Our last appointment in Amsterdam was to go to the Van Loon house where we had arranged to meet Marlene Dumas, who has recently been appointed as an Honorary RA. She said that she hadn’t been sure whether to accept or not, but did so on behalf of women artists everywhere. I attach a photograph of us both raising a glass to this (sorry about my suit).
Tag Archives: England
Gillian Naylor (1)
I’ve just been to the funeral of Gillian Naylor, with whom I worked very closely all through the 1980s when I was at the V&A and she was Senior Tutor in the Department of Cultural History at the Royal College of Art. It’s odd how much one finds out about someone, but only after they die when friends from different stages of their life come together. She read modern languages at Somerville in the early 1950s, then worked for Design Magazine in the late 1950s. The shocking aspect of her life was that she had to resign from her job at the Council of Industrial Design when she became pregnant in 1962. The father of her child was never revealed and the great tragedy was that her son Tom drowned in the Thames on his seventeenth birthday. This must have been in 1980. They played In Paradisum from Faure’s Requiem which had been played at Tom’s funeral and we then carried her coffin through the Crematorium to another chapel. I couldn’t understand why the coffin was so heavy. It had apparently been filled with Tom’s books.
Gillian Erica Naylor
12th August 1931 – 14th March 2014
Charleston Literary Festival
We’ve just had a very nice event to celebrate 25 years of the Charleston Literary Festival. I think I have gone every year for the last twenty. Every year a treat, full of unexpected literary, dramatic and occasionally political pleasures. In my speech, I tried to remember the best intervention by a member of the audience, which was when Lisbet Rausing asked a question of Adam Nicolson which made a connection between his admiration of the patriarchal values of the traditional landed aristocracy in Great Britain and the values of the Estonian aristocracy before the second world war. And what had that led to ? The point was that the audience always knows at least as much as the speakers.
Christopher Ondaatje, Nigel Newton and Charles in the Academicians’ Room or the Royal Academy © Axel Hesslenberg
Edmund de Waal
Yesterday we went down to Margate to see Edmund de Waal’s new installation called Atmosphere, porcelain bowls hung in rows with musical intervals in front of the great East window looking out to the north sea. The Dean of Canterbury was there and the Canterbury Cathedral choir. They sang motets from the balcony and it was obvious that his work is a form of monastic contemplation stripped to shape and the space in between, although he talked more of Constable and Turner looking up at the clouds and the dissolution of the distant horizon.
Foxcroft and Ginger
At long last, there are signs that the new London has arrived in Stepney. We’re able to have eggs and bacon in Foxcroft and Ginger, the new, so-called ‘artisan bakery’ which has been installed in the old Wickham’s Department Store, which English Heritage has shamefully failed to list in spite of being one the grandest buildings in the old East end and the subject of a memorable eulogy in Nairn’s London.
A developer has bought the building and installed work units upstairs. Now we don’t have to go to Spitalfields for bread and cappuccino. Farewell to the chicken shops which have traditionally lined the Mile End Road!
Civilisation
It’s a long time since I’ve been on the Today programme, two minutes of ephemeral fame, talking about Tony Hall’s proposal that the BBC should remake Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation ‘for the digital age’. Of course, the whole point of Civilisation is that it’s not about the digital age, because it’s about the message, not the medium. And nobody made the point that nowadays Kenneth Clark wouldn’t get the role: wrong voice, wrong class, wrong teeth, wrong views. My candidates, for what they’re worth, are Jessica Rawson, Lisa Jardine or Mary Beard.
Catherine Goodman (3)
Have just been for my third sitting. I was asked to take a picture of the studio which is magnificent in its picturesque neglect, but it feels intrusive to ask, disturbing the privacy not just of the studio, but of the sitting. We listened to Mahler’s third symphony in the intervals of painting and desultory talking of music, friends, the Veronese exhibition at the National Gallery and why I had never visited India.
Burlington Project (1)
We have just had a breakfast for our patrons encouraging them to come up with the last £6 million required to fund the Burlington Project. At last, it looks and feels like reality: a project team in place; £30 million raised; the plans all in place; all we need is the remainder of the funding. I was asked what would happen if we don’t have all the funding in place by the autumn. I’m confident that we will. For anyone who is interested in what we are up to, we’ll provide a link to the little film which explains the project.
(full video)
Catherine Goodman (2)
I’ve just been for my second sitting with Catherine, bicycling all the way from Stepney to Flood Street in the early morning sun. I’ve realised that it’s different sitting to a woman than to a man: more companionable; more about psychology than pure observation. She switches between conversational mode and painting and I learn a bit about what it was like to be at the Royal Academy Schools in the early 1980s when Peter Greenham was Keeper and it was all about figurative painting, no abstraction allowed, and the staff included Anthony Eyton and Olwen Bowey, both long – standing RAs. There’s an invisible community amongst those of us being painted for Catherine’s exhibition at the NPG, as we exchange places in her studio, talk about one another, but never meet. I can’t help wondering if it was like this for Reynolds’ s sitters as they went in and out of his studio on Leicester Fields, very punctually on the hour. We had Delius today, rather than Bach.
Chiarascuro
Good opening for Chiarascuro, a most beautiful exhibition from the collections of the Albertina and Georg Baselitz. I particularly like the design by Eric Pearson which is dark and atmospheric and creates the feeling of a print room with dark colours and desk cases and labels with a thin red rim. The Old Master specialists were out in force and Baselitz gave the opening speech.
Gallery view in Renaissance Impressions
| Charles | Saumarez | Smith | 
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