I was asked to speak this afternoon at a conference on the theme of ‘Can culture replace God ?’, which was good for the mind if not for the spirit.   Much of the discussion was on the severence of culture from religion, beginning in the eighteenth century with Voltaire and extending to the writings of Lessing, Kant and Hegel and the ways in which the Romantic poets replaced the experience of religion with transcendental subjectivity and the worship of nature.   I wasn’t able to contribute to this part of the discussion, but I was able to supply information and statistics on the ways in which the rise of going to museums has paralleled the decline in going to church.   After my lecture at South Creake last month, I discovered that the Royal Academy undertakes market research on the extent to which visitors regard going to an exhibition as the equivalent of going to church:  32% of visitors view exhibitions as an opportunity to stimulate the imagination;  29% as an opportunity to reflect or contemplate;  and 25% for inspiration.   Art may not be able to provide a satisfactory meaning for existence (and nor nowadays does going to church), but it can, as in the work of Kiefer, provide an experience of the transcendent.

More discussions about how to ensure that art history does not die as an A Level subject in 2018.   It has become clear that the issue is much broader than simply retaining art history as an A level subject, currently mainly in private schools:  that is, how to ensure that there is at least some teaching and awareness of art history in state schools more generally, not just at A Level, in order to ensure visual literacy.   At the moment, anecdotal evidence suggests that pupils are introduced to ideas about art history in Primary Schools.   Then, there is a requirement that pupils should learn about art history as a part of Key Stage 3.   But does this actually happen ?  The big loss is the reduction in the amount of art history which is taught as a part of art and design education since artists are no longer expected or necessarily encouraged to know about the past. 

I am prompted by comments on my blog about Anthony Bryer to say slightly more about the Christmas we spent with him in the Fellow’s apartment at Dumbarton Oaks.   We were the only people there and so had the run of the house, library and garden.   He had assumed that Romilly, who was with me, was a man because the well known Byzantinist Romilly Jenkins was male and was pleasantly surprised to discover otherwise.   We had what my family would describe as a very Bryer-ish time (this was to capture the element of the zany), attending midnight mass at a church on Massachusetts Avenue and then taking a shortcut back across the grounds of the British Embassy and, on Boxing Day, having a drink in a bar on Wisconsin Avenue where Bryer was totally oblivious to the fact that it was striptease joint.   He then shipped us off to friends of his in Virginia who had a private aerodrome. 

I went this afternoon to see the progress of work on our building project in Burlington Gardens.   It’s gathering pace with up to 170 people working on site in conditions which resemble the ruins of an ancient city.

This is the view of the scaffolding on the north façade:-

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While I’m at it, I’m also posting a picture of the spotted leaves of a Begonia Maculata, which I admired so much during our weekend in Wiltshire that I was presented with it.   It now sits in a position of honour, flowering in the drawing room:-

I’ve just been asked by a friend if I’m OK because my blog has gone silent for a couple of days.   The truth is that I do sometimes go silent, overwhelmed by Royal Academy business.   But just to prove that I’m still alive and well, I’m posting two pictures of the Thames in the fog at the weekend:-

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We went to hear Vanessa Redgrave read a selection of letters by Vanessa Bell to mark her move from London to Charleston a hundred years ago.   The letters to Roger Fry, her sister Virginia and her lover Duncan Grant conveyed the pleasures and privations of their early years at Charleston in the closing years of the First World War, the birth of her daughter Angelica by Duncan Grant, the eating of grouse by T.S. Eliot and her reading of The Waves, the tragedy of the death of her oldest son Julian in the Spanish Civil War and the marriage of her daughter Angelica to Bunny Garnett, her father’s former lover.   Charleston was both creative and incestuous.   Redgrave’s reading conveyed the anguish of what happened there.

I was wandering along Piccadilly last week thinking that it is a while since I have done an architectural post (not quite true, I know) and have been meaning to find out more about J.C. Cording & Co. whose flamboyant brass lettering announces their shop.   The history of the shop is, as I guessed, interesting:  first established in 1839 on the Strand for the supply of waterproofs, they moved to Piccadilly in 1877.   When the street was widened, Cordings resisted and kept their original façade.   It’s now owned by Eric Clapton.   Oddly, I can’t find out anything about the building which is omitted by Pevsner:-

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I went to Westminster Cathedral to attend the afternoon high mass in honour of Tom Phillips’s new mosaics in the Chapel of St. George the Martyr which commemorate the English Martyrs – and not just to attend the Mass, but to see the work itself.   It’s very in character, part of the Cathedral’s commitment to commissioning mosaics from contemporary artists, including Tom and Leonard McComb:-

I also hadn’t seen, which I should have done, the very fine carving by Eric Gill, his last work, of Christ Triumphant in the same chapel:-

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Since it is a beautiful sunny lunchtime, I called in at St. Andrew-by-the-Wardrobe (once called St. Andrew juxta Baynard Castle) just along the road from Blackfriars Station.   It was Wren’s last church, chatacteristically simple in design, built in the 1690s, but completely gutted on the night of 29 December 1940.   It was surprisingly sympathetically reconstructed in the 1960s with a pulpit and font which came from St. Matthew, Friday Street:-

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