A Week at the Edinburgh Festival

Just back from a week in Edinburgh, visiting my sister, celebrating my birthday, and Doing the Festival! This is what we did, each with a mini-review in case you're thinking of going to any of them yourself:

Monday:
Walked along the Water of Leith to Dean Village (beautiful) to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art to see the exhibitions of new work by Hiroshi Sugimoto and a retrospective of drawings and sculptures by Tony Cragg. Thumbs up for Sugimoto (who I like anyway) especially for Lightning Fields, which manages to capture forms from bursts of energy which seem to be alive, like weird sea creatures from the bottom of the ocean... Photogenic Drawing (blow up prints of Fox Talbot images from the 1840s) seemed more of an academic experiment. Take-it-or-leave-it thumbs for Tony Cragg - I like those weird sculptures that look like lots of faces in profile but after a while it is all the same.

Midnight till 2 am: 'Political Animal' at The Stand, politically satirical stand-up hosted by Andy Zaltzman. His bits in between the guests were the best and funniest thing about it so if you're not sure and don't want to stay out late then I'd go for his 'Armchair Revolutionary' show instead! But it fulfilled all my expectations of the Fringe! Late night comedy stand up in basement bars... So worth it for the experience alone.

Tuesday:
'The Proceedings of that Night': Excellent. This will probably turn up on Radio 4 at some point. Short single-hander play about an actor recording a ghost story for radio, inexplicably all alone late at night in an isolated recording studio... As he reads it the ghost story starts to fight back. Truly spooky!

'Blood and Roses': also really good. A promenade play, where we turned up to a meeting point in St George's West church and were given headsets to listen as the play played out in our heads, while we followed an usher who led us round nearby streets and into spookily dressed staged spaces. A love story through different times and places, with some witches thrown in for good measure.

Wednesday:
'The Queen: Art and Image' at the Scottish National Gallery. Not that I'm a patriot but I thought this was a really interesting exhibition - about celebrity, the developing image of the Queen over the long period of her reign, how this image is manipulated according to political events or popular opinion, especially the need to make her increasing accessible to her subjects... Plus many of the world's greatest artists have photographed or painted the Queen and there were some iconic and beautiful images. In particular I was struck by 'Lightness of Being' by Chris Levine (do a Google Image search), the accidental portrait taken while the Queen rested her eyes between long exposures while he worked on the actual portrait. Both are in the show and are holographic, so the reproductions don't really capture how the images follow you around the room...

Explored the craft market in the graveyard of St Johns church. Bought a cheese knife with a handle made from bracingly scented juniper wood as a memento.

National Museum of Scotland - which has recently reopened its doors after a major refurbishment lasting more than a decade I think. They have done major work on restoring the Victorian building, and the natural history displays are spectacular - particularly as they have a contemporary feel yet are inspired by the original Victorian approach - and I spent quite a lot of time in there. However I found the rest of it - the, er, art - disappointing and I am sorry to say the Islamic displays were risible.

Thursday:
A discussion at the Book Festival about Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, marking the centenary of his birth this year. This was K's choice and it was nice to do something at the book festival - most of the interesting talks were happening the following week... I hadn't read any Czeslaw Milosz - had hardly even heard of him - but it was a really interesting session, with some of his poetry read out, in English translation as well as in the original Polish, and I certainly will investigate him now.

'The Conference of the Birds': this was Isla's choice, a student production (we had had lunch that day with the Islamic history tutor of some of them!) which used a lot of physical theatre to depict this allegory of the world's birds undergoing trials and tribulations while they search for their king, the Simurgh (for which, read God). But it was really well done, and really nice to see something quite experimental - took me back to my own days of student theatre.

Friday:
My birthday! I am officially in my late 30s now. We took a trip to the seaside - driving along the East Lothian coast to Gullane where we had a wonderful 2-hour walk along its sandy beaches and back along its dunes, before heading for North Berwick for lunch - a feast of lobster and chips from the wonderful and much-to-be-recommended Lobster Shack at the harbour... We saw the lobsters being delivered (still alive of course) so they were totally fresh and absolutely delicious!



Pudding was Signor Luca ice cream (made with all local ingredients) while sitting on the sea wall looking out to the sheer rockfaces of the Bass Rock with its colony of tens of thousands of seabirds... It was gorgeously sunny and warm so K and I got a bit burned while Isla just went a deeper brown as she always does!

Back to Edinburgh in time to see 'Cowboys and Aliens' at the cinema - there was some low-brow activity as well!

Saturday:
'Me, Myself and Miss Gibbs': a really original show put together by Francesca Millican-Slater, which tells the story of a postcard she picked up in a junk shop in Devon, sent on 15 July 1910 to a Miss L. Gibbs, instructing her to 'Be Careful Tomorrow'. Francesca became obsessed by the postcard and about trying to track down Miss Gibbs and why she should be careful tomorrow... It was a really interesting little detective story, beautifully presented (best use of an OHP I've ever seen I think), told from the perspective of her personal journey to find out what she did, how she felt about the 'historical stalking' she was doing, who she met along the way... Really excellent.

After this we wandered up to the Farmers' Market on Castle Terrace, catching it just before everyone packed up for the day, and had the most amazing Aberdeen Angus beefburgers! Followed, somewhat later, after some lazy wandering and provision-purchasing (can't leave Scotland without some hot-smoked salmon, though the preferred Hebridean Smokehouse variety - smoked in peat, yum! - was not in evidence), by a tray of macaroons at Valvona & Crolla's VinCaffè...


That evening, opening night of 'The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle' at King's Theatre. This was the only thing we did as part of the actual, original 'International Festival'. My sister and I both really loved Haruki Murakami's book, though K hadn't read it so I think he spent most of the performance wondering what on earth was going on. It was really well produced and staged, with lots of interesting projection and puppetry, and I enjoyed the mix of Japanese and English language... K said the next day that the memory of the performance seemed like a hallucination which was exactly the nature of the book, so an amazing achievement, really, to capture its surreal nature.

There was much more food, drink, meeting up with friends, chatting, walking, exploring my sister's new neighbourhood (she now has her own flat off Leith Walk)... It was exhilarating and exhausting! Back to work for a rest!

Henry Moore and the Jets

K ponders the Harrier, one of the two fighter planes in this year's Duveens Commission

That title might suggest this posting might actually be about Henry Moore, whereas the only link is Tate Britain - and I just couldn't resist the rock'n'roll title, Henry Moore being possibly the person I least associate with rock'n'roll....!

James commissioned us to go along to Tate and assess this year's Duveens Commission, Harrier and Jaguar, by artist Fiona Banner - so we thought we would combine it with going to see the Henry Moore exhibition before it closed. Nothing much to say about that - apart from, as K observed, grouping a whole load of Henry Moores together in an enclosed space does nothing for one's appreciation of his wonderfully abstract creations. Each one needs to be contemplated on its own terms, the way you do when you stumble across them as public sculpture, but in an exhibition environment, after a while you get fatigued by the requirement to give each one an equal share of your intellectual capacity...

