Tag Archives: England

Olivier Bell

Today is the 98th. birthday of Olivier Bell.   She was was one of the first students at the Courtauld Institute;  a friend and lover of Graham Bell during the second world war;  worked for the Control Commission in Germany after the war as an honorary Colonel restoring works of art to their rightful owners;  was one of the first officers of the newly established Arts Council;  married Quentin Bell, the younger son of Vanessa Bell;  edited Virginia Woolf’s diaries with exemplary precision;  and helped to establish Charleston as an independent trust where she still attends Trustee meetings (as today).   After a lifetime of public service, the government awarded her an MBE in the New Years Honours.   Only about sixty years too late.

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Chatsworth

It’s a long time since I’ve been to the first Duke of Devonshire’s palace in the Peak District, the south front of which was designed by William Talman whilst the Earl of Devonshire (as he then was) was in retreat as MP for Derbyshire, implacably hostile to the actions of the Crown and one of the signatories to the letter inviting William of Orange to invade in defence of protestant liberties.   Quite a medieval act of treachery for such a pillar of the community.   I’ve always been a bit sceptical of the idea that the architecture is in some way a statement of the independence of the post-Revolution nobility, but the internal courtyard is certainly full of martial imagery

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RA Schools (2)

In wandering round the students’ final show yesterday, my eye was caught, as often, by the character of the setting, generations of students passing through and leaving their trace and the casts which were used as a tool for teaching:

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Thomas Heatherwick

I have just been to a talk by Thomas Heatherwick RA.   I have been aware of his work for a long time, ever since we were driving down from Scotland In 1994 and stopped at Belsay, a ruined Greek Revival house outside Newcastle.   English Heritage had commissioned a number of young designers to build so-called ‘sitooteries’, a Scottish term for a small garden pavilion.   Thomas had designed the first and the only one I remember:  a febrile hedgehog of a building which was the precursor of his Expo Pavilion in Shanghai.   But I had never heard him talk before.   I have seldom heard someone talk so inspiringly about the processes of design and making.   He started as a student constructing a small-scale building, because he believed that buildings should be as much about the process of construction as the intellectual analysis of space.   It’s obvious that he’s right, but it’s seldom said.   And he went on to describe his thought process in a whole series of projects up until the Garden Bridge across the Thames.

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RA Schools (1)

Each year, there is a small ceremony for the graduating students of the Royal Academy Schools to receive their diplomas.   Each year, I find it unexpectedly moving witnessing a year group of 17 students, who have moved as a cohort through the experience of the Royal Academy and its art school:  the first year studios with the casts from Sir Thomas Lawrence’s collection hanging on the walls;  the Premiums when their work is exhibited in Burlington Gardens through to their final show in the nineteenth-century studios underneath the exhibition galleries.   Everyone seems to win a prize:  a residency in New York or money for travel.   I once made the mistake of saying that it was privileged (they pay no fees) and saw 17 people looking at me furiously because it’s not privileged having to survive for three years without secure funding.   But at the end it looks and feels worth it.

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Catherine Goodman (16)

I’ve at last come face-to-face with my portrait.   It is (of course) much better than in reproduction and also better in combination with the gallery of other sitters, where it is quite clear that they are effective and successful  interpretations of character, based, as was mine, on ties of friendship and a long process of observation and record:

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I hang next door to Hannah Rothschild who I regard as my companion-at-arms through the process because she took as long and was nearly as difficult to complete:

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Whitechapel Road

In walking to the local post office under the absurd delusion that there might still be a collection on Sunday, I noticed how well the façades of the Whitechapel Road look now that they have been cleaned up under an HLF scheme, dating back from when the road was planned to be Olympic boulevard.   It reveals some of the history of the east end:

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Veronese

We finally made it to the Veronese exhibition yesterday on the penultimate day before it closes:  a wonderful and nicely judged collection of paintings, demonstrating Veronese’s brilliant ability to create massed compositions, rich in visual incident, for the Venetian aristocracy in their villas and estates.   Full of small children, horses, dogs, spectators on distant balconies and beautifully painted fabric (but badly painted hands), many of the paintings are owned by the National Gallery itself, thanks to Charles Eastlake’s autumn shopping trips to northern Italy, armed with government money, when he was able to extract pictures from the impoverished Italian nobility.   Whilst many artists benefit from seeing their work en masse, I wasn’t convinced that this was true for Veronese.   Seeing them all together makes one realise the extent to which he replicates the same compositional formulae, using a wardrobe of cloaks and robes which reappear in different pictures.

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Stonehenge

Some time ago I was asked over the breakfast table if I’d like to visit Stonehenge at dawn.   Of course, I accepted.   So it was that I found myself drinking claret in the Holiday Inn in Solstice Park, part of the horrible detritus which has accumulated beside the A30 on the other side of the roundabout from Stonehenge.   In the morning, we were driven to the new visitor centre designed by Australian architects, Denton Corker and Marshall, a clever piece of unobtrusive design more than a mile away from Stonehenge itself:

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We were then taken to admire the full landscape with its barrows and the so-called cursus, no doubt invisible in the photograph:

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Sir Richard MacCormac (1)

I have just been to the launch of a book that Richard MacCormac (RA) has produced about the house he has lived in in Heneage Street, Spitalfields, and, more importantly, the house next door where Jocasta Innes, his partner for the last three decades, lived.   It’s called Two Houses in Spitalfields.   She bought no.5, which had been built for a brewer, in the late 1970s.   Her daughter, Tabitha, evoked the heroic days of Spitalfields preservation, when their house had few amenities but electric light, Brick Lane had only curry houses, and much of the area was faced by demolition.   The neighbours met one another in a nearby pub and Richard’s house could apparently be reached from Jocasta’s via a secret door made out of a fireplace.   Jocasta died in April 2013.   Her house is now up for sale.   The book is a photographic record.

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