Against the proposed demolition of the Cleveland Street workhouse

London's last surviving Georgian workhouse: 44 Cleveland Street, London W1

Tired out from pondering the rights and wrongs of George Osborne’s selective hacking away at child benefit, Iain Duncan Smith’s modest proposals for the wholesale reformulation of state welfare provision, the general conference-season ambience of broken electoral promises, simultaneous and self-contradictory accusations of ideological inflexibility and half-baked desperation, the whole unsatisfactory spectacle of a Conservative Party enjoying no shared coherent vision about where the line ought to fall between public provision and private responsibility and hence muddling through as best it can, encumbered all awhile with a coalition partner whose history, instincts and commitments with regards to state welfare provision could hardly be more different?

If so, well, then here’s an easy question for you, by way of light distraction. The question concerns an old building. Just to make it even easier, there’s a photo of it above.

The question? Here goes. Which is a better idea — demolishing an attractive, conveniently-sited, structurally sound Georgian building, replete with historical associations which we’ll discuss in a moment, in order to throw up in its place an unremarkable tower-block providing a mixture of residential accommodation and some office space — or in contrast, preserving the old building, which could easily be converted to suit present-day purposes, including, err, residential accommodation and perhaps even a bit of office space as well?

Not exactly difficult, is it?

The historical case for preserving 44 Cleveland Street is particularly strong, not least for the commentary it offers on the past few centuries of welfare provision in London — a story, as it turns out, with more than a degree of contemporary resonance.

On James Lees-Milne and the National Trust

Blickling Hall, Norfolk, bequeathed to the National Trust by the 11th Marquess of Lothian upon his death in 1940.

Is it purely fortuitous that the decline of our civilization and the collapse of the country house way of life are coincidental?

— James Lees-Milne, ‘The Country House in Our Heritage”, in The Destruction of the Country House by Roy Strong et al, Thames & Hudson, 1974.

i.

A professed enthusiasm for the published diaries of James Lees-Milne comes, we learn too late, at the cost of having to defend their late author against a catalogue of failings — only some of these entirely imagined or misguided.

A few accusations, at least, can be fended off easily enough. Wasn’t JLM a snob? Yes, of course he was — but then he was neither the uncritical confidante of duchesses, the worshipper at the gaudy shrines of wealth and success nor the self-congratulatory anosmiac in matters of public and private morality that some believe him to be, not least because to have been any of these things would have exemplified a predictability both boring and unattractive — and JLM was, of course, neither. Wasn’t he a reactionary, though? Not really, more’s the pity. Because for all the encouraging rants against trade union militancy, redistributive taxation and Irish republicanism notwithstanding, there’s also enough Harold Nicolsonian liberalism, Duke of Edinburgh-style ur-environmentalism and dandyish personal eccentricity here to ward off any accusations of ideological consistency. Politically, as in most other ways, JLM remains hard to pin down. In these paradoxes, maddening though they can be, lies more than a degree of his diaries’ enduring appeal.

Admittedly, there are problems. JLM was, on the basis of these same diaries, both anti-semitic and racist — but so very mildly so, by the standards of his age and class, that one often ends up wondering more at the mildness itself, than at the unremarkable nastiness and stupidity of yesterday’s rightly discredited prejudices. He was capable of remarkably homophobic pronouncements — somewhat oddly, given his promiscuously bisexual, mostly guilt-free history. His patchy wartime service — six months in the Irish Guards, followed by a year of convalescence and a welcome return to civilian life — looks unimpressive, especially when compared with the heroism of so many of his contemporaries, although the stress-induced onset of hereditary Jacksonian epilepsy would clearly be a kinder explanation than whatever combination of nervous collapse and cowardice unsympathetic critics might otherwise postulate in its place. JLM also went on a lot about liking houses more than people, which is rarely a good sign — although in practice, the individual qualities of house and person tended to soften the edges of any comparison — so perhaps he can be excused on that particular score.