The most memorable thing for me was the room dedicated to the series of drawings he made during the Second World War, especially of coal miners in Yorkshire, and of sheltering women and children in the tunnels and platforms of the London Underground. Inevitably the hundreds of sleeping figures take on the ghostly feel of Moore's signature 'recumbent forms'...

But to the Jets. As an aviation journalist who appreciates art and museums, James was keen to know what we - as two curators - thought of the current installation of two fighter planes in the neoclassical surrounds of the Tate's Duveen gallery, the implication being they had become art objects rather than objects of destruction. I am going to attempt to get my thoughts on all this in some sense of order for him here.

The first thing is that it is completely awe-inspiring. You see the jets first as beautifully-designed objects, and then you remember that they are designed that way in order to be more effective killing machines. This creates a sense of tension and awkwardness inside you which is the essence of the artist's intention, I think. This is especially so with the Jaguar, cleverly shown upside down, so you find yourself admiring the sleek engineering of its under-carriage, and then discover you're face-to-face with its gun ports.


I don't know if I'm using the correct terminology to describe any of these bits of the plane, and in fact my utter ignorance of this type of object was also part of what disconcerted me about their display. I didn't know if what I was looking at had been 'interpreted' by the artist in any way (and the text on the wall panel didn't clarify that for me, even when I finally read it) - I didn't know if the suggestion of feathers painted on the wings, nose and tail of the Harrier Hawk were put there by the artist or whether they were part of the original design of the planes; I didn't know if a Jaguar normally looked that shiny. Having watched an interesting short film about it on the Tate website (what a joy, may I say, to listen to an artist being so articulate about their work), I now know that the Jaguar was stripped back and polished for the exhibition, but there was something unsettling about my ignorance at the time I was looking at them.


I wonder if this is a female response? Most of the men visiting the galleries seemed inexorably drawn to the planes and seemed to want to 'explain' them to the women they were with - I suppose a symptom of making Airfix models as boys, and all wanting to grow up to be fighter pilots... One man - and this was extremely perturbing - posed for several photographs standing astride the long nozzle projecting from the front of the Jaguar, so blatantly phallic. These photos were being taken by a female friend or partner who seemed to think it all very amusing, but you felt you were intruding on something too intimate - not to say vulgar and rather pathetic - to be out in the open like that.

I felt the planes were poised as if they had just come to land - crash landed in the case of the upside-down Jaguar, though obviously there was no damage to it. The Harrier was just hovering with its nose a few inches off the ground, as if it had just plunged through the roof and caught in the branches of a tree or something - though the curator in me wanted to know more about the superstructure supporting it in that position... There was something slightly sinister about the 'greyed-out' appearance of both cockpits - I felt if I looked too closely I'd see someone in there, a dead pilot perhaps.

I suppose that was the tension surfacing again, the fact that you are so strongly aware of these objects' original function - these are both actual decommissioned planes which have seen action in recent international conflicts: the Jaguar was in Desert Storm. I felt happier - if that's the word - comforted even, that this meant they were authentic - that we were not just looking at them as gratuitous symbols of conflict, they had actually been there. Though, again, the tension, the unsettling awkwardness...

The polished, seemingly silver-plated, precious-metal surface of the Jaguar now reflects the architecture of the galleries enclosing them, and more than one person was taking photographs of this artistic reflection. This is deliberately part of Fiona Banner's effect - the Tate built with the funds from slavery, in the neoclassical style that was the symbol of empire at the time it was built, now housing these modern symbols and tools of empire. The display works because of its environment, in a more successful way than I have seen for a long time - seeing the planes in that space generates thoughts and feelings which I can't imagine thinking if I saw the planes in a airplane hangar or in an aviation museum. Perhaps I would, but there is something about the creative intent behind stripping and decorating them in this way, the whole idea that they are now art, that makes you look at them in a completely different way. Well, it provokes thought, and that has to be a good thing in an art installation.

So thanks James for our own commission! My head was so deeply buried in the ground during the last few months that I didn't even know about it, so I'm grateful for the excuse it gave me to start to reopen my eyes to the outside world.

Two pots

In honour of our new Ceramics Study Galleries - the break-neck project I have been working on full-time for the last 9 months, which had their gala opening last night, and which open to the public tomorrow - I wanted to blog about two pots I have acquired recently.


This vase was designed by Keith Murray for Wedgwood in the 1930s. Murray was trained as an architect and brought an architectural eye to his ceramic designs. My colleague, the curator of modern and contemporary ceramics, tells me that he thinks Murray was one of the best Modernist designers for pottery, and I love its simple yet very structural elegance. This design was glazed in this 'Moonstone' white, in an olive green, and a metallic grey, and other versions of it were made with more and thinner ribs, and in different functional forms including a gorgeous pair of bookends which I would love to have! You can find more info here on the Museum's example of this vase - with a rather better photograph.

This is the only thing I chose to keep from among K's grandparents' possessions. He made a long list, including the two bookcases which arrived in time for lunch on Easter Sunday, probably made in the 1930s as well, so the vase looks right at home on top of them, in the corner of a 1930s flat. I was invited to keep whatever I liked, but the only thing that had always rather caught my eye was this vase - tucked away on top of the kitchen cabinets and wonderfully unfussy in the context of Betty and Robert's rather more decorative taste... Apparently when they had valuers in to assess their collection, it was the only thing that they said was really worth anything. But it was already spoken for.


And facing it, a rather different object. This is a late 19th-century storage jar which I bought in Tunisia recently. Again it is very close to one we have in the collection, which was acquired in 1894, which therefore helps me to date this one.

I was in Mahdia, and finally had a bit of free time to wander around in the souk of that small and special town. Two of us went to buy a present for the lady who had done most of the organising of the Summer School (which I will write about soon!) and we had been directed by some colleagues to a street that was slightly off the beaten tourist track, where there were looms and textile shops. We bought her a lovely silk scarf (and one each for ourselves, ahem) then before we knew it had been lured into a neighbouring shop. It was all shiny touristy kitsch in which I had no interest at all, and we disengaged ourselves pretty quickly, but the kindly gentleman proprietor was not going to give up that easily and asked if he could show us one last thing in the shop opposite. As we stepped in, I could see there were some genuine antiques in here and said to myself "Aaah, this is the real stuff" - which he heard so of course we started talking about the fact that I worked in a museum in London which had some Tunisian ceramics in its collection, and which I had been looking at recently for the Study Galleries.

I had sort of promised K that I wouldn't buy any pots on this trip (since I have rather a habit of doing so and we are running out of space in our small flat...) but I couldn't resist when I saw the collection of 19th-century wares he had underneath a table loaded with jewellery - forgive the Orientalist simile, but was a true Aladdin's cave! My only consideration was size and which one I could feasibly fit into my suitcase! I had run out of dinars so paid him in sterling - £40 which I thought was a complete bargain!!

The shopowner - Mr Ben Rhouma - said he acquired the pots from people who had them in their homes, inherited from forebears, and knew that the occasional tourist liked to buy them, so sold them to him for a bit of ready money. He does nothing at all to them, so it was a bit cobwebby and still is a bit dusty, but since learning how to clean pots for our Ceramics Project I will be applying my cotton swab any time now. There is a broken section at the rim, but the piece was inside, and one of my conservator colleagues has loaned me some paraloid and instructions for how to reattach it in a conservation-approved manner.

