Antiquities in peril at the British Museum: the Portland Sale, the destruction of the Vase and a similar act of vandalism at the Fitzwilliam

As habitués of auctions, we at Jot 101, are always interested in historic ones. It is interesting to note how prices of lots back then compare to recent prices fetched. Were there ‘ sleepers ‘ in past times, as there are now ? 

In Austin Dobson’s A Bookman’s Budget we find the author quoting a passage from  Rosalba’s Journal (1915) on the sale in April 1786 of ‘ The Portland Museum’ , consisting ( in the words of the Skinner and Co., the auctioneers ) of:

 ‘

‘ shells, corals, minerals, insects, birds’ eggs, agates, crystals, china. snuff boxes, coins, medals, seals, prints, drawings, jewels, and precious stones…’

These and other treasures had been collected by the Duchess of Portland over a long period and were housed at her late dwelling-house in ‘Privy Garden’, where the sale took place. In the words of Rosalba:

‘It occupied about thirty days and included 4,156 lots. One of the buyers was Horace Walpole ‘ who secured a head in basalt of Jupiter Serapis’  and an illuminated Book of Psalms, both of which he forthwith installed in the Beauclerk closet at Strawberry . Another item was a unique set of Hollar’s engravings, in thirteen folio volumes. This fetched £385; but the prices generally were far below what they would have been in our time. Rembrandt’s etchings, for example, went for 28s., Chelsea china ( 28 pieces for 30s. The gem of the sale was the blue and white glass Vase, or Sepulchral Urn, thought to have once held the ashes of Alexander Severus, which had been discovered near Rome in a sarcophagus under the Monte del Grano. Until 1770 this marvel of the ceramic art had remained in the possession of the Barberini family, being subsequently acquired by Sir William Hamilton, British Plenipotentiary at Naples, from whom, through his niece, Miss Hamilton, one of Queen Charlotte’s Ladies in Waiting, the Duchess purchased it for £1,800. Henceforth it became known as the Hamilton or Portland Vase. At the sale it was bought in by the third Duke for £1,029, and deposited by his son in the British Museum. Here it was smashed to pieces in February 1845 by a drunken workman; and was afterwards most ingeniously and successfully pieced together by Mr Thomas Doubleday.’ 

Continue reading →

Some artists’ letters from the D’ Offay catalogue

Felicien Rops

Letters written by artists are generally boring. Just read William Blake’s letters. Most of them concern business arrangements with printers and publishers. However, there are a few exceptions. The letters of Samuel Palmer, that great admirer of Blake, tell us so much about his mental state, his religiosity and politics. Those of James Smetham, the Victorian artist, are occasionally mystical and deranged. The unpublished  letters of Britain’s favourite twentieth century artist, John Piper, many of which I have read, are also lively and sometimes controversial. 

We could say something similar about the twenty-five letters of Jean Cocteau, that Anthony D’Offay had for sale in his Art and Literature catalogue back in the late 1960’s. The addressee was Madeleine Le Chevrel and most of the letters and postcards to her were written between 1912 and 1925. Cocteau had the rather eccentric habit of composing ‘in a curiously abbreviated style where one word suggests a sentence and a question mark a paragraph’. Thus: (1917) ; Diag. prolonge mon sejour…Rome est lourd, molle, morte, grosse et petite. Le souvenir decourage de vivre. Les soupe, les champagnes, les aphrodisiaques, le cacodilates du Vesuve menent la danse de cette Kermesse enorme ou les eglises, les cuisines et les bordels  sont decore de la meme pacotille splendide. Les femmes sur les balcons se laissant tomber comme de bateaux entre les bras des marins…’ 

That strange word ‘ cacodilates ‘ is certainly new to us at Jot HQ. Some online research reveals that a French chemist named Cadet brewed up something he called Cadet’s fuming liquid in 1757. This turned out to contain cacodylic acid, a poisonous arsenic-containing compound, which today is used in chemical analysis. However, back in Cocteau’s day, it seems that a derivative of this substance was used in France as a stimulant, rather like cocaine.

For such a graphic picture of the young avant-garde artist and writer D’Offay wanted a quite reasonable £185, which is around £7 a letter.

