Category Archives: Uncategorized

The New Tate Modern (1)

It was the opening day of the new Switch House:  a radically different set of geometries to the original Giles Gilbert Scott Power Station.   The new building, joined at the hip by Herzog and de Meuron, is a neo-Egyptian brick ziggurat.   It’s impossible to get a full sense of what its impact will be in a single day and how the linear geometries of the old boilerhouse will relate to the triangular grid of the new ground plan.   It’s certainly extremely impressive on its own, with its complex changing outline, built on top of the original oil tanks and sharing much of the same industrial aesthetic, with sweeping circular concrete staircases leading upwards, Jasper Morrison furniture, a lot of public spaces and wonderful views from the top of all of London.

This is the building from outside:-

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Michael Landy RA

One of the pleasures of going to Basel was the opportunity to see the Michael Landy exhibition on the ground floor of the Tinguely Museum, a wholly appropriate place for the work to be seen because he was apparently first inspired as an artist by visiting the Tinguely exhibition at the Tate in 1982.   They share many characteristics, particularly the mechanical anarchism.   But I was particularly pleased to see his very beautiful line drawings – a set of portraits of friends – and his amazing etchings of plants commissioned by Paragon Press.

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Kunstmuseum Basel

The Kunstmuseum was closed for renovation when I came to the art fair last year.   Now that it has reopened, it is possible to see its astonishing collection of early German paintings, including Grunewald’s great Crucifixion and Holbein’s Dead Christ;  not to mention a room full of Fuseli’s, labelled – he was born in Zurich, the son of a Swiss painter – as Füssli, and a great collection of classic modern paintings on the top floor, all displayed in a grand, but austere, slightly monastic building.   Opposite is a new extension, neo-brutalist and even more austere:-

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The Tondo

Today for the first time since it was installed behind bullet-proof glass upstairs in the Sackler Gallery in 1991, the glass was taken off the display case of Michelangelo’s Tondo, so that one could see it in its full, fresh and rough-hewn glory.   We were told its history in the RA:  bought by the artist and collector, George Beaumont, in Rome in 1822;  shown in his house in Grosvenor Square;  bequeathed on his death in 1827 to the RA;  hung on the top floor of Burlington House in the late nineteenth century and in the General Assembly Room after the war;  occasionally exhibited, as, for example, in the great Italian Art exhibition in 1930.   It certainly looks very different out from behind glass, some parts finished and polished, much of it still waiting the chisel:-

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Aby Warburg

I went to a film by Judith Wechsler, a Harvard-based filmmaker, about Aby Warburg which marked the opening of a major conference organised by the Warburg Institute about his work and life.   The film demonstrated how brief Warburg’s active working life was:  time spent researching in Florence, influenced by Burkhardt;  a visit to the Hopi and Zuni Indians following his brother Paul’s marriage in 1895 (Warburg hated American telephones);   living in Florence and then collecting his library in Hamburg, interrupted by the first world war;  diagnosis after the war as a schizophrenic (a second opinion, demanded by his brother Max, suggested manic depression);  incarceration for a period of three years from 1921 to 1924 in a Swiss clinic;  release after he demonstrated his intellectual faculties by delivery of a public lecture;  the Great Crash, followed by his death in October 1929.   Yet his ideas about the origins of images and their motifs, expressed in his incomplete photographic project Mnemosyne, have become increasingly influential.   Today was the 150th. anniversary of his birth.

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Brexit (2)

Since I’ve discovered that I get far more readers for my comments on Brexit than I do for minor architectural features of the east end, I would add that one of the depressing aspects of travelling back from Derbyshire, as from Anglesey, is the way that the countryside is festooned with VOTE LEAVE placards, presumably because the farming community is implacably pro-Brexit in spite of the fact that they, more than anyone, have benefitted from EU subsidy;  and because, apparently, Remain has decided not to issue billboards, a potentially lethal mistake.

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Brexit (1)

Nearly the last of the events we attended at the Derbyshire Literary Festival was a discussion between Caroline Lucas, Green MP for Brighton, and Natascha Engel, Labour MP for North East Derbyshire.   It was meant to be about the role of women in Westminster, about which they might have agreed, but turned into an unexpectedly fierce debate about the Referendum.   Caroline Lucas, fresh from campaigning in Burton-on-Trent, was passionate and articulate about the virtues of immigration, the need to maintain open borders, and the historical importance of European collaboration.   Natascha Engel, who admitted to herself being a first generation immigrant, has already voted Leave, it appeared only as a gesture of solidarity with her elderly, ex-mining constituents, who blame the hardship of their lives irrationally on immigration.   She made the mistake of making a hostile comment about Poles.

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Brompton Bicycle

Andrew Ritchie, the inventor of the Brompton Bicycle, gave a very entertaining, but also extremely informative account of what it takes to invent and market a new consumer product in the hostile world of British investment finance.   He devised the first bicycle in the bedroom of his flat opposite the Brompton Oratory and then spent several frustrating years trying to raise capital from long-suffering friends and avoiding being taken over by bigger operators, including Raleigh.   It was a classic story of Samuel Smiles perseverance in the teeth of suppliers of components going bankrupt.   Now, after twenty years of success and after moving into a new factory, the Brompton has become too expensive.

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Dovedale

One of the pleasures of coming to the Dovedale Literary Festival is the pleasure of being in Dovedale itself:  the view across the valley of the River Dove over the hill from Cheadle with clouds settling in the valley;  the walk over the fields to Ilam in the morning;  walking up Dovedale;  and looking across the valley to Hazelton Clump:-

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Jeremy Hutchinson QC

We have heard Jeremy Hutchinson talk about his life and work as an advocate before.   I would happily hear him do so many times again.   At 101, he is still able to recall with extraordinary vividness his childhood memories of T.S. Eliot who, oddly, had a cottage at Bosham, while Hutchinson’s mother, Mary, was at West Wittering;  the time when the destroyer serving in the war was bombed by the Germans;  his defence of Lady Chatterley’s Lover by calling on the evidence of Richard Hoggart, then a Lecturer in English at the University of Leicester;  his defence of Kempton Bunton who stole Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington by climbing through the National Gallery’s lavatory windows after hours;  and his mockery of Mary Whitehouse’ s lawyer who brought a case against Michael Bogdanov, the Director of Romans in Britain.   He can still dominate a room with humour, ribaldry and intellectual sarcasm.

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