Two pots, completely different aesthetics, but I love them both, and the memories they conjure.

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And thank goodness the project has finally come to a triumphant close! The galleries look amazing - "overwhelming" and "awe-inspiring" were some of the phrases that people mentioned to me last night. They are visible storage galleries with massed groupings of objects organised geographically and chronologically, but the sheer quantity and scale is so impressive, it takes your breath away. But now it is time for a holiday. On Friday morning at the crack of dawn we leave for North Uist to visit my sister, chill out for a week, visit seal colonies, eat smoked salmon, and read the 3 for 2 book selection I acquired in Waterstone's in Hereford last weekend (having finally come to the end of the 3000-and-some-pages of the Baroque Cycle - magnificent, but it has taken me 6 months!!). So I'll check in again in a couple of weeks. Over and out.

Van Gogh's Letters

Letter 902 from Vincent to Theo van Gogh - the last letter he ever wrote his brother

Just in from seeing the current Van Gogh exhibition at the Royal Academy with my parents. Though I usually steer well clear of anything that smacks of Impressionism at the Royal Academy - since the crowds at those shows are legendary - my mother likes to get in touch with her Dutch roots when anything Netherlandish comes on, and I wanted to see the exhibition since reading a review of the latest edited volume of Van Gogh's letters in the LRB. (My father lasted about 20 minutes in the exhibition - which was, admittedly and expectedly, absolutely packed - and K went to see the Paul Sandby show of 18th-century watercolours, 'Picturing Britain', instead!)

Van Gogh was an inveterate letter-writer - after an exhausting day of painting, he would sit down and write screeds of correspondence, most often to his brother Theo, to whom he wrote nearly 1000 letters. These would describe in detail the paintings he was in the process of making, regularly including sketches or studies, with indications of how he intended to colour them... His philosophy of painting and the gradual deterioration of his mental state plays out in the pages of these letters, and the exhibition nicely brought together the finished oils themselves with pen and ink sketches or studies - which were often beautiful in their own right, occasionally more so than the paintings - with the letters, sympathetically mounted so you could see both sides, and with selected quotations from the letters on the labels, serving to elucidate the art.

It was nicely done, though huge. And as usual at the RA (I find) very little wider context. So no explanation, for example, of why Van Gogh suddenly switches from Dutch to French in his correspondence with his brother. And not arranged particularly chronologically - except for the last room, which contains the landscapes he painted when he was in the mental asylum in Auvers-sur-Oise, in the last months of his life. You're just expected to know the key events and moments of Van Gogh's career, which I don't - perhaps the result of not having come to any of the RA's previous Impressionist exhibitions.

My overriding impression was of the tragedy of Van Gogh's life. He had such a close relationship with his brother - they died within a year of each other. Theo was not only his main source of finance, but his main advocate and guide in the development of his artistic career - keeping him informed of developments in Paris, as Van Gogh taught himself to paint in the area round The Hague. Van Gogh was obviously hyper-sensitised to colour and his surroundings, I presume a consequence of his mental illness - something I had not really noticed before, perhaps from never having seen so many of his art works together in one place. Amazingly, in the last 70 days of his life, he painted more than 70 canvases. He was obviously working at such a frenzied peak of activity that ultimately it was too much for him to sustain, and he shot himself.

But it was the love and closeness that the two brothers had for each other that really came through for me - and perhaps mainly because I had read the LRB review, since there was not too much about this in the text panels. All the letters have been fully edited, translated and published - a small investment of £325, or you can view everything online in facsimile (for free!) here.

Saturdays in the British Library

This has been our habit for a goodly while now, but since the start of the year, it has become a regular routine. There is something very relaxing about spending a quiet day in the library - when you're academics like us, and what you love doing is your research, yet have such hectic, crazy jobs that largely involve meeting other people's deadlines so that research gets pushed to the sidelines, ie your own time. It gives us the chance to spend a companionable day together, and we get on with work we need or want to do.


The British Library is an amazing building - the largest public building erected in the UK during the 20th century, apparently. K calls it 'the ziggurat of learning', and there is something awe-inspiring about approaching the building across that wide open plaza - which sits atop six storeys of book stacks - with the neo-Gothic spires of St Pancras station encrusting its horizon. It's so well-designed to frame the view of that historic building, and be sympathetic to its environment yet architecturally assertive at the same time.

We've taken to using the Manuscripts Reading Room. This is because K regularly looks at actual manuscripts, though I can make no such claim. Humanities I is the biggest reading room, which tends to get packed out with undergraduates. Serious readers use Rare Books & Music instead. Scholars ascend the conspicuously located staircase to the ivory tower that is Manuscripts, which is always pleasantly empty, dotted with academics engaged in the serious business of primary research. I call up printed books, which the librarians at the issuing counter are so uninterested in that they rarely even ask me which desk number I am sitting at when I go to collect them. That is after they have looked down their noses at me for only consulting printed works produced during the 20th or 21st centuries.

It's always pleasantly sociable too. The library is often packed on a Saturday - we're not the only saddoes that spend their weekends engaged in intellectual pursuits. Most of the other readers are regulars, and creatures of habit, who usually sit at the same desks or put their coats and bags away in the same lockers. We certainly do. And we're often bumping into people we know. We see Patricia there on such a regular basis that we often have lunch together.

And then at the end of a productive day, you file out feeling virtuous, and because it's only 5 o'clock, there's still a whole evening of relaxing ahead of you.

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After the library yesterday, we headed for Chinatown for an early dinner, and then to the theatre - the Donmar Warehouse for the last-night performance of Red, the new play by John Logan about Mark Rothko during the years he was working on the Seagram commission. You can read my post about last year's exhibition at Tate Modern, which reunited those paintings, here. The play was absolutely fantastic - I had forgotten it was the last night, but clearly knew that when I booked the tickets, and in retrospect it made sense of the almost violently passionate performances that the only two characters presented last night. Though perhaps that's how it's been every night. Alfred Molina kissed his hand to the stage when they went out after their second curtain call.

The Donmar is a fantastically intimate almost in-the-round space, which seats only 250 people and puts on amazing shows. We went to see Life is a Dream there with Gareth last year, which was also a revelation. The set for Red was Rothko's studio in the Bowery, and the designers had recreated the feeling of being in a real artist's studio, with every surface encrusted with dried (red) paint. The centrepiece was a gigantic 'easel' from which hung a series of really good replica Rothkos - I would love to know how they got that genuine oil painting feel. Each 'scene' was punctuated by a different painting - Rothko and his studio assistant (played by Alfred Molina and Eddie Redmayne, both excellent) would lower the canvas on its pulley system and carry it over to the back wall of the theatre where there was a stack of 'in progress' canvases, and bring out another one. As the play went on, and Rothko's mood became darker and more despairing - as he realised the ultimate irony, tragedy even, of hanging his paintings on the walls of a fashionable New York restaurant - more and more black took over the surface of those pulsating (the word used in the play) red canvases...