In any event, however, we may perhaps agree that JLM was not an unambiguously admirable human being. As the diaries make plain — nor does Michael Bloch’s brilliant biography do anything much to dispel the impression — JLM could be petty, headstrong, arbitrary, vain, self-justifying and also extremely selfish. But JLM was, as the diaries also reveal, clear-eyed regarding his failings. And herein, I suppose, reposes his greatness as a diarist. For the perfect imaginary companion, while he surely ought to be more alert, more perceptive and more fluently confidential than even his brightest readers, at the same time cannot be seen to be superior to them. ‘You were silly like us …’ Even more than his wit and social reach, JLM’s contradictions, his failings and that unsparing yet somehow affectionate self-criticism are what render the diaries perfect company, as much so on tiresome days as on happy ones. A better man would, in short, have been a worse diarist. His enthusiasts end up loving him as much for his contradictions, contrariness and flaws, real though these may be, as despite them.

Yet for all that, there is one aspect of JLM’s story which continues to fill me with unease — his relationship with the National Trust.

No. 76 Dean Street: a restoration drama

Until some point soon after lunchtime on Friday, 10 July 2009, No. 76 Dean Street probably looked, to the thousands of people who rushed or ambled past it daily, much like any other Soho building. A few, perhaps, would have glanced up and seen it for what it was — a townhouse of some quality, built c. 1740, and thereafter subject to the usual vicissitudes, serving variously as residence for the seventh Earl of Abercorn, a workhouse, premises for a firm of leather-cutters and, most recently, offices for a financial services company. A brief look into one of those tall ground-floor windows might, if correctly timed, have revealed an elegant deal-and-oak staircase curving up towards the right of the front door. Sometimes, indeed, passing by after dark, it was possible to gaze upwards, usually more by accident than design, and to be astonished once again at what the chance illumination revealed inside that front first-floor room — elaborate cornices, surfaces painted with scenes of various sorts — a fleeting impression of gilt, brightness and even grandeur reclaimed from the slushing tides of ambient, could-be-anywhere ordinariness lapping about our city.

Soon after lunchtime last Friday, however, a fire seems to have started somewhere within the air-conditioning system of No. 76 Dean Street. By the time dusk fell, the roof had collapsed.

Dilapidated or just complicated? ‘The Roman Forum’ by David Watkin

A few sentences into David Watkin’s The Roman Forum, notice is served that this will be no ordinary guidebook. The first paragraph establishes a tone that will persist throughout:

“The Roman Forum is one of the most famous of all historic sites, the heart of the ancient city, the hub of the Roman empire, the goal of tens of thousands of Grand Tourists. It is still visited by millions of people a year, yet it can be a baffling experience. Part of this is because archaeologists dig deeper and deeper in the understandable pursuit of knowledge about Rome and its early history, leaving behind rubble and holes which are ugly and difficult to understand. It is also because some of the most prominent monuments, which are believed by almost all visitors to be antique, turn out essentially to be products of the nineteenth or twentieth century.”

Yet how many other guidebooks would, by way of introducing the reader to ‘one of the most famous of all historic sites’, begin by asserting that the site in question is not only ‘baffling’ but also ‘ugly’ and ‘difficult to understand’ — let alone insist on the illusionless point that what may be seen today of the Forum is, in large part, a modern restoration? How many authors would dismiss archaeologists’ ‘pursuit of knowledge’ at the Roman Forum, of all places, with recourse to that pity-saturated adjective, ‘understandable’?

Prof Watkin, on the other hand, is no ordinary compiler of guidebooks. Professor of the History of Architecture at Cambridge University, fellow of Peterhouse since 1970 and a convert to Roman Catholicism, he has written important books on Sir John Soane,Thomas Hope, C. R. Cockerell, Athenian Stuart, John Simpson and others. His account of George III’s architectural patronage was a scholarly history in which the effort to avoid writing an instruction book for princes was palpable, if not wholly successful. Prof Watkin’s most famous work, Morality and Architecture (1977, revised edition 2001) indicated a willingness to defend as a matter of present-day urgency the inherited architectural vocabulary of ancient Greece and Rome, while at the same time acknowledging timeless doctrinal truth as simultaneously fundamentally different from and confidently superior to the sort of claims that can be made in favour of style, zeitgeist or positivist assertions of ‘progress’.

Not everyone has admired this. Thus Prof Mary Beard who, in her role as general editor of Profile Books’ ‘Wonders of the World’ series, commissioned Prof Watkin to write the present volume, again demonstrates the bracing disinclination to avoid controversy which has not only offended sensitive souls along the way, e.g. here, but lent energy to her re-invention as a successful uber-blogger, achieved without damage to a career as a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge and a classicist of formidable seriousness.

For commissioning Prof Watkin, in any event, Prof Beard is to be warmly congratulated. The Roman Forum is, to use the almost too predictable phrase, a triumph. Clear-eyed, surprising, malicious, injunctive, polemical and often intensely funny, it achieves a minor wonder of the world in taking a place all civilised people feel they know and rendering it, if not new exactly, then far more complicated, contestible and immediately significant than had previously seemed to be the case.

Ancient and Modern: Palladio at the Royal Academy

Architectural exhibitions are, by default, flawed exercises. Few curators would have the nerve to stage, say, a Titian blockbuster without a single Titian painting on view, a marble-free Bernini show, a Schiaparelli crowd-pleaser offering the curious not a single faded frock or frill. And yet the celebration of a lacuna — a high-profile Hamlet minus the prince — is a matter of necessity in the world of architectural exposition. Goethe once claimed, apparently, that architecture is frozen music. If so, the best a curator can offer is a glimpse of the score. The actual performance takes place on some other stage entirely.

Hence the inevitability with which the Royal Academy’s excellent Andrea Palladio: His Life and Legacy comes to be made up out of sketches, plans, notes, printed pages, painted portraits, sections and facade elevations, near-doodles, a set of drawing instruments in a leather case, maps, and of course those meticulously-constructed lime and beechwood models, smelling of varnish and scholarly obsession — dolls’ houses made by angels for princes, immodest household shrines of formal perfection, each one as cleanly excised from the environmental matrix encasing actual buildings as inital intention ever can be from deed or subsequent doubt.

Saving the King: George III and Queen Charlotte at the Queen’s Gallery

Archive: 6 April, 2004

ART: Saving the King
George III & Queen Charlotte at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace

Let’s cut straight to the point. George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste, currently showing at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, is that rare thing — an excellent concept brought to fruition with intelligence, visual aplomb, conviction and exemplary attention to detail — and for all those reasons, it deserves the large audience it will doubtless attract.

We’ve been waiting a long time for this one. Bizarrely enough, although his 60-year reign (1760-1820) was one of the longest in British history, encompassing a giddying degree of change and some of this country’s finest hours, there has never before been an exhibition devoted solely to George III and his queen. Yet had any other institution happened first upon this happy idea, one doubts it could have matched the sheer firepower of art and artefacts, the appropriateness of exhibition space or the rightness of content, taste and tone achieved here by the Royal Collection. Or to put it another way, streams of aimless tourists may well flock to George III & Queen Charlotte — but so should anyone with an interest in history, Britain’s royal family, European fine and decorative arts, architecture, the study of patronage or the cultural life of the West in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. And if that doesn’t mean ‘everyone’, this is hardly the fault of the exhibition or its planners. Few, I imagine, will emerge from George III & Queen Charlotte without a radically revised view of this perennially under-appreciated monarch — or without acquiring a heightened understanding of what it takes to rule successfully in strange, troubled, complicated times.

Everything else aside, though, perhaps the most praiseworthy aspect of George III & Queen Charlotte is its polemical thrust, no less resolute for being delivered in civilised, even gentle tones. The thesis of the exhibition is simple enough: that while George III is remembered today either as a pathetic madman or as the stubborn and ill-advised fool who lost Britain her North American colonies, he ought to be remembered instead as someone very different — as a modest, intelligent, hard-working monarch whose art-collecting and building works need to be seen in the context of his heartfelt and unceasing efforts to improve the lives of his people. All of which leads to a consequent point, all the more powerful for the curatorial refusal to spell it out: in the words of a public address distributed at the time of the Golden Jubilee in 1809, the king was

the father of his people who had preserved his country from the dreadful evils prevailing on the continent where we have seen kings hurled from their throne, and constituted authorities (venerated and admired for ages) trampled underfoot.

Or to put it another way, George III needs to be seen against a background of what didn’t happen during his reign, as much as he ought to be congratulated on much of what did. And if there is a third point, insofar as it is articulated at all, it comes neither from the curators or even the objects themselves, but rather emerges organically from the whole idea of a domesticated, hard-working, resilient royal family, negotiating changing times and shifting mores — complete with a Prince of Wales who draws, who cares about architecture, who worries about a sustainable future for British agriculture and who, despite some teasing, is almost invariably proved both correct and prescient in his concerns. People who like the idea of continuity will find George III & Queen Charlotte deeply satisfying in a way that few exhibitions could really hope to match. All of which means that, unsurprisingly, ERO liked this exhibition very much indeed.

Making an entrance
Those who have not yet visited architect John Simpson’s additions to the Queen’s Gallery will, of course, enjoy the added pleasure of seeing how very well these new rooms function in practice. The robust, confident little portico lends a sense of occasion to the whole business of entering the new gallery space. Best of all is the double staircase — tall yet fine in its proportions, with all the vigour that makes classicism effective without the bombast that can render it boring — leading the visitor upwards, enforcing a rotating glance around the double-height entry hall before delivering him at the doors of the pleasantly-proportioned, well-lit first gallery. The magic here is, I suppose, nothing that would have surprised the ancient civilisations, with their firm grasp of how to make something memorable and even numinous out of the approach to sacred sites or seats of power — nor even the sturdy figures who commissioned the creation of the Manchester Art Gallery — but how many London museum or gallery entrances suggest even the slightest interest in the mechanics of how the visitor first encounters what he has come to see? Add to that the fact that the staff of the Queen’s Gallery seem remarkably efficient, friendly and genuinely helpful — again, not the invariable way of London public attractions — and one gets a definite sense that this is something more than just an exercise in selling tickets or achieving visitor targets. Trivial points? Not really. A visit to an exhibition is, for some of us anyway, more than just the sum of the objects on show and the curatorial interpretation of them. If there’s a sense of richness, real significance, even institutional self-confidence that permeates George III & Queen Charlotte, it takes hold even before the first exhibit slips into view.

As for the exhibits themselves — well, it is hard to know where to start. George III & Queen Charlotte sets out to give an account of the ways in which these two royal patrons created, displayed and enjoyed their various collections — including prints and drawings, portraits, Old Master paintings, fine furniture, china, silver and gold table settings, objects de virtu and so on — while also encouraging achievement in architecture, horticulture, manufacturing, astronomy, horology, agriculture and more or less every other obvious form of worthy endeavour. Everything shown is, apparently, sourced from the Royal Collection. The result is dazzling, delightful — all but overwhelming.

Again, the exhibition spaces work brilliantly. Two long galleries display paintings and furniture, decorative items and interesting mementoes; two smaller cabinets are filled with miniatures and ornaments; there are a couple of long, low galleries showing off drawings and watercolours; finally, the passage between the two main galleries is filled with china, plate and two magnificent old lamps, and provides a tantalising glimpse outside, to the gardens of Buckingham Palace. So there are tall rooms and low rooms, light rooms and darker rooms, splendour and scholarly reserve — an ideal combination. But every single space is filled with something that is, in its own way, fascinating and evocative — complete with labels that inform without patronising — shaped by the curators into a satisfying, coherent, persuasive-looking whole.

Whoever hung this exhibition has both a first-class eye for the visceral impacts of long vistas, and a nice sense of visual drama. Larger paintings, for instance, are awarded long lines of sight — but then surrounded with amiable groups of smaller pictures and flanked with furniture and decorative objects — not left floundering in acres of naked wall-space. Sensitive hanging means a lot for a work like Annibale Carracci’s The Madonna and sleeping Child with the Infant St John the Baptist — its intimate composition and skilful chiaroscuro gaining absolutely everything from the spotless grandeur of its surroundings — while Sebastiano Ricci’s enormous Adoration of the Magi looks strong, festive and surprisingly at home in its wholly secular setting. Meanwhile, the decision to place side-by-side three sets of fine china — each, in its own way, a masterpiece, but as radically different in terms of style as can possibly be imagined — provides an unforgettable lesson in the scope of late eighteenth century court taste, from the most frivolous rococo to the most austere and scholarly classicism. In the same room, dinner services were displayed in a way I had never seen before — laid out in front of