Continue reading →

Roy Miles – the Man who introduced Russian Paintings to the West

Jot 101 roy Miles

Discovered in a July 1991 copy of Boardroom Magazine, a glossy brochure covering ‘News, Views & a Taste of the Good Life ‘ is a large feature on the celebrity art dealer Roy Miles, then at the height of his fame ( or notoriety ).

Interleaved with the profile of Miles by one Alison Becket are a number of promotional items, including an invitation to attend Mr Miles’s ‘ Russian Summer Show ‘ at his gallery in Bruton Street, Mayfair, a mocked up page from the Mail on Sunday of October 1990 advertising a show by the Russian expressionist painter Sergei Chepik and other reproduced pages from the Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times promoting Chepik and highlighting the fact that such famous people as Mrs Thatcher ( who was given a painting by Chepik) and Eddy Shah ( remember him?) had come to see works by the ‘ Russian genius’.

On the front cover of the magazine we are shown a photograph by Lord Snowdon no less of Mr Miles resplendent in dark suit, spotted tie and slicked back hair staring straight at the camera. Above this image we find the description that firmly nailed the dealer in the eyes of a certain type of wealthy art collector as ‘the Man Who Introduced Russian Paintings to the West ‘. By ‘ Russian Paintings ‘ of course, we are not talking about Malevich, Tatlin and the Suprematists. They would not have appealed at all to the former Prime Minister whose favourite poem was ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’, and probably not to Mr Miles’s other clientele. No, the Russian paintings that Miles brought over to the UK were firstly Soviet Social Realism and then as a total contrast, the subversive and sometimes nightmarish depictions of torture and oppression that Chepik began painting as an exile in Paris from 1988 as his protest towards the Soviet regime.

Born in 1935 to a prosperous , art-loving middle-class family in Liverpool, he appreciated art and indeed won a prize for a watercolour aged ten. At the same time he was making money by selling Dinky Toys to his fellow schoolboys. He had arrived in London by the late fifties and for a short time worked for an antique dealer. Continue reading →

 Some celebs of thirty years ago

Things you didn’t know, or perhaps had forgotten, about people once in the news, Jot 101 Tatler cover 001and perhaps still newsworthy, according to Tatler’s Thousand  Most Socially Significant People in 1992.

Michael Portillo ( b 1953)

Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Portillo is occasionally tipped to become Prime Minister. Shrewd, direct, with, as Private Eye puts it, the eyes of an assassin, lips of a tyrant, he gets his hair cut and we all have to read about it. His recreational interests include opera, Trollope and the Michelin Guide, said to be his Bible. He was part of the Omega project ( a blueprint of right wing policy) and backed a bill for hanging.

 

Private Eye doesn’t seem interested in him, now that he has abandoned active politics. Today he earns a living by going on train journeys around the UK and Europe clutching his trusty Bradshaw and a Baedeker. An avuncular figure who looks as if he might be the kind of chap you’d have a pint (or glass of red) with down the pub. One wonders as if he is still pro-hanging. The subject hasn’t yet come up, though while touring Spain he did dilate on the life of his father, a revolutionary during the Spanish Civil War.

Timothy Clifford, former Director of the Scottish National Gallery (b 1946)

‘Dynamic fogey who looks like an arty merchant banker. Rosy-cheeked and Regency clad, he has a ridiculously posh voice and is very well-connected.’ Continue reading →

Oddities of London

Jot 101 Oddities of London Golden Boy picAbstracted from The Good Time Guide to London(1951)

 

The statue of George IV in Trafalgar Square shows the king, without boots or spurs, riding a horse without saddle or stirrups.

 

True. Incidentally,  Sir Francis Chantrey’s bronze of 1829 was originally made for Marble Arch.

 

On the floor of the entrance hall of the National Gallery is a mosaic of Great Garbo.

 

True .The Bloomsbury set mosaic artist Boris Anrep was commissioned to provide a number of art works for the Gallery based on specific themes and featuring a number of contemporary figures. On the half-way landing the actress Great Garbo appears as Melpomeme in ‘ The Awakening of the Muses ‘. 