The play itself was a battle of words and wits between Rothko - as the synecdoche of the past-it generation of Abstract Expressionists - and his young assistant - a painter himself, of the Pop Art generation. It was about art and philosophy, seeing and thinking, but also about ageing and the human urge to hang on to a past that seems to be slipping away. They had sold out of all the scripts, but the next time we're at the National Theatre I plan to buy a copy in the bookshop and read it again, since the writing seemed to capture that intangible ability to talk about art, as well as the spiritual quality of those Seagram paintings.

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It was the second amazing thing we'd seen in as many nights. On Friday night we saw Un Prophète - the new Jacques Audiard film - at the Ritzy. It's been haunting both of us ever since. It's gritty and hard to watch sometimes, but slow-moving and meditative too, and newcomer Tahar Rahim, who is in almost every frame, is just fantastic.

I've been trying to relax in the evenings this week. I sent off the article on Almoravid religious architecture on Sunday night and have been feeling pretty exhausted as a result of not really having had a break the last two weekends straight. And since things are heating up with the Ceramics Galleries installation phase, I need to be on the ball. I've been waking myself up thinking about it quite a bit lately - usually about 2.30 in the morning, I wake up with music playing in my head, and work thoughts crowding in, and the only way to drown them out is to play myself back to sleep with something on the iPod. I've also gone and got a stinking cold, which hit me out of nowhere mid-week, so I have been feeling a bit under par. I still managed to get all my ceramics labels written and sent off on time though!

As I was going to St Ives...

I met a man with seven wives
Each wife had seven sacks
Each sack had seven cats
Each cat had seven kits
Kits, cats, sacks, wives
How many were going to St Ives?

The traditional answer to this riddle is 1 ("I") though it turns out there are a surprising number of philosophical and mathematical interpretations of this old nursery rhyme - which you can read here.


In any case, on this occasion, there were two of us. K and I spent a week's retreat in a lovely 18th-century stone cottage in St Ives, which we have rented a couple of times before, as a Christmas hideaway. This time we went over New Year. We couldn't remember exactly when we had been before (our collective short term memory is terrible), but there we were in the comments book, Christmases 2005 and 2006. We had to cut the second trip short, since K's grandmother, Betty, died. I suppose we have always harboured a sense of unfulfillment, so it was wonderful to be coming back.

As usual, my full set of photos are over on Flickr - you should see my slideshow in the window below, otherwise click here.

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It's the perfect cottage for two, and was an excellent find - though I did spend the equivalent of several days online until I found it!


St Ives is also the perfect destination - we can get there by train, which is essential since neither of us can drive (and we've discovered it helps if you treat the loooong train journey as part of the holiday!); it's beautiful and picturesque, full of traditional granite houses, whitewashed with slate rooves covered with lichen, giving the town its distinctive range of colours; it's by the sea - and for some reason I am always drawn to the sea, I could sit and stare at it for hours ... as well as being surrounded by amazing landscape; and it's got Culture, all of the above having attracted a colony of artists to settle there since the late 19th century, but made most famous by the likes of Barbara Hepworth and Bernard Leach, as well as the 'primitive' (such a disparaging adjective) local fisherman and artist, Alfred Wallis, whose work I love. In fact, 'our' cottage is right opposite Barbara Hepworth's former studio - now a small museum and sculpture garden, which is a wonderful and inspiring place to visit, even though freezing cold in the winter! I love her sculptures, which can also be seen in various spots around the town.


This strong artistic legacy - which I always intend to learn more about and never get round to - led to the foundation of an outpost of the Tate there in 1993, in this retro-Modernist building, in homage to the importance of abstract modernists such as Hepworth and her husband Ben Nicholson to the history of the town.

Every time I visit, I am disappointed that there is no permanent corner of the gallery given over to the history of art in St Ives. Their temporary exhibitions always feature the work of local artists but, alas, you cannot learn anything about the history or artistic trends sponsored by this local community by visiting the gallery whose very existence is due to their fame and their legacy. I seem to write this on the evaluation form each time I go and it obviously has no influence! No Alfred Wallis on display anywhere this time around - and I have to say we did not think much of the current exhibition. One of the problems with having such a strong architectural space, which responds to and encompasses views of the sea and the landscape within two of the major gallery spaces, is that the artwork on display within has to be really strong to compete with what is around and outside. I am always far more interested in gazing out of this picture window than I am in gazing at the works behind me.


A highlight of this trip was our first visit to the Bernard Leach Pottery, which reopened in March 2008 after a major refurbishment. The old pottery workshop has been really sympathetically restored so it very much has the feel of a functioning pottery, from which the potters have just stepped out for the moment, and you can watch a fascinating film made in the 1950s, showing Leach and his studio in action, with a recent voiceover from one of the potters who worked there at the time. Leach was the founding father of British studio pottery and was deeply influenced by his time in Japan, and the new areas of the building reflect that by having a very Zen style to them - low wooden buildings with walkways between, housing a modern pottery which continues the Leach tradition of teaching through working. We bought two very beautiful black, salt-glazed mugs as a memento - I am drinking my morning coffee out of one right now! - but I could have totally bankrupted myself in the shop...

Another highlight was unexpectedly seeing a pod of dolphins playing in the sea off Porthmeor Beach. After visiting the Leach Pottery, we wandered back down to the sea, to sit and eat our packed lunch of Cornish pasties. Suddenly several specks appeared in the water, which we gradually realised were fins. There were at least 10 of them, quite close to the beach, and after weaving their way deeper out to sea, some of them started leaping and playing in the waves. Porthmeor Beach is popular with surfers because of the size of its waves, and the dolphins seemed to be joining in! In fact one of them made its way quite close to one of the surfers who was out that day - crazy dude - but then backed off again when it seemed to realise it was just a human being. It was amazing! They played like that for about 20 minutes. I unsuccessfully attempted to take some photographs - K much more sensibly filmed them:

When I looked up from this spectacle, the whole length of the beach and the edges of the surrounding cliffs were lined with people all watching - it was great, how this unexpected event of nature really wowed everyone and drew them all together.

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On past visits, because we have been there over Christmas, everything has been closed so there was very little pressure to do anything... More was open this time, but for the first few days we still managed to resist doing very much at all. Relaxing was what we were there for after all. We had ordered our groceries via a Tesco delivery and were both rather surprised when this actually arrived without any fuss on Monday morning - on past trips, we've got to the cottage, unpacked our suitcases, then lugged them by bus to the out-of-town supermarket to stock up. No such hassle this time! After which we promptly nested. I don't think we did all that much for the first couple of days apart from snuggle up in front of the wonderful log fires that K built and read our books.


Yes it really was that cosy!

We just took a little light reading with us...


We were there for New Year's Eve which is a big deal in St Ives. We had heard rumours about it but didn't really know what to expect. We went out at the start of the evening for a pre-prandial drink at The Sloop Inn - a wonderfully atmospheric pub on the harbour-front which they say dates back to 1312, and which you have no problem imagining smugglers and pirates frequenting... as indeed they were this evening, since as we sat there a steady stream of people in fancy dress, some of it extremely elaborate, came and went at the bar...


