It was only when I walked upstairs at the Tate and saw the thickly coagulated pigment of works by Frank Auerbach that I realised how much I had appreciated the beautiful sensuality with which Barbara Hepworth used materials, not just the smooth forms of abstract marble in the mid-1930s, juxtaposed together, but, most especially, her use of wood – holly and lignum vitae, smooth and beautifully polished – and her abstract shapes hollowed out in inverse, sometimes held together in tension with string, from later in the same decade.
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The Front Desk
When we have a very busy exhibition, as Ai Weiwei is, I like to take a turn on the front desk, not to sell tickets (I haven’t had the training), but to observe the responses and reactions of visitors and what it’s like for staff. I could scarcely have chosen a trickier morning as we are having to limit the number of tickets sold on the desk to 25 per half hour, owing to the great number of tickets presold online. What struck me was the infinite patience, tolerance and good humour of those waiting in line, even if they had international flights to catch, and the infinite patience, tolerance and good humour of the person selling tickets in multiple and totally unpredictable combinations. Then I went to see how Edmund de Waal was doing and was conscripted to take the tickets of visitors myself.
Ken Stradling
I was invited by Margaret Howell to see the work she has selected from the Ken Stradling Collection, modernist pieces of glass and furniture which Stradling collected while he was working as a buyer for the Bristol Guild of Applied Art during the 1950s, buying studio glass in Scandinavia. He also acquired furniture designed by Marcel Breuer and made by P.E. Gane, a firm in Bristol run by Crofton Gane who supported and promoted modern design. The work is displayed throughout the shop.
A trip round the galleries
In honour of Frieze week, I did something which I should do more often, namely visit the galleries in the vicinity of the RA, starting at Alan Cristea in Cork Street. He is showing an exhibition of new work by Cornelia Parker, based on photographs of silver ware in Spink which she found in a skip and has converted into short run editions of prints. He also has a room full of installation works by Edmund de Waal and new prints by Michael Craig-Martin.
I liked the exhibition at Ordovas on Savile Row installed round one of Damien Hirst’s sharks and based round the theme of the sea, including a fragment of a Roman sarcophagus, a wonderful Yves Klein and works by Picasso, Francis Bacon and Max Ernst.
The best of the exhibitions I saw was the beautiful and unexpectedly extensive exhibition of early Hockney portrait drawings in the new Offer Waterman gallery in St. George Street. The gallery is an early eighteenth-century house which was once once the showroom of William Morris and has been immaculately converted (look at the oak floorboards). The drawings date back to 1961, when Hockney was still a student at the RCA:-
Charles II
I was on my way to a lecture by Adrien Gardère last night at the Royal Hospital in Chelsea when I nearly bumped into a large gilt statue of Charles II in the so-called Figure Court on the south side. Oddly camp, it was presented in 1682, the year the Hospital opened to treat the victims of the Battle of Sedgemoor and two years after its sculptor, Grinling Gibbons, so much better known for his wood carving, had been made King’s Carver:-
Frieze Masters
Frieze itself was mobbed at opening time, so I was only too happy to walk through the park to Frieze Masters, not so crowded and a bit more thoughtful.
I always like Sam Fogg’s stand, surprised that such great works of medieval art are nearly affordable. This a twelfth century French head of a Christ Child. Only £10,000:-
Hauser and Wirth have a beautiful terracotta model by Henry Moore for his Madonna and Child in St. Matthew, Northampton:-
Gagosian
I started my Frieze day tour at the new Gagosian Gallery on Grosvenor Hill, tucked in behind Alfred’s Club, a grand new space, designed, like Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery, by Caruso St. John, helping to consolidate Mayfair as a place for art as well as fashion. The spaces look good for a small number of big pieces by Cy Twombly.
Shepherd Market
I had a drink tonight in Shepherd Market (named after Edward Shepherd, its architect and the site of the old May Fair) and felt a sudden deep wave of nostalgia for its old, scuzzy character in the days when I worked – rather briefly – as a delivery boy for Heywood Hill. I have resisted nostalgia for old Soho, preferring its new found smartness to its old seediness, but in Shepherd Market I found myself missing the old ambiguity between aristocracy and tarts:-
Will Alsop RA
I was asked to take part in a conversation with Will Alsop held at Phillips as part of Frieze Week, organised by Surface magazine, and chaired by Sarah Thornton, the author of Seven Days in the Art World and 33 Artists in 3 Acts (very good on Ai Weiwei). Two things will stick in my mind. The first is the way that Alsop uses painting rather than drawing as a way of conceptualising a building project, often collaboratively. The second is why it is that Alsop has never been asked to design a museum in spite of his prominence as an architect and the fact that he has a genuine and deep interest in the practice of art. I remembered that he had been on the shortlist for Tate Modern. Nobody mentioned The Public in West Bromwich.
The bust of Charles Raven
In clearing out my study today, an annual ordeal, I came across a curiosity, which I am not even sure I acknowledged when it arrived. Ever since I first met Anthony Caro in the mid-1990s, I have been intrigued that he told me that when he was an undergraduate reading Mechanical Sciences (ie engineering) at Christ’s College, Cambridge, he had done a bust of the then Master, my grandfather Charles Raven. It was Caro’s first – unrecorded – experiment in sculpture. I have often wondered what became of it, as did Caro. No-one, including the College, knew. Then out of the blue came a letter from one of Caro’s college contemporaries containing a misty, but perfectly identifiable, photograph of the undeniably noble, quasi-Roman bust with Caro himself gingerly holding the backcloth behind it. This at least makes it possible to document the bust, and might make it easier to locate it:-
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