Help needed! Apparently Buhler painted Watson’s portrait. But where is it now? If anyone has any information about this or even an image of the picture, I should be very grateful to hear.
Why History?
In 1976 I arrived from my country grammar school at the Historical shrine of Peterhouse. At the time, although the smallest of the colleges of Cambridge, it had the highest number of History dons.
The study of History was taken seriously and the effect on me was to be lifelong. The key people for me were Maurice Cowling and Brian Wormald. Sitting in front of these strange, intense men reading an undergraduate essay was profoundly challenging. Historical writing involved seeking to understand the reality behind why men acted in the way they did; and that reality was hugely complex and not to be confused with the descriptions of it in the work of historians. For those writing about the past always have an agenda. The identification and evaluation of that agenda is part of the reader’s challenge. The effort to abandon – or at least admit to – that agenda is part of the historian’s challenge.
Peter Watson,Richard Hamilton and Adrian Berg
In the early 1950’s, Peter Watson was heavily involved with the developing ICA. Although he was to die in 1956, he just had time to connect with one or two artists who are, or who were until very recently, still alive. An example was Richard Hamilton, who died not long ago. I spoke to him earlier in the year and he gave me a very interesting Watson anecdote which will appear in the book.
Adrian Berg, perhaps best known as the artist of Regent’s Park,may or may not have known Watson. When I met him at the reception at the RA following John Craxton’s memorial service, I forgot to ask him. Now it’s too late.
In Tate Britain on Sunday I noticed that there is an interesting area of work by Hamilton, presumably put up to commemorate him, and also a large and beautifully lush picture of the Park by Berg, to mark his recent passing.
Robert Colquhoun
Went to an excellent lecture last night at the Fleming Collection, given by Davy Brown. He is the source of a great deal of knowledge about Colquhoun and has a large collection of his work. The interesting thing was his emphasis of the monotypes.From the early 1950’s until his death in 1962 at the age of 47, Colquhoun painted few oils, except for a batch prepared for the Whitechapel retrospective at the behest of Bryan Robertson in 1958. But he was still working, when their often diffcult living conditions permitted. What he was working on were often monotypes and Davy explained what these were, technically, and also why they were important.  Colquhoun’s reputation is usually focussed on the great oils of the 1940’s,shown at the Lefevre, but this is a new way of looking at the work in a more balanced fashion.
(On a personal note, I should say that Davy is one of the most helpful people around in the contemporary art world. When I was doing my piece on Colquhoun some years ago, he helped me unstintingly and was a delightful person to deal with.)
Gore Vidal/Peter Watson
They met in Paris. If anybody reading this has a way of contacting Gore Vidal, please get in touch. I should like to know if he can remember anything about their meeting.
Lecture at the Fry Art Gallery
Anyone reading this who can make the trip to Saffron Walden is most welcome to buy a ticket for a lecture I am giving at the Fry Art Gallery on the evening of Friday 25th November.The lecture is called The British Art World after the War and will no doubt be slightly controversial!
The Gallery is an absolutely splendid establishment.In those parts they sort of worship Edward Bawden and quite right too.(Also Ravilious).The Collection contains an excellent collection of mid-20th century British art and is well worth a visit.There is a link to their website attached to my site.
Oliver Messel
Went to Christie’s for a Reception to mark the publication of a new book on Messel edited by his nephew, Thomas Messel. Oliver Messel was an important designer, slightly perhaps fallen from the public eye. This is therefore a timely moment to remind people who he was. He was one of those talented people who was pretty good at all sorts of things. Although one doesn’t see his work very often, he was clearly also a competent painter. It would be nice to see a show of his pictures sometime. The problem with giving due weight to people who, for example, design interior decoration, is that it isn’t easy to illustrate the finished article, except through photos. And most rooms don’t remain as originally designed and furnished for long.
I am particularly interested in Messel from the Watson angle, as they were very close for a time around 1930. There are a few tantalising pictures of the 2 of them on holiday somewhere that looks like the South of France.
Stanley Spencer in Rotterdam/Francis Bacon in the Hague
Went at the weekend to the Kunsthal in Rotterdam,where there is a splendid new Spencer show.There are a large number of Spencers on display and also an attempt to contextualise the work by including work by many other contemporary British artists.So it turns into a wider review of the British art scene of the period,particularly of his early years.I can recall seeing pictures by William Roberts,Paul Nash,Gilbert Spencer,Bomberg,Freud,David Jones,Eric Gill,Wyndham Lewis etc etc.
One swings around a bit on Spencer.At one moment he is a mad English individualist in all his unique brilliance and there seems little point trying to find any context for him.Then it seems possible to see similarities between some of his work at some points with some of other people’s works at particular points in their careers.I am not a particular fan of the value of identifying influences in modern British art,but it must actually be quite unusual for artists to achieve genuine uniqueness.In Spencer’s case,of course,and probably in most cases,the influences may well be those of earlier artists and not contemporaries.So I suppose the possible value of setting the scene with the work of others is to show a whole generation of British artists responding to the same sort of shared inheritance that was art history when they started out,however divergent their careers became.
Anyway,worth a visit.I am not sure whether Rotterdam itself merits a long tourist stay,but we combined it with a stay in the Hague,from where we visited Delft on the tram and saw there the fascinating little Vermeer museum they have.At the Gemeentemuseum in the Hague there is currently a room full of Francis Bacon pictures,some on long term loan from the Estate.Unfortunately,they seem rather cramped in a small gallery with low ceilng and bright lights.The inevitable glazing on the pictures means that it is very difficult to look at the pictures without irritating reflections of lights and some sort of construction in the middle of the room.It is impossible to photograph the Bacons from any angle.
It’s been a bit of a Bacon fest recently,as we also came across the picture in the Thyssen in Madrid the week before.
Public Sculpture of the City of London
This book by Philip Ward-Jackson (published by Liverpool University Press in 2003 as the seventh volume of a series called Public Sculpture of Britain) is a tremendous asset. I work in the City and often chance upon sculptural features scattered around. Because of the incessant rebuilding which the City undergoes, sculpture gets moved here. It pops up in random places and it is left as a vestige of some former life. More often than not there is nothing to indicate what it is. This book contains all the answers.