 

On October 23rd, 1843, a few days before the statue of Nelson was erected, 14 persons ate a rump steak dinner on the top of Nelson’s column

 

True .Doubtless Punch ( founded 1841) would have had something witty to say about this matter. Continue reading →

Some anecdotes from Harold Murray’s Kaleidoscope

Oscar_Browning_(crop)Joe and Arthur Rank

 

“The richest man I ever knew was Joseph Rank, the flour miller whose quiet son, Arthur Rank, the film magnate, is so much in the news today. There were only three lines about ‘Joe Rank’ in Who’s Who. He was said at one time to be worth twenty millions. No one knows how many millions he gave away. Again and again I heard him say he stayed in business as an octogenarian in order to make money to give away. He refused titles and honours except the freedom if the city of Hull…This remarkable man had his little eccentricities, as millionaires generally do have. He told me he couldn’t stand journalists; they were always telling lies about him…In the ’14-18 war he handed over, it was said, a few million pounds to a Board of Trustees for the extension of Methodism. One of the last occasions on which I met Mr Arthur Rank was at the opening of a Methodist milk bar in Battersea, when he, with his wife, served behind the counter. His interest in films began when he warmly supported a campaign for religious films …”

 

Oscar Browning

 

“One of the most interesting men I then met at Bexhill was Oscar Browning (above right)  the famous “ O.B.” of Cambridge, a plump, bald-headed, Pickwickian little man, who, when over eighty years of age, would go down to the sea very early in the morning and bathe, whatever the weather. Continue reading →

Fluxus Manifestos of 1966

 

Manifestos Paik Laser TV 001Found— a copy of Manifestos, the eighth Great Bear Pamphlet published by The Something Else Press of New York in 1966.

The Something Else Press was an avant gardeAmerican publisher of writers associated with Fluxus, an international, interdisciplinary community of artists, designers, composers and poets inspired by the composer John Cage. Many, including Yoko Ono, whose Grapefruit ( see Bookride blog )   had appeared in 1964, were dedicated to Performance Art and ‘Happenings’. The double pamphlet Manifesto, described as a ‘call to arms ‘, was edited by Dick Higgins (1938 – 98), a leading figure in the movement. It contained material by many of the authors of the nine other pamphlets in the Great Bear list—including Alison Knowles ( Higgins’ wife),  Al Hansen, Jerome Rothenberg, Allan Kaprow and Wolf Vostell.

All those who wrote for Manifestoswere significant in their own way, but a few were more pioneering than others. Nam June Paik was one. Born in Korea Paik was a Buddhist whose Zen-like vision permeated much of his work, which included  pioneering experiments in video art. He was also interested in the possibilities of cybernetics. By 1966 he could declare in Manifestosthat ‘As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of boundary regions and across various existing sciences’. He went on to declare that he is ‘video-taping the following TV programmes to be telecast March 1, 1996 A.D.’ The speculative programmes on this ‘ Utopian Laser TV Station ‘ feature many of his fellow Manifestos contributors, but also such influential figures as John Cage and  Dadaist Marcel Duchamp. Most of the programmes described by Paik recall real Performance Art (‘Confessions of a topless cellist by Charlotte Moorman’; others may be satirical (‘ Baby care by Diter Rot’). One programme for 11a.m., ‘ Jackson Mac Low’s 1961 film in which a standing camera focuses on a tree for many hours, looks forward to Warhol’s  five hour long Sleep. Paik went on to explore variations on video art, most notably with ‘TV Buddha’, a video installation depicting a Buddha statue viewing its own live image on a closed TV circuit. Continue reading →

The Golden Urn

IMG_0991Found — all 3 issues of The Golden Urn the rare magazine produced at Fiesole by Bernard Berenson, Logan Pearsall Smith and his sister Mary Pearsall Smith (later Mary Berenson.) Of some value – we have catalogued it thus:

