We visited the workshop of Luigi Bevilacqua, which still has fourteen looms from the eighteenth century where they handweave velvets, damasks and brocades to historic patterns. It may just be preserved as a historic relic, but what a relic:-
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Orsoni
We went into the backstreets of Cannaregio to visit Orsoni, an old established industrial manufacturer of mosaics, with an amazing library of mosaic glass, every colour except fuschia:-
Companion Guide to Venice
I was pleased to discover that I still had my original copy of Hugh Honour’s Companion Guide to Venice in my travel cupboard, not the first edition of 1965, but the second edition of 1967, which still has a dutiful copperplate inscription in it that it was given to me by my Aunt Margaret in 1967, presumably for Christmas. This confirms what I had always slightly doubted that my first visit to Venice was in Easter 1968 when I was allowed to stay a couple of nights on my own in a hotel behind the Accademia and explored the city – the Carpaccios in S. Giorgio degli Schiavoni, the Colleoni monument, the Accademia itself – with the Companion Guide in hand.
Piazza S. Marco
I thought I should pay my respects to S. Marco and to hear the band play at Florian’s, but I spent my time instead examining the sculptural decoration on the Procuratie Nuove, begin by Scamozzi in 1586 when the Empire was already in decline:-
A House in Norfolk
I’m not sure that I want to say where we had lunch because it feels like an invasion of privacy: only to say that it’s very nice to be able to visit an unrestored Tudor house, one room deep, with exemplary brick pilasters and remote from the twentieth century apart from the distant noise of the dual carriageway:-
UEA
I love the campus at UEA with Denys Lasdun’s strange space age ziggurats rising out of the parkland and Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre still astonishingly modern in the way that it combines large-scale, semi-industrial space with the intimacy of examining small-scale objects from different visual cultures arranged informally in vitrines across the floor plane:-
Francis Bacon and the Masters
We went on a quick day trip to the Sainsbury Centre to see the exhibition Francis Bacon and the Masters: a wonderful exhibition not just because it helps to demonstrate Bacon’s astonishing visual eclecticism. It’s a completely convincing demonstration of the way his imagination fed on imagery of past art, not only Velázquez, but Titian and Van Gogh and Soutine and Hellenistic sculpture, never copying, but always adapting pose and composition. It’s also a wonderful exhibition for the wealth and range of work lent by the Hermitage, which Bacon never actually visited, but which is able to supply examples of every sort of art that Bacon might have devoured.
The Grafton Galleries
We went to the exhibition Inventing Impressionism at the National Gallery last night. I hadn’t realised how key to a knowledge of Impressionism in London was the comprehensive exhibition held by Paul Durand-Ruel and Sons in the Grafton Galleries in 1905, when Roger Fry became an advisor; nor how large and spacious the Grafton Galleries were, with top-lit exhibition galleries as grand as the galleries at the Royal Academy. Originally in Grafton Street, it is said to have moved to Bond Street, although there is a picture of its grand premises, described as being in Bond Street, in Building News on 6 May 1892 and it is still listed as being in Grafton Street in 1899. It held miscellaneous exhibitions, including Manet and the Post-Impressionists in 1910.
COLLECT
We went to COLLECT at the Saatchi Gallery, as we do every year. I have spent the week puzzling about where the boundary lies between the Crafts and Luxury Goods. It’s true the demarcation lines are being blurred as the Crafts go upmarket, are more expensive, are used for purposes of display, and lose the puritan and utilitarian tradition. It’s probably because there are high charges to exhibit, but I miss a gallery like Cold Press in Holt, which would introduce a touch of desirable austerity. We liked the work of a Japanese jeweller called Kimiaki Kageyama, represented by SO Gallery in Brick Lane:-
The Day After
I have realised that, without exception, my analysis of the likely result was wrong. But I am intrigued that in the sweepstake that I took part in a fortnight ago everyone else was right. Did they know something I didn’t ? I assume it was that, based on the 1992 election, they knew to ignore the polls; that people will wilfully mislead the pollsters; and that when deciding whether to vote with their heart or their wallet, they will always vote with their wallet.
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