Owing to the temporary closure of the Kunstmuseum while it is being renovated, key works have been redistributed to other museums, including some of the greatest works by Holbein which have been redisplayed in a single tall room in the nearly unvisited Museum der Kulturen, including his Dead Christ dated (very conspicuously) 1521:-
Basel is pretty low key for a major art, financial and pharmaceutical city, low rise and much of it is suburban like a large industrial park with smoking chimneys in the distance and the headquarters of Roche right near the centre of town. I got a better sense of it on day two, having entirely missed the historic centre which is extensive and well preserved. It’s a burgher town, grown rich on the banks of the Rhine with old houses and quiet streets:-
We set off to see the Schaulager, one of Basel’s multiple museums, designed, like so much else in Basel, by Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron for the Emanuel Hoffmann Foundation and opened in 2003. It’s not the most beautiful building, a big brown biscuit on three sides, like a Weetabix, with an entrance façade with two large video screens:-
I was really pleased to have a chance to see the Beyeler Foundation, one of the great smaller museums of the world, on the outskirts of Basel looking out over fields. The building was designed by Renzo Piano and opened in 1997: rather classical with red sandstone columns at either end of a temple-like structure; filled with bleached oak floors and the best quality of natural daylight diffused from the ceiling. There is also a quality of it being inside out, with views out into the countryside and the garden, like the de Menil Museum in Houston:-
I’ve never been to the Basel Art Fair before. It’s mildly overwhelming having the whole of the contemporary art world packed into a large Swiss warehouse, gallery after gallery stretching out into the infinite distance. What have I liked ? Pablo Bronstein in Franco Noero, a gallery from Turin. Quite a few Sean Scullys. Some wonderful Christos. New work by Grayson Perry shown by Paragon Press. I particularly enjoyed the showing of large works in the adjacent space under the title Unlimited including work by Ai Weiwei called Stacked (2012):-
And a poignant work by Kader Attia called Arab Spring (2014):-
I have just been to a discussion between Cornelia Parker RA and Jimmy Wales about the embroidery that Cornelia has made based on the Wikipedia entry for Magna Carta. The embroidery is currently (and temporarily) exhibited in the British Library before going on tour to the Whitworth Art Gallery, the Bodleian and other venues. There was an intriguing contrast between Cornelia’s views of Wikipedia as a pre-eminently democratic medium reflecting the voice and, by implication, the views of its individual contributors and Jimmy Wales’s description of the average Wikipedian who is a young, male techie (average age 27). Wales said that bloggers tend to be obsessed by the sound of their own voice whereas Wikipedians are obsessed by the protocols of accuracy.
We made a short excursion this morning to see the Pullens Yard Open Studios, a bit of unexpected late nineteenth-century urban development just south of the Elephant and Castle where James Pullen, a local builder, created an estate of 12 blocks intersected by workshop yards, now occupied by a miscellaneous collection of artists, writers, clothesmakers and a florist, serviced by the Electric Elephant Cafe:-
We slipped into the Chapter House of Canterbury Cathedral in order to see the exhibition of Romanesque stained glass from the South Window. Some of the figures date from before the fire of 1174, so are amongst the earliest stained glass in the country, designed by an artist known only as the Master of Methuselah. They are what remains of 86 figures originally placed in the clerestory of the choir, so invisible to the human eye. This did not prevent an extraordinary display of vigour and humane realism:-
I haven’t been to Cotesbach since December 1973. It’s a Queen Anne house, added to in the later eighteenth century, and owned since 1759 by generations of Marriotts, who tended to be parsons as well as Leicestershire landowners and whose family papers are now preserved as an educational trust:-
After lunch today I was asked if I would be interested in seeing some family albums. I found myself having the unexpected experience of seeing photographs of my father and his sister as children, my grandfather, who I never met and had no real idea of what he looked like, and my great grandfather, the Archbishop of Sydney, at my grandmother’s family house in Hertfordshire. They show a prosperous, rather clannish Edwardian family circle, with a great deal of hunting and endless holidays in Scotland, just before the outbreak of the first world war.
My great grandfather:-
My grandparents’ wedding (my grandmother Muriel had met my grandfather in Sydney):-
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