8vo. pp 151. Numbers 1, 2 and 3 complete – all published (1897-1898). Rebound in one volume. Number 1 contains ‘Orlando’ a ‘Self-appreciation’ by the then young Bertrand Russell ( a vaguely philosophical cri de coeur unattributed in the text). Rebound with original illustrated front wrappers, each with an urn design, bound in. Red buckram binning lettered gilt at the spine. Genuinely rare and seldom appearing in commerce. The introduction sets the mood–“The Golden Urn is published by certain people of leisure and curiosity, who thought it worth while to print for their own entertainment some impressions of art and life, some experiments in letters. Appreciation, untrammelled thought, scholarship, its editors will welcome… questions of aesthetics will be discussed… it will appear on unfixed dates and entirely at the pleasure of its editors; it is privately printed and will not be for sale. copies however will be sent – not without a feeling or, at least, an affectation of diffidence – to a few fastidious people.” The elegant fantasy piece in the third issue ‘Altamura’ was a collaboration between Pearsall Smith and Berenson and burlesques the life and ideals of an artists retreat not unlike their own circle at Fiesole. The last piece in the magazine is an amazing extensive list by Mary and Bernard Berenson of the greatest Italian Renaissance pictures in the world (Sacred Pictures) with their locations in every country, some in private hands in America and England – “..the study of them are regarded as acts of piety, and very helpful, though not exactly necessary, to Salvation.”

Berenson, of course, went on to become the 20th century’s most important art critic and art expert, Pearsall Smith’s became an important and admired anthologist whose Trivia books are still read and sought after.Each issue has his (and possibly the Berenson’s) favourite passages from Shakespeare and the Romantics. Berenson’s list of Italian paintings is referred to online as ‘famous’ — it is certainly a labour of love and the fruit of deep research  and would have been very hard work in a pre-technology era.

 

 

Mad about Whistler

 

Blickling sutcliffe letter 001That’s the English Rex rather than the American James McNeill. This covering letter, which was rescued from the archives of the booksellers Eric and Joan Stephens, was  sent on 22 September 1968 from the National Trust property Blickling Hall, Norfolk, by the artist and Rex Whistler fan, John Sutcliffe. This letter bears a characteristic scraper board design by Whistler as a sort of letterhead. That’s how much Whistler meant to Sutcliffe.

The letter explains that despite owning ‘about 100 books either illustrated by R.W. or with illustrations of things of his or with dust wrappers by him’, Sutcliffe still needs a number of items to complete his collection. He also wants some post-war illustrations by John Minton and Keith Vaughan. The most coveted items on the wants list are marked with asterisks and include Mildred(1926), Lady Cynthia Asquith’s Treasure Ship(1926) and Edith Olivier’s As Far as Jane’s Grandmother’s(1928). Later priorities are the rare Edward James booklet Your Name is Lamia, which was printed by the author in 1933 in an edition of just thirty copies, and two books by Edith Olivier and Dorothy Wellesley, for which Whistler designed the dust jackets. Sutcliffe also asks Eric and Joan to look out for certain issues of periodicals—mainly from the thirties– devoted to design and decoration. These periodicals include The Architectural Review, The Artist, The Studio, The Connoisseur and Decoration. It is not explained whether or not Whistler contributed to these publications.

Little is known about John Sutcliffe, apart from the fact that he seems to have been a graphic designer who revised James Lees Milne’s original NT guide to Blickling Hall and wrote a ten-page pamphlet on the Hall’s Library in 1971. It may be that he worked at the Hall while writing these two works. He doesn’t appear to have lived there at any time. As an artist he co-exhibited at the 1967 Lynn Festival and there is at least one work by him among the art collection at the Hall. If he is the John Haddon Frowde Holman Sutcliffe who is listed as working for Read & Sutcliffe of King’s Lynn as an artist, then his name suggests that his parents were artists too, or at least art lovers. As we know, David Haddon and Holman Hunt were nineteenth century artists of some eminence.

But all this is less interesting to us at Jot HQ than the fact that John Sutcliffe was a fanatical collector of work by arguably the most gifted illustrator of the twentieth century. [RR]

Contact Magazine 1950

Call it lazy journalism if you like, and we at Jot 101 do, but in all the obituaries of the great
publisher George Weidenfeld in 2016 there is no mention of the magazine Contact, which he edited from 1950. This is a glaring omission, since it is a showcase for the talents that this refugee from the Nazi Anschluss of Austria in 1938, shared in abundance with so many other émigrés from the Third Reich.

 

According to one obituary, having landed in the UK Weidenfeld soon put his knowledge of Germany and the German language to good use by enrolling in the BBC’s Overseas Service, though others say that he was recruited to the BBC Listening Station near Evesham, where his co-workers would have included British journalists like Geoffrey Grigson and Gilbert Harding and other German-speaking émigrés, such as the art historian Ernst Gombrich. In 1948 Weidenfeld joined up with Nigel Nicolson to form the publisher Weidenfeld and Nicholson with the express aim of launching a socialist magazine that would unite politics with the best of culture. There is no mention of the name of this magazine anyway on the Net, but Contactwas certainly not it, as there is no hint of any political agenda in the copy for September 1950 that we found at Jot HQ the other week.