Basically everyone in town dresses up in fancy dress, and the small town is inundated by people from around Cornwall and beyond, also dressed up in fancy dress... Apart from the many smugglers and pirates, we saw quite a few Roman centurions, some Darleks, quartets of people dressed up as all the characters from the Wizard of Oz, and a veritable menagerie of people dressed up as animals... Thus attired, an enormous street party ensues! We popped back out again just before midnight and joined the throngs congregated around the harbour, where the tide was far out, and at midnight people started letting off fireworks on the beach. The whole thing had a great happy buzz about it, and was a really fun way to see the New Year in! (though we did so in our normal clothing!)



St Ives has also got some really top-class cafes and restaurants: we tried some new ones this time, spurred on by the recommendations in June's issue of Olive, the foodie magazine we subscribe to. Some of these places did not even exist the last time we were there! Cornish cream tea in the Porthminster Beach Cafe was particularly fine - I think it's the clotted cream that does it! Though the amazing views of the sea help as well...


The Digey Cafe was fantastic as well - a really cosy little deli-cafe selling locally-sourced produce, and judging by the lunch we had, excellent cooking too. Amazing steak-filled crumbly Cornish pasties from the new St Ives Bakery provided the perfect packed lunch for our long coastal walk to Lelant, while The Dolphin on Fore Street provided really gorgeous juicy fish and chips which were the perfect accompaniment to the special episode of Dr Who on New Year's Day!!

One thing we did not manage to do - though we're determined to do it next time - was the lantern-lit ghost walk around the town, led by the magnificently-named storyteller, Shanty Baba. However, late one evening we were sitting in front of the fire, reading, when we heard them stop outside the cottage and overheard Shanty tell about the man who used to live there, one James Wallis, the last of the local "ghost layers" - exorcists, or 'ghostbusters'. We couldn't quite hear everything he said, but it was amazing to think he was talking about 'our' cottage! This James Wallis was also a maths teacher, and all the local smugglers used to send their lads along to him, to sit in that front room where we were sitting reading by the fire, to learn some basic tricks of the trade! This explained why the cottage has a home-made sundial attached to the front wall with 'J. Wallis, 1780' rather naively inscribed on it. A brilliant little bit of history to add to our appreciation of the cottage and our surroundings!

I think St Ives would be a complete hell-hole in the summer, when those wide open beaches are mobbed by endless crowds of sunbathers... We have vowed never to go in the summer, but it makes the perfect winter retreat! I have come home with a desire to reread the Daphne du Maurier tales of smugglers and remote inns on Cornish moors and feisty heroines, which I so enjoyed as a teenager! And fortunately, we both still have another week's leave, a bit more time to prepare ourselves to go back to work and the onslaught of 2010... though feeling recharged after our Cornish hideaway.

One that didn't win the Turner Prize...

I haven't been along to Tate Britain yet to see the Turner Prize show, but reading about Richard Wright's piece - a gold leaf abstract fresco on the gallery wall, which will get painted over at the end of the show - certainly makes me want to. There is something wonderful about the fact that the fundamental reason the judges all gave for selecting it as the winner was that it is beautiful.

One of the artists that didn't win last night was Roger Hiorns, creator of a rather amazing installation in a derelict council flat in Elephant and Castle, which we popped down to see a couple of Sundays back, in the pouring rain. This piece is called Seizure, and you can read more about it here. I have also posted my photographs of it on our Flickr site - it's worth a look (apologies, the picture link to my photostream doesn't seem to be working at the moment...).

The flat was turned into a watertight tank and 75,000 litres of super-saturated copper sulphate solution was pumped into it through holes in the ceiling. This was then left to cool and crystallise over the next two and a half weeks, and then they broke into it and pumped out the remaining solution. When you first visited, back in 2008, you were given wellies and rubber gloves since the crystals were still wet. When we went round the other week, we were told not to lick our fingers after touching the crystals, since it was poisonous! A little boy going round with his father earnestly said, "Daddy, will you remind me if I forget?", to which his father replied, "But if you forget, it will be too late!" Oh dear...

Every surface - originally the floor as well, even the old bath - is encrusted with large jagged crystals in this ethereally or supernaturally deep blue colour. It's quite stunning when you're cocooned in there. And perhaps because I had been there so recently, at one point I had an overriding sensation of being in the Alhambra... That sensation of every surface covered in glittering ornament, that you just can't take in in one go - you have to sit and be and absorb it gradually, in an almost spiritual way... Originally the plaster decoration of the Alhambra's walls would have been coloured in deep primaries - gold, red ... and blue.

And like Richard Wright's work, this amazing idea will be destroyed. The council block it's housed in is scheduled for demolition at some point in the New Year. In fact, it should have already gone by now, but the credit crunch stalled the developers. Lack of money combined with artistic creativity? Isn't that always the way?!

If you want to pop along and see it before 3 January, details are on the Artangel site.

Resurfacing slowly

I'm sitting here with a cup of green tea and a Ben's Cookie (triple chocolate chip!) which I bought purely in honour of Yamin - she always raved about them when we were all living in Oxford and used to buy us boxes of the things, but I associate them with her and Oxford and because she is now in New Zealand and we in London I never eat the things. But I was passing their stall in High Street Kensington station earlier, and decided to pay memory lane a visit. Very tasty!

It is probably that Oxford is in my mind, since we were there at the weekend. We went down for a brilliant wedding - and if you know us, and how we usually feel about weddings, you'll be surprised to hear me say that. It was Polly and Steve's, and the theme was village fête - they had the service in a tiny, beautiful English country church, then the reception was in Polly's parents' garden, or rather in the field behind it, which had this amazing view down into the valley and the 'dreaming spires' of Oxford. The village fête theme manifested itself in the form of all the silly games you usually find at such things - welly wanging (!), coconut shy, skittles, treasure map... There were genuinely amusing speeches (including a singalong element to the best men double-act) and after dinner highly amusing barn dancing - you could hardly hold K back, and normally he's the last person to get up on the dance floor! It was all just joyous and great fun, and Polly and Steve seemed to be having a brilliant time, and that's the main thing.

Unfortunately, having finally got my hands on the camera to download the pictures of the day, it seems as if it had accidentally set itself to film rather than photo, and there are now lots of brief moments when I thought I was taking a snap, followed by lots of footage of the ground, as I held the camera in front of me ready for the next photo opportunity. It makes you rather sick watching it through actually! There is the occasional good capture - like this one, the first of the barn dances, based on a Central European wedding dance apparently...

