Have just been to a talk by Christo: not just a talk, but an event, performance and peroration. He spoke a bit about his life – actually not quite enough: born in Bulgaria, escaped from Prague, educated at the Academy of Fine Arts (as an artist or as an architect ?) in Vienna, moving to Paris and then to New York in 1964 where he has lived in the same tenement block ever since, using the small studio at the top of the building, doing all the work on his projects with his wife Jeanne Claude and without a big office of assistants. He showed images of many of his projects – the Valley Curtain in Colorado, the Running Fence in California, the wrapping of the Reichstag and of the Pont Neuf. It’s completely obvious that he likes the process and politics of the gestation at least as much as the finished result. What wasn’t entirely clear is how he uses the process of drawing which he does after the project has been conceived in order to support it financially. There was a quality of enthusiastic innocence about his presentation which has won over audiences internationally, including most recently in Abu Dhabi where he is building up community support for a project in the desert. So, the question nobody asked is why he’s never done anything in Britain: umbrellas in the Lake District ? wrapping the Royal Academy?
Tag Archives: London
Winterreise
Sunday evening. We went to hear Jonas Kaufmann sing Winterreise in a concert performance at the Royal Opera House. I’ve been brought up on recordings of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau singing them and I got a frisson from hearing them sung so slowly, so quietly and with such extraordinary control, shiveringly not just because they are about winter, the graveyard and snow. At the end, the man behind me said ‘Would you give it a four or a five ?’. A funny comment as if it was a football match against Fischer-Dieskau.
Springtime in Stepney
Having just read an email about how beautiful it is in the Valley of the Kings, I am posting some photographs of how beautiful it is in the Mile End Road:
Marlene Dumas
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).
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
Anselm Kiefer (1)
We had Anselm Kiefer to dinner tonight. Tim Marlow interviewed him about his life and his forthcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy. It turned out that in his childhood, he had wanted to be first Jesus and then the Pope and then decided that it was better to be an artist. Born close to the Rhine, he studied constitutional law at university, influenced by the writings of Montesquieu, and only subsequently attended art school. In other words, he came across as an intellectual first, and an artist only to realise his intellectual vision. Tim asked him if he was a painter of the Sublime in the Burkean tradition. He denied this, but there is surely some truth to it. At least I discovered that the exhibition I remembered of his work at the Riverside Studios in the 1980s did really exist and wasn’t just an effect of false memory.
Tim Marlow and Anselm Kiefer in conversation at the Royal Academy. © Red Photographic
Dinner for Anselm Kiefer at the RA. © Red Photographic
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)
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