 

What is obvious is that although the name of the publisher is absent from the title page of Contact, if we turn to page 56 we find that in an advert for three books published by ‘ George Weidenfeld and Nicholson’  the address of the editorial office of 7, Cork Street is the same as that of the editorial office of Contact. Why Weidenfeld should not want to be easily identified as both the editor and the co-publisher of the magazine is not immediately apparent. What is obvious is that he was keen to sign up some of the rising stars in British cultural journalism as contributors.

 

But not all were British. The ‘ provocative’ American columnist on the New Yorker, Emily Hahn, contributed an entertaining sketch on the behaviour of well-heeled American tourists in post-war London:

 

‘ They are afraid of boredom; they do not have their own kitchens and sitting rooms. They simply must find restaurants and places of amusement; they are homeless wanderers otherwise…Average English restaurants are not inspiring. Americans soon become aware of this fact. In Paris one eats with pleasure in French restaurants: in Italy one eats Italian food. But in London the wise American looks around for a restaurant which is not typically native… ‘
 Continue reading →

The Dawn: An experimental poem by Ramon Gomez de la Serna

Found in a box of papers –  this two page typewritten carbon copy of a Gomez surrealist poem page 1 001poem entitled ‘The Dawn’ by the famous Spanish experimental writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna  translated into English by Diego Marin ( author of Poesia Espanola, 1962) and Tomas Bartroli (fl. 1969). It would be interesting to discover its provenance.

In his time Gomez (1888 – 1963) was arguably the most celebrated experimental writer in Spain. Born in Madrid to a middle-class family, he refused to follow his wealthy father into law and politics, resolving instead to adopt the bohemian lifestyle of an experimental writer, and subsequently he began contributing to many of the avant-garde magazines of the period.

Like Sartre in Paris, years later, he established a literary salon in Madrid’s Café Pombo and during the First World War brought out six collections of experimental poems—El Rastro, El Doctor Inverosimil, Greguerias, Senos, Pombo and El Circo. Thereafter he continued to publish experimental writing, including works on Dali and El Greco. His work strongly influenced the surrealist film-maker Luis Bunuel. He is now best known for his lapidary ‘ greguerias’.

One source has described his main characteristics as a writer thus:

‘ his search for a new fragmentary genre of short prose poems, his exaltation of trivial everyday objects, his emphasis on eroticism, his exuberant self-projection and exclusive dedication to art, his playful humour, his contemplative secular mysticism, and above all his cut of the image…’ Continue reading →

Maurice Percival illustrator

IMG_5524

IMG_5526Found– Moonlight at the Globe;: An essay in Shakespeare production based on performance of A `Midsummer Night’s Dream at Harrow School (Joseph, London 1946). It was written by Ronald Watkins O.B.E.  a drama teacher who at the time of the book was working at Harrow. This copy bears a signed presentation from the book’s illustrator Maurice Percival (to ‘Ted and Jessie’) with a letter in an excellent italic hand and an attractive self portrait drawing – both on Harrow School Art School notepaper. Percival illustrated 2 other books with text by Watkins- both on Shakespeare.

Percival falls beneath the Wiki radar but there is scattered information  on the web and an interesting press cutting about him loosely inserted in the book. This is from The Daily Telegraph Peterborough column in 1958  and was occasioned by an exhibition of 240 of Percival’s drawings of Roman scenes at Richmond Central Library. The article notes that he had been teaching art at Harrow (1945-1954), formerly at Malvern and as a locum for Wilfrid Blunt at Eton. Peterborough also writes that MP admits to being ‘quite non-plussed when confronted with nature’ and ‘wildly inaccurate..few artists care to make either claim.’  The exhibition also had a photograph of King Faisal II as a schoolboy at Harrow ‘doing some italic  writing.’  Presumably the ill fated king* was taught by MP, something of a calligrapher as well as a fine draughtsman.

*He had just been executed at the age of 23.