I don't think I'd been to Oxford since February last year, when we went down for K's PhD viva. After 10 years of living there, it is so utterly familiar, that is never weird going back - it just feels like you've only been up to London for a day or so, though maybe some of the shops or cafes are different. There's a Costa cafe on Cowley Road for god's sake! Talk about gentrification. Still, I don't miss living there - I enjoy London too much now. But it was so so wonderful to catch up with old friends - Bob and Bev, who we stayed with, squeezing ourselves into their front room as Bev's brother was already staying; and Nigel and Ginny, who are back in Oxford now, living in an entire corner tower of Christ Church's Tom Quad! We had a wonderful lunch with them and an idyllic few hours sitting out in the Sunday afternoon sun in their garden, surrounded by medieval Oxford walls and the large fig trees which are the offspring of the seedlings which Edward Pococke - first chair of Arabic at the University of Oxford, in 1636, and who used to live in Nigel and Ginny's very corner tower - brought back with him from the Middle East!

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I am now on leave from work for two weeks, trying to shift gears in my brain and start thinking about our Scottish holiday... It's been an utterly crazy time at work since getting back from my Research leave - not just trying to get on with the remaining work on my book, but also getting sucked in to work on the Jameel Prize, which has been interesting but unexpected - it was never something on my work plan for this year. And the second round of comments and edits came back from the copy editor on Friday, leaving me no choice but to spend the first two mornings of my holiday working on those files, so they could be delivered to the designer today. The next time I see my text it will be starting to look like a book!

The weekend in Oxford felt like the start of the holiday, though K has the big academic conference on Henry VIII this week, so I have hardly seen anything of him! I have been enjoying being out and about - on Monday afternoon I went to visit Moya, and went with her to collect her kids from nursery, and played Lego with them while she prepared the supper. I even got to read Sam a bedtime story (actually 3!) - which was fun for being something I don't do every day! Yesterday I went to see the J.W.Waterhouse exhibition at the Royal Academy - as you may know, I have a soft spot for the Pre-Raphaelites, and though he was not really one of the Brotherhood, he worked in their mode, and created powerful visions of the classical world, especially of Homeric myths, or moments of tension from episodes in Ovid's Metamorphoses, just before a captivated all-too-human (usually) man falls prey to divine vengeance. His powerful, magical women fill the canvas and conjure long-forgotten stories from the Odyssey, or the Morte d'Arthur... I'd forgotten how these were the images that first inspired my interest in classical myths and legends. I love his painting St Eulalia (1885), and the striking contrast of the martyred virgin's unclothed body against the falling snow.


Today I have been pre-holiday shopping - how is it that that always entails spending about £50 in Boots?! On this occasion, I was investing in insect repellant, since everyone I have told that we are going to the Outer Hebrides has warned me about midges - and I am someone who usually receives a lot of attention from biting insects! I got 3 for 2 of a spray called Jungle Formula, the ‘Extra Strength’ variety for ‘Tropical Use’ - hopefully that will keep off the little devils!!!

It's time to think about cooking dinner - I'm doing Valentine Warner's 'spring chicken salad'. I really like his recipes - he does a series in the food magazine we get, Olive, about 'What to Eat Now', so it's always seasonal ingredients but I think he makes really imaginative and fresh combinations. It's also a specially nice meal, as tonight's our last night together until Sunday and holiday: tomorrow I'm going to my parents' and my sister and I then fly to Edinburgh on Friday morning, for a couple of days of girly together time, then we meet K at the airport on Sunday to fly to the edge of the world - Stornoway. I wanted to check in with the blog before disappearing again, so you knew I was still here! I am sure when we're back from our chilled-out week in our Hebridean cottage there will be lots of pictures to post and lots of seal- and dolphin- and whale- and puffin-watching to update you on... Speak to you then!

Where's Obama today?

Turns out he's just arrived in Baghdad!! He's really packing it in on this round-the-world trip! There's a headline in K's Economist (April 4th-10th, p. 59) that says, "If atmospherics were all that mattered, the American president would be well on the way to curing the world's ills". It was good to have him in London, and I loved the fact that he gave the Queen an iPod!! There are some amusing track suggestions for her here. Michelle seemed to go down a storm at the inner London secondary school she visited - we heard some very eloquent teenage girls talking on the radio about how her visit had inspired them. (Talking of radio, did you catch K on Today??) I did not go on any protests, and to be quite honest, I really did not see the point of them. "Jobs, Justice and Climate"? Plus the usual add-ons that you get at protests like that. I tried it over Iraq - it didn't work. Its absolutely shocking, though, about that guy who died of a heart attack, on his way home - especially since it seems like the heart attack was set off by police assault.

Call me shallow, but I was frankly more interested in watching the footage of the Obamas meeting the Sarkozys at Strasbourg - Nicolas looked like a cartoon character next to Barack!! And what was Sarkozy doing with Obama's tie?? There was some fascination with the "sartorial battle" between Carla and Michelle ("two fashion titans"!), which is always amusing to read - though I am not sure I approve that you can now post comments at the end of stories on the Guardian website. I find myself reading them almost against my will, in a sort of morbid fascination, though very rarely do you get anything actually worth paying attention to - and how is it that people have time to participate in this kind of online conversation, sometimes several times??

Anyway, book update. I have finished Chapter 2, and sent that off to my readers, but I am having some difficulty getting going with writing Chapter 3. I have decided it's PMT - well, I've got to have something to blame. It also feels like a holiday - all the schools have broken up, and many of my colleagues have taken the week off, so there is a holiday air which is rather effecting. I also feel it's ok to have a little break between chapters - but there's just no time for that, I keep having to tell myself.

I spent this morning in the Baroque exhibition - classic work-avoidance activity. Now, I really do not like baroque as an artistic style - but I liked this exhibition. It is really well laid out, with a simple but effective design - like the section about secular spaces (ie. the palace) being laid out like an enfilade of rooms in a baroque palace, culminating in the king's bedchamber - as you would if you were a courtier visiting. It feels quite empty - though there is not a shortage of objects, though some of them are BIG, but they get a chance to breathe, and so do you - I always find if you're in an original baroque space it is just too overwrought and overwhelming that you just can't appreciate its individual elements, whereas you can here.

The one let-down was that nowhere does it actually tell you what baroque is, or how it develops, or why it spreads as widely as it did - why did it appeal so much? They imply it was through the patronage of the Catholic church and the absolute monarchs of the 17th century - though it doesn't ever really say what they were trying to use this style to express, apart from wealth, and power, which is self-evident. It was also slightly disappointing that - though much is made of this being the "first global style" (because it is the first style to travel out of Europe, though I am not sure this is necessarily something to be proud of, since it's imposed on colonies by European imperialists) this was only represented in a rather tokenistic way, with very few objects (though one of them was, admittedly, again, very large) and just there as "examples", rather than objects in themselves, if you see what I mean.

The theatre section was great - they had found this 17th-century castle theatre in the Czech Republic, which has retained its original stage set and furnishings, and it is obviously still used, since there was a short film of performances underway, and the guys under the stage turning pulleys to change the set. Fascinating. Opera was invented at this time, and much was made about the "total work of art", so that a baroque setting was multi-sensory, and included musical as well as visual stimulation. I really liked the use of music in the spaces, though at certain points these clashed with each other, but I think this experience would have been rather lost on you had you been going round with the audio guide (and you know how I feel about those...)

