap. He did so extraordinarily knowledgeably and thoughtfully – about the influence of postmodern theory, the need to preserve time in his life for looking at the sky (he only works at his studio three afternoons a week), his interest in pattern and fabric, and his knowledge of, and interest in, different languages, including yoruba:-
I was asked last night about the origin of the term ‘Abstract Expressionism’. I knew the straightforward answer to the question, that it was first used in 1946 by Robert Coates to describe the work of Hans Hofmann. But I couldn’t answer the second question. Who was Robert Coates ? Peter Mayer, who republished some of his experimental fiction, knew the answer. He was the ballet critic for the New Yorker, a protégé of Gertrude Stein and author of books, now not much read, including The Eater of Darkness (1926) and The Outlaw Years (1930). He described the works of Jackson Pollock as ‘mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless’.
Writing about the misericords in St. Katharine’s made me want to know more about M.D. Anderson, who published a King Penguin on misericords, following her earlier Animal Carvings in English Churches. In looking her up, I saw her wrongly described as a man. In fact, she was the daughter of a Master of Caius and married Trenchard Cox, who succeeded the alcoholic Leigh Ashton as Director of the V&A in 1955, supposedly only to keep the seat warm for John Pope-Hennessy, who patronised him. There must be people who remember her, as well as Cox, who according to his obituary, resembled Lewis Carroll’s Dormouse. Maybe she was similarly self-effacing.
I was asked last week if I knew the misericords in the chapel of St. Katharine (I now realise because they were featured in the daily bulletin of Spitalfields Life). The answer was that I knew the chapel, but not the misericords as there was a service or maybe just a prayer meeting going on when I went. So, I returned to investigate this morning and discovered that at the back of the chapel are the original fourteenth-century choirstalls, as apparently illustrated in Andrew Ducarel’s History of the Royal Foundation and Collegiate Church of St. Katharine, published in 1782 (he was buried in the church) and G.L. Remnant’s Catalogue of Misericords in Great Britain.
This is the bearded man:-
As the book of my blog inches its way towards publication, I went to check out the Bethnal Green Library, which I include in passing, but without any information. I’m glad I did. It’s a fine piece of municipal socialism, originally built in the 1890s as a wing of the local lunatic asylum and adapted in the 1920s by the Borough Engineer as a library, with bas reliefs of Charles Darwin, Karl Marx, William Morris and Richard Wagner, as selected by the town council which was part Communist at the time:-
I know I shouldn’t really like the absurd Tudorbethan hut in the middle of Soho Square which has displaced Cibber’s statue of Charles II and hides an electricity sub-station, but I do:-
This is Charles II, removed in 1876 and returned in 1938:-
I was asked to see Maker’s House, a collaboration between Burberry and the New Craftsman in Burberry’s temporary premises in Manette Street in the old Foyles due to be demolished next year. Downstairs, it consists of a grand pot pourri of crafts, making, needlework, sculpture and scissors, as well as a small shop selling Burberry’s gabardine boiler suits (sold out):-
I have only just read the review by Matthew Collings which says that Blue Poles is, I quote, ‘notoriously unsuccessful as a painting’. Having spent much of today standing in front of Blue Poles, absorbing its extraordinary visceral energy, the depth of pigment, the sense of its compositional complexity, and its obvious originality even amongst major works by so many of Pollock’s contemporaries, I find this negative assessment hard to understand. ‘Heavy and airless’. I don’t think so.
We had the press view and opening today of our Abstract Expressionism exhibition. One never quite knows how an exhibition will look and turn out. Even last week, wandering around, it was hard to assess, with only brown paper representing many of the paintings waiting to be hung. But today it all came together: an exhibition which works on at least two different levels, as a survey of a movement in art from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s, and, at the same time, a way of seeing the work of a group of artists united by friendship and drinking, which included extraordinary individual talents (I was told that originally they met in the evenings to drink coffee and it was only later that they switched to whisky). I only half knew how unique it was to have a room full of work by Clyfford Still outside Denver and to be able to survey an era of American Art (at least temporarily) better and more comprehensively than anywhere across the Atlantic.
I had the utmost pleasure in showing Ben Heller, the first owner of Blue Poles and a friend and early supporter of Jackson Pollock, where what had been his painting was hanging in our exhibition Abstract Expressionism. He told Front Row how he had been offered the painting over lunch for $32,000, which was much more than he had ever previously spent on a painting, including his other Pollocks, and how he had made a quick calculation that he could pay for it in four instalments over two years. It hung with two other Pollocks in his family’s living room in 151, Central Park West until he sold it in 1971 to the Australian government for $1.3 million, a purchase which helped to bring down Gough Whitlam’s government. Ben hadn’t seen the painting since it has been cleaned, making the whites whiter, the yellows more yellow, and the blues blacker. His reaction to the exhibition after seeing it for the first time was ‘Holy moly’:-
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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