Illustrator E.J. Detmold’s religious books

440px-Edward_Julius_Detmold0Found –Life (Dent, London 1921) an unillustrated book of aphorisms by the great illustrator E. J. Detmold (Edward Julius – the portrait is by his twin brother Charles Maurice and the rabbit is by E.J.). The book is the publisher’s own retained copy with their stamp on  the fep   reading  ‘FILE’. Also a pencilled note by someone at Dent revealing that Detmold wrote 2 other similar philosophical/ religious works for Dent both published anonymously ‘Greater things, and a greater than things’ 1923 and ‘Selflessness’ 1922. WorldCat did not know these were by Detmold and we have added a note at their vast site All 3 books are scarce.  His biographer Keith Nicholson notes:

“Life, his only unillustrated work, a book of aphorisms, was published by J. M. Dent in 1921. A key book to an understanding of Detmold’s mind, Life is an inauspicious-looking small volume printed on one side of the leaf only. In his preface the author writes: `The following words have come to the writer, over a period of many years, as the fruits of self-overcoming.’ From the curious, mystical text we learn that there are two ways of attainment: `The direct positive way – through progressive liberation – passing from the lesser realization of the body, to the greater realization of the mind, and therefrom to the realization of the infinite through the soul; and the direct negative way -through disillusionment – which comes of infatuation with things in themselves, and the inevitable passing thereof.’ In the event, ‘Life’ was Detmold’s farewell to the public world of books, and his testament. Resigned from the world, Detmold went to live in Montgomeryshire where, after a long retirement and almost totally forgotten, he died in July, 1957.”
Its a curious, deeply religious work, some of it written as if channelled from the unconscious, or beyond. Page 24 merely has these words:

“I am spirit

wherein alone, the souls of men,

meet in perfect oneness;

I am the root of true friendship.”

Page 16 has just these words at the  top and bottom of the page:

” Dominion is life.

Subjection is death.”

In 50 pages, beautifully printed by Charles Whittingham and Griggs (Chiswick Press), there are less than 1500 words.  It seems a shame that such a talented illustrator should stop drawing for the last 36 years of his life. There are many cases of this in art and literature, creative persons who suddenly stopped producing work, often for religious reasons – Alvin Langdon Coburn, Rosemary Tonks, Raduan Nassar come to mind. Please let us know of any others.

Edward_Julius_Detmold63

Rognon de la Flèche and ‘Treasons Bargain’

Treasons BargainFound – an art catalogue from 1990 of an exhibition at the Michael Parkin Gallery in Belgravia, London. Rognon de la Flèche was the name by which Lady Cara Harris was known in her role as an artist. Parkin’s intro explains:
Rognon de la Flèche was the pseudonym of Lady Cara Harris and literally means ’ the tale of the arrow’ or more to the point ‘the sting in the tale’…To mention her name to old friends like John Betjeman, John Sutro, Adrian Daintry, Cecil Beaton and David Herbert would bring forth a knowing smile, almost instantaneous laughter and the inevitable hilarious story. I personally love the one of her daughters wedding date when she forced the somewhat reluctant bride-to-be to accompany her to Harrods to choose some new bath taps..having wasted the Harrod’s assistants time for several hours not to mention her by know somewhat agitated daughter’s – she apologized serenely remarking that she was suffering from the severe problem of ‘bidet fixée.’

The only daughter of the redoubtable Mabel Batten, known as ‘Ladye’ who was a ‘close friend’ of both Edward VII and Johnnie Radclyffe Hall, author of The Well of Loneliness, Cara Harris was also the mother-in-law of Osbert Lancaster. The art of Rognon de la Flèche 1865 to 1931 (Lady Cara Harris continued until 1952) was first shown in December 1933, at the Warren Gallery, in Bond Street. Now some 57 years we are showing not only repeated this eccentric exhibition but also a collection of homemade dolls whose births, marriages and social activities became regular features in the pages of The Times and Tatler. Also showing during the exhibition will be one of her remarkable films Treasons Bargain (1937). Described as having five acts and 106 scenes it stars an elderly aristocrat (Lady Cara) who successfully outwits the ‘baddie’ Catptain Desmond Sneyke (Osbert Lancaster) and features performances by Lord Berners, Sybil Colefax, Lord Donegal, Victor Cunard, John Betjeman and and Cecil Beaton…’ Continue reading →

Robert Lenkiewicz—one of the great eccentrics of our time

 

Lenkiewicz picFound, a page torn from a copy of the Bookdealer dated 13th November 2003 previewing the forthcoming sale at Sotheby’s of the collection formed by the artist and book collector Robert Lenkiewicz.

