I’ve just been to a fascinating evening in celebration of the talks programme organised by Frieze Masters, whereby well known artists, including Phyllida Barlow  and Bill Kentridge and Edmund de Waal, are interviewed by princes of the art world like Wim Pijbes, the Director of the Rijksmuseum, and Luke Syson of the Met.   The idea, which lies at the heart of Frieze Masters, is of crossover between money and fashion, which help to drive the contemporary art world, and connoisseurship, which still more or less dominates the experience of Old Master painting.   So in celebration of this crossover, Gucci had taken over the Italian embassy for the evening.   Instead of a formal evening, it was full of models who had suffered a lifetime of malnutrition and rock music in amongst the tapestries:  perhaps not quite enough to eat.

Last year I was asked to take the RA patrons round Frieze Masters.   It’s not an easy task because an art fair is necessarily a pot-pourri full of the unexpected.   Last year the highlight was Hans Kraus showing us his Julia Margaret Cameron album, a nearly complete set of her photographs with inscriptions, as well as the discovery of a dealer selling Eskimo art.   This year, our favourites were Sam Fogg’s stand, which had a very beautiful Spanish wooden head:

And a French early sixteenth century painting:

Danny Katz had a beautiful Spanish crucifixion:

And we especially enjoyed the kunstkammer of Peter Freeman and Georg Laue, which had an amazingly delicate 17th. century South German Turned Cup, still with its original case:

And a mid eighteenth-century Spanish head of Saint John of Sahagún: