Today has been Rubens, Rubens, Rubens. Our exhibition is about vastly much more than just Rubens, but is fundamentally about how to get contemporary audiences to engage with Rubens’s stature, not just in his own lifetime across Europe, but his influence on eighteenth-century artists, nineteenth-century artists, and, in the room which has been specially curated by Jenny Saville and added to the exhibition since it was shown in BOZAR in Brussels, on contemporary artists, including Picasso and Sarah Lucas. I think the exhibition looks – but then, of course, I’m prejudiced – pretty wonderful in our big galleries (wall colours chosen by Eric Pearson), which enable the thematic system of organisation to work quite clearly: love, sex, war and poetry; he did them all.
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Stephen Cox (1)
I was asked to come to the unveiling of a new work by Stephen Cox in Apple Tree Yard, where Lutyens worked on the plans for New Delhi and Wheeler’s used to be. It’s at the back of a new building by Eric Parry, with whom Cox has worked before. I realised that the façade of the new building is one I had recently admired in walking across St. James’s Square: quite plain, unornamented, faced in smooth black brick at the upper levels and black porphyry on the piano nobile below, following the rhythms of adjacent buildings, with an effective, semi-classical, big basalt office building behind.
This is the building from St. James’s Square:-
John Bolding & Sons
I came out of Bond Street underground station one morning last week and noticed the elaborate terracotta sign signalling the premises of John Bolding & Sons, of Grosvenor Works in Davies Street. It was a company founded in 1822 in South Molton Lane, a manufacturer and supplier, as the sign says, of sanitary appliances – the highest quality basins and baths to the residents of Mayfair and beyond, made often in brass and technologically sophisticated. It bought out its rival, Thomas Crapper, in 1966, only to go bust three years later:-
The Upholsterer’s Room
We had dinner tonight in the Upholsterer’s Room at the back of A.V.Fowlds, a café in Addington Square off the Walworth Road. It was cold, lit by braziers, but magnificently nineteenth century, with a lorry parked inside and thirty people squished in to eat:-
Bermondsey (2)
We went on an expedition to see an exhibition of knitting at the Fashion and Textile Museum in Bermondsey High Street. I had never been to the museum which has an idiosyncratic coloured façade by the Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta, but which is presumably as much an expression of its former owner, Zandra Rhodes, who established the museum:-
22 Old Bond Street
One of the unexpected consequences of writing this blog is that it has made me pay more attention to buildings which I would otherwise pass by. So it was that yesterday I realised how fine the façade of 22, Old Bond Street is, which I have walked past a thousand times without noticing. Pevsner thinks it likely to be by William Flockhart, who worked for Ricketts and Shannon and whose office was at 27a. He describes it as ‘outrageously lush’. But a bit of lushness cheers up a winter’s afternoon. By chance, David Rosen was there and told me that when he first knew it, it was the office of Hubert Givenchy:-
Melvyn Tan
We went to a small concert performance by Melvyn Tan in Ravenscourt Park, the scene of the first telephone call from Brown’s. He played Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op 7, followed by a series of short pieces based on Bist du bei mir composed in honour of Judith Serota when she stood down as Director of the Spitalfields Festival, together with several more which Melvyn himself had commissioned, two of which were being played for the first time in the composers’ presence. It began with a piece by Judith Weir and included work by Peter Maxwell Davies and Richard Rodney Bennett, each a small distillation of the composer’s style, variously allusive and atonal, played with flourish:
Robert S. Pirie
I have been very sorry to hear news of the death of Bob Pirie, a great book collector and anglophile, lawyer, banker, specialist in the works of Donne, and all-round colourful character. I first met him in Boston in the mid-1970s when he invited me to lunch at the Club of Odd Volumes and I used to see him when I was in New York and vice versa. He was one of the people involved in the early days of the American Associates of the Royal Academy. I will miss his advice.
Late Rembrandt
I slipped into an early morning viewing of Rembrandt:The Late Works, really only to be able to commune with a small number of the greatest works before they return home: the extraordinary Conspiracy of the Batavians under Claudius Civilis which is owned by the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Sweden, but lent to the Nationalmuseum; The Syndics, of course, from the Rijksmuseum; the two portraits from the National Gallery in Washington, acquired, I note, in 1942 (there is detailed information about the provenance of these and other paintings online in order to make clear their immunity from seizure); the astonishing Jacob blessing the Sons of Joseph from Kassel where I have never been; and what is presumed to be his last work, Simeon with the Infant Christ in the Temple, also from Stockholm, so profound even if, or perhaps because, unfinished. As rich an exhibition as I’ve seen in a long while.
Judith Aronson
I have just received in a large brown paper parcel a copy of Judith Aronson’s book, Likenesses. I’ve always liked and admired her photographs, some of which we acquired when I was at the NPG. She knew Avedon when she was a student, but they are much less direct and confrontational than his, more meditative and much more often informal. They’re photographs of a world we have lost (or maybe it’s only I who have lost it), of writers and intellectuals, when ideas ruled the world. I think they’ve just gone on display in Cambridge University Library.
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