Because of his reclusiveness, little was known about Lenkiewicz before he died in 2002 aged just 60. A media frenzy then broke out. There are so few genuine eccentrics in the art world that the press can hardly afford to ignore such a prime example as Lenkiewicz. Here is a passage from the preview:

‘Here we have a man who faked his own death some years before he died …and lived for a few days in hiding at the Cornish home of one of his patrons, the Earl of St Germans. He was notorious for befriending and patronising vagrants and tramps, in particular one Edwin McKenzie, who lived in a concrete tube on a rubbish dump and preferred to be known as Diogenes. Since Diogenes’ death in the 1980s the whereabouts of his bodily bits were a mystery, until his embalmed remains were discovered in a secret drawer in a bookcase at Lenkiewicz’s Barbican library. ‘

‘If you remain unimpressed there were other discoveries including what was left of the condemned 16th –century witch, Ursula Kemp. Her skeletal remains, which had been nailed to the coffin, are believed to have been disinterred in Victorian times. This find nicely compliments his great book collection, illustrating as it does Lenkiewicz’s obsessive curiosity with life and death’. Continue reading →

I once met…Olive Cook

Olive Cook photoI had first met the writer and wife of the brilliant architectural photographer Edwin Smith, in 1984 at Saffron Walden Museum, where I was a museum assistant. I was helping her with an exhibition of her late husband’s photographs. I recall that she called everyone ‘ darling ‘, which I saw as suggesting that she had once been in the theatre. I don’t remember anything more about her.

Fast forward to the late 1990’s and I was actually sitting with her in the kitchen of ‘The Orchards ‘, the famous home outside Saffron Walden that she and Edwin had once shared. Having visited various artists’ homes over the past two decades, including that of John and Myfanwy Piper at Fawley Bottom, I should have been prepared for what greeted me there, but I wasn’t. In the sitting room I seem to remember bright modern pictures and sculpture and art books covering every surface, with a lot of wickerwork and hand knitted rugs and potted plants. Rather Bloomsburyish, I thought, but in a nice way. The kitchen was more practically furnished, but in the same rather genteel-arty style. It also had a typically smell about it, an odour of old money artist that I’d noticed about the Pipers’ kitchen. Perhaps it was the drains. But I liked this comforting smell. Continue reading →

Sir Max’s Birthday Party

maximilian birthday prgramme 001Found—a programme for the seventieth birthday party of Sir Max Beerbohm (1872 – 1956), the well known caricaturist, parodist and all-round wit.

It was held on August 24th 1942 and organised by the Players Theatre, which during the war had moved to a ‘basement ‘ in Albemarle Street. The seventy-strong Maximilian Society, had been created especially for the event, and it was decided that a new member would be added each subsequent year that ‘ the incomparable Max ‘celebrated his birthday. The chairman was ‘Sir’ Desmond MacCarthy, the Bloomsburyite literary critic.

All we can gather from the programme is that much of the entertainment comprised seven Music Hall singing acts who trilled such raffish ditties as‘ Milly’s Cigar Divan ‘, ‘ Sweethearts and Wives’, and ‘ Driving in the Park’ . Beerbohm, who began his career in the 1890’s at the height of the Music Hall era, would have known these songs, and might even have chosen them.

Some of the performers were big names themselves. The actor Frith Banbury ( 1912 – 2008) would star in the classic film ‘The Life and Times of Colonel Blimp’ the following year. Hedli Anderson (1907 – 90), the singer and actress, was associated with the Group Theatre and had previously starred in plays by Auden, Isherwood and MacNeice, whom she married that same year. In fact, ‘Funeral Blues ‘was specially written for her by Auden and put to music by Britten for the Group Theatre’s production of ‘The Ascent of F6’. As we all know, the poem later became the star turn in ‘Four Weddings and a Funeral’. Continue reading →

I met a woman who met Man Ray

Man_Ray_1934Another in the series “I once met” and the sub category “I once danced with..” used when the meeting was only with someone who knew the person (almost always famous.) This is a reference to the popular song “I danced with a man who  danced with a girl who danced with the Prince of Wales.” An earlier Jot concerned a meeting with a doctor who had worked with Wittgenstein when he was a hospital porter at Guy’s in WW2.