Anyway I think it has opened this week because of Easter - being, perhaps, the most Baroque of church rituals. And nowhere is it more Baroque than Semana Santa in Seville - of which there were some more film clips. In all my years of visiting Spain, I have never witnessed this, and is something I would really love to do sometime - though I am not sure I could get past been terrified by the penitents in their pointed KKK-inspiring hoods... Some seasonal photos I have enjoyed from the Guardian website (is it obvious which newspaper I read?):

Barbie and Ken go to Mass!

April Fool

Lordy, this has been a busy March! Somehow I find it slightly inconceivable that I have actually managed to draft the first two chapters of my book – though Chapter 2 is still a little rough, and a little long (though 3000 words less too-long than it was this morning), and I have given a work-in-progress seminar on it all, yesterday. Phew. I feel exhausted! And sadly there’s no let-up – Chapter 3 needs to be drafted! I am aiming to have something down on paper for all four chapters by the end of April. A chapter every two weeks. Am I mad?

So, time to post the calendar image for the month.

Descent from the Cross, Catalonia 12th-13th century, MNAC, Barcelona © KR

This is one of groups of monumental wooden sculpture from medieval Cataluña, among the fantastic collections of Spanish Romanesque art in the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona – taken last May, when K joined me for two weeks in Spain, after I had taken my group of Museum Patrons on their guided tour of ‘Islamic Spain’, and was staying on for the rest of the month to do research, museum and site visits for my book. We always try and fit in a visit to Barcelona, to visit Sarah and Julius, and their children Leila and Isaac – this was our last visit to their lovely (tiny!) old apartment just steps from the sea at Barceloneta. They were just in the process of sorting out a mortgage when we were there (they beat us to it!!) and have since moved to a larger place, just a few streets down, which is even easier to stay in than the last one, by all accounts – must go and find out some time soon!

We’d been to MNAC before, but K didn’t seem to remember (it was a fair few years previously, and I had been back on my own a number of times since then), and he just went crazy for the Romanesque. I phoned him at one point from Gothic Spain (and got stern looks from the wardens) and he was still halfway through the Romanesque period! That stuff is just absolutely fantastic though – we both really love it. There is something so – human – about its artistic naivety. The architecture is pretty fab too. Anyway we chose this photo for the calendar this month, because of its Easter-related theme, of the death of Christ.

And, in case you’re wondering, K has been doing very well at the not-drinking-alcohol-for-Lent. He has been taking Sundays off – this has obviously helped. I think last year he spoke to actual Christians about it, and apparently Sundays are not counted in the number of days for which Lent lasts – they’re a religious feast day, ergo you don’t have to give up what you gave up. He has been known occasionally to rather over-compensate – when Nick was here a few weekends back (so wonderful to see him! Was it really three years since the last time…?), K awoke on Monday morning with something of a headache. A whiskey too far, I fear.

And one last by the way – Stieg Larsson is excellent. Still a little way to go, but it has definitely been the thing to switch the brain off from The Book last thing at night. Highly recommended.

Another thing that has kept me sane the last couple of weeks - watching back issues of Brothers and Sisters. Gaaaad, I love that programme! I am not sure exactly why it is so good - on the surface the characters seem quite stereotyped and the idea of it doesn't sound that interesting: a big ensemble cast (12 main characters!), a loving but explosively expressive family and their escapades through daily life, all revolving around the personality and the absence of the husband/father, who (brilliantly) died right at the beginning of the first episode. But the writing and the acting is just fantastic! Welsh actor Matthew Rhys is so watchable as as Kevin Walker.

Another last 'by the way'. K has just informed me that he might be interviewed on the Today programme on Saturday morning, talking about Henry VIII! Be sure to listen!!

Read this book!!

I have decided to write separate thoughts in separate postings. I think this probably makes it easier for you to read them (if indeed you are doing so), as well as, later on, for me or you to find and link to them. So, some extra musings for today:

I have been meaning to share something with you for about a week now. There is a ‘gallery’ space by South Kensington tube station, which used to be a frame shop, but now stands pretty much empty, and is occasionally taken over by a temporary shop or an art installation. It is currently hosting a company called Stuff and Nonsense, which I can’t find online, but if you can’t get down to South Ken before 26 March when their ‘residency’ ends, I’d try a more concerted effort at Google than I have done. Basically, they sell designer lights. These lights are made out of stuffed animals. And not just any stuffed animals – stuffed vermin. The lighting they have on display in the window I have to walk past every day to get to work features stuffed pigeons, and I am pretty sure that at the beginning of the week there was a stuffed squirrel clutching a light, frozen in the act of scampering up the wall. This must have sold, as I don’t remember seeing it again. It’s a clever idea, and a very modern (postmodern?) take on taxidermy, but who in their right mind actually wants one of these lights in their home? The thought of it makes my flesh creep!

Something else I need to share: a fantastic graphic novel which I picked up yesterday afternoon in Clapham Books – a pleasant discovery in itself. It’s The Museum Vaults: Excerpts from the Journal of an Expert, by Marc-Antoine Mathieu (see the picture at the head of this posting), and no description can do it justice. It is one of a series of four graphic novels being produced in collaboration with the Louvre, which is a fantastic idea. There’s a really insightful interview with the artist here, about this and his other work, and one of the quotes describes it as “a kind of parallel world in which he examines, not the work [on display in the Louvre], but the discourse around art.”

The conceit is that “the Expert” (I love it!) has come to evaluate the contents of the subbasement levels of a museum so grand and old that its very name has been forgotten. He and his assistant spend fifty years exploring subbasement level after subbasement level, and their encounters with the various department supervisors they find along the way are existentialist musings on the very nature of art, in a simultaneously deeply comic and extremely profound way – the Flooded Gallery (“I was a guard before … now I’m a ferrywoman”), the Repository for Moulds (“All these moulds constitute the entire memory of the Museum’s statuary art”), the Fragments Room (perhaps my personal favourite, given my predilection for broken bits of pot…), the Restoration Workshop, where a minor paint touch-up is depicted as a precise surgical operation, the Frame Depot (of which there are some previews here)…

The idea that has stayed with me the longest is the chapter entitled “The Icon”, wherein The Expert muses upon all the slightly different variations which The Master created of You-Can-Guess-Which-Painting, which are subtly rotated so that no visitor ever has the same experience of the painting – “the interpretations are accordingly divergent and give rise to opinions, debates, interpretations and exegesis that, each time, only thicken the mystery a little bit more. Through this ploy, The Master wanted to represent the very mystery of representation” – though this mystery is threatened by the invention of “a magic box, a sort of camera obscura that can freeze the real and can reproduce it”, which will ensnare the painting and cause “the cold eye of exactitude [to] imprison the smile on exhibition that day”… Ahhh, just brilliant. I sat on Clapham Common in the sun and read this while eating my lunch, but I will have to read it again and again. What a wonderful way to give myself some well-earned time off from writing my own book!!

Two Cities in One Day

Today we went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern. It was a beautiful winter day, cold with a clear blue sky. We took the 59 bus to Waterloo Bridge and walked along the South Bank, which was busy with other Londoners enjoying the rare afternoon sunshine. Riverside London looked absolutely beautiful and we stopped and admired St Paul’s before passing into the cavernous interior of the Turbine Hall. We paused briefly at the current Unilever Series installation, which neither of us thought was up to much, though perhaps you only ‘get it’ if you spend more time there. It all seemed rather unimaginative, a collation of pastiches, which perhaps was what it was all about, in a postmodern kind of way.

The main perk of working in a museum – or, at least, the one I work in – is that I can get into most exhibitions for free, so there really is no excuse for not going to see everything that comes on in London – though there is usually quite a lot going on in London, which is one of the things that is so brilliant about living here, but trying to see everything would be practically a full-time job. Anyway, I love Rothko. One of the things I used to enjoy most about being a teenager in London (and I am one of those rare Londoners who was actually born and raised here) was sitting in the Rothko room when it used to be in the Tate at Millbank, before that was Tate Britain, or there were any other Tates, and it was just ‘The Tate’. This was probably my favourite art gallery when I was younger – everything under one grand and rather beautiful roof, and catering to all the different artistic phases you pass through during adolescence. I had my pre-Raphaelite phase (and am still rather partial to The Brotherhood, I must admit), my Turner phase, but there was always something other-worldly about the enormous Rothko canvases in what I remember as a dimly-lit and rather hallowed space in the old Tate. I have visited them in their new home at Tate Modern, but when I think about those paintings, the image that comes to mind is the old gallery at Millbank.

Anyway hallowed and memorable is not the nature of the space they currently occupy during this exhibition of his late series, which has the Seagram murals at its heart, but perhaps that is the fundamental problem with the transience of temporary exhibitions. The last show we had seen in those rooms was the Juan Múñoz retrospective (his is the Turbine Hall installation I most regret not having seen) and I could still imagine his works occupying those spaces – his works which are so representational and focused on the (his) human form, in almost diametric opposition to Rothko’s paintings, so there was a rather strange layering of the two artists in my mind. In any case, I think the way to experience Rothko’s art is probably to sit calmly and for several hours in the chapel in Houston for which he was commissioned to produce fourteen paintings of his Black Form series. That’s the kind of meditative environment you need to really look at these magnificent paintings, which suggest so many layers of meaning and profundity, opening like windows onto unknowable mysteries, endlessly resisting our natural urge towards interpretation. The hustle and bustle of the Tate on a busy Sunday afternoon was not it (though, of course, great for visitor figures etc etc).

I couldn’t help wondering what Rothko himself would have thought of the exhibition. He withdrew his commission from the Seagram building when he decided that a private restaurant on Park Avenue was “an unsuitable environment in which to experience his paintings”. He worked closely with the Director of the Tate Gallery in the 1960s to agree how some of the murals might be hung in that space, and one interesting piece in the show is the maquette from the Tate Archive showing the agreed arrangement of the hang. This is the gallery I used to love to visit, now lost in the mists of time. Reading the exhibition booklet it became clear that Rothko had very clear ideas about how his paintings should be hung (low), and lit (dimly), in spaces with warm-coloured walls – all features which had been completely ignored in the exhibition design, which had the standardised white walls and overly harsh lighting of modern art galleries, and which had the effect of flattening the tones and gloss of the paintings and made it impossible for you to really see into them in the way I remember being able to. The catalogue reprints his very specific instructions about how some of his murals should be hung for an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1961 – I assume they were followed then. It seemed to me that if Tate Modern had a reason for disregarding how Rothko wished his own paintings to be experienced (apart from cost), they needed to make a case for it.

I also get a bit frustrated by exhibition text which focuses on the object (usually the case with paintings exhibitions like this one) to total exclusion of all context, refusing to indulge the viewer with biography, or any information about the creative process – we’re there for The Art, you know, which needs to be understood on its own terms. Perhaps I am too used to working in a decorative arts museum, and in a field which always seeks to make connections across societies and technologies. I guess I have developed a prejudice against an attitude which privileges (Western) painting as High Art, without any concern for justifying this place of privilege. If you don’t get it, you’re just not enough of an aesthete.

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It was dark when we left the Tate, but still beautifully clear, and the city lights were reflected in the fast-flowing waters of the Thames – when London is at its most beautiful, I think. We carried on walking along the South Bank, to Southwark Cathedral and past the deserted Borough Market, where we got another bus back to Brixton. At home, I settled down with my green tea and pastel de nata (Portuguese delicacies being one of the joys of living in Lambeth), to read “Here is New York”, the essay on the great city written by E. B. White in 1948. I had bought this little book in the Strand Bookshop during my trip to New York in the autumn, and it was one of the books in the box I shipped back, and only just picked up from the post office depot after getting back to work in early January. I guess it is a love letter to the city by someone who loved to live there, but not at all over-romanticised, a very warts-and-all view, which makes it yet more lovable. It brought back strong memories of my month there in the autumn – which have been rather fading in the onslaught of the more heavily-spiced Damascus memories – as well as drawing many parallels for me with London:

It carries on its lapel the unexpungeable odor of the long past, so that no matter where you sit in New York you feel the vibrations of great times and tall deeds, of queer people and events and undertakings…

New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost everything that comes along … without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that every event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul.

The collision and the intermingling of these millions of foreign-born people representing so many races and creeds make New York a permanent exhibit of the phenomenon of one world…

My edition of this essay was printed in 1999 with a foreword by the writer’s stepson. The end of the essay is absolutely remarkable in light of the events of 11 September 2001, which were not even envisioned in 1999, but in 1948, E. B. White wrote:

The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now…

It certainly is today. How amazing his foresight was from 1948, but I suppose there must always have been a sense of the city being perched so precariously upon the ocean. I always find amazing the view you get of Manhattan from the plane, that utterly flat raft of land with the impossibly tall towers rising from it, somehow not capsizing it.

White talks of the construction of the United Nations headquarters, which was then being built:

The city at last perfectly illustrates both the universal dilemma and the general solution, this riddle in steel and stone is at once the perfect target and the perfect demonstration of nonviolence, of racial brotherhood, this lofty target scraping the skies and meeting the destroying planes halfway, home of all people and all nations, capital of everything, housing the deliberations by which the planes are to be stayed and their errand forestalled.

Thank goodness the UN building was not the target, but if only the organisation was as effective as White optimistically believed – though perhaps their recent persistence has had some role in finally staying Israel’s hand in Gaza.

His final paragraph puts me in mind of a scene from my own recent history in New York – a small tree growing out of the top window of an abandoned low-rise building lost in amongst all the skyscrapers and multi-storey apartment buildings of Carnegie Hill, which I passed every day on my walk to the Met, and find now that I did not photograph.

A block or two west of the new City of Man … there is an old willow tree that presides over an interior garden. It is a battered tree, long suffering and much climbed, held together by strands of wire but beloved of those who know it. In a way it symbolises the city: life under difficulties, growth against odds, sap-rise in the midst of concrete, and the steady reaching for the sun. Whenever I look at it nowadays, and feel the cold shadow of the planes, I think: ‘This must be saved, this particular thing, this very tree’. If it were to go, all would go – this city, this mischievous and marvelous monument which not to look upon would be like death.