In the 1990s I knew a dealer in modern first editions who had known Man Ray in the 1960s. Her name was Elizabeth Spindel and she sold books from her Canonbury home in North London. She said he made jokes but could not remember any. I asked what his friends called him (he was born Emmanuel Radnitzky) and she said “Man.” This was amusing as in the 1960s, especially amongst hipsters, everyone was known as “man.”

A piece from the Fresno Bee in 1990 by his brother-in-law Joseph Browner has a good insight on the great surrealist: “Man Ray..was a kind of short man who looked a little like Mister Peepers, spoke slowly with a slight Brooklynese accent, and talked so you could never tell when he was kidding.”

 

Joyce dancing & other bizarre anecdotes of bohemian Paris


3296340639_321e3f1c48_zIn the twenties the hard-bitten ex-pat journalist Sisley Huddleston
(whose father was such a Francophile that he named his son after a French painter) was the go-to man in Paris for political, literary and social low-down. So it was likely that from his seventh floor studio in Montparnasse he would come up with some hilarious observations on the more outré bohemian behaviour of the times.

In his Bohemian Literary and Social Life in Paris ( 1928), reviewed by Kenneth Kininmont in John O’London’s Weekly for November 17, 1928, he describes, among many other things, James Joyce dancing a ‘ serpent dance with Adrienne Monnier, who kept the famous little bookshop, the resort of many writers, in the Rue de Odeon’.

He also remarks on Rodin’s liking for cooked tripe and recalled a night spent with the Dadaists in their little theatre in Montmartre, where Tristan Tzara, the inventor of ‘a horrible noise-making machine, of the coffee-mill tribe, called a Dada-phone, was putting on one of his plays, entitled ‘Premiere Aventure celeste de M. Antipyrine’. This involved a cast of eight standing in a row and reciting through tubes of cardboard, speeches, of which the following is a translated example:

The equatorial bite in the bluish rock weights upon the night intimate scent of ammoniacal cradles the flower is a lamp-post doll listens to the mercury which mounts which shows the windmill holding on the viaduct before yesterday is not the ceramic of the chrysanthemum which turns the head and the cold the hour has sounded in your mouth once more an angel which falls.

Tzara‘s ‘Premiere Aventure..’ was written in 1916.Perhaps the idea of reciting through tubes of cardboard inspired’ Edith Sitwell to recite her poetry through a megaphone in the entertainment entitled Façade (1923).{RR] 96_530x

 

An artist among the Charing Cross Road bookshops

IMG_3272Found in the art instruction magazine The Artist (London, November 1934) an interview with the artist and art therapist Adrian Hill about his recent oil painting ‘In Charing Cross Road.’ Here are a few extracts -most of Hill’s talk is about  technique, but there are some insights on the choice of subject:

… there were some who questioned the impulse behind the work, and wondered whether the scene was worth the skill and discernment that the artist had brought to the task

I admit that I shared a little of this feeling. Charing Cross Road is a central and important thoroughfare, but it must rank in the C3 class amongst London highways. Indeed, there is so little of the beautiful or the picturesque about the neighbourhood that I asked Adrian Hill if the idea of sitting down to paint it came to him suddenly, or if he had deliberately hunted for such a subject.

“No, I wasn’t looking for it,” he said. “It came to me. It was a gift from the London traffic. I was waiting to cross the road when I suddenly found it in front of me, complete in design and detail, asking to be painted.”

“As far as size is concerned, did you see it as a 24″by 20″?”

“No, I thought at first of making it bigger – about 40″ by 30″ – but it was an experiment in the ay of subject, and I decided to go modest. If ever I do a similar scene, I shan’t hesitate to paint it on a grander scale!”

“You had no misgivings about tackling it inside the studio?”

“None at all. I believe I should have painted it mush less spontaneously and confidently if I had had the subject in front of me. The details would have been so insistent that I should have been led into making a still life study of books instead of an impression of a bookshop, which was what I was after.”

“But I suppose you had to use a model for the books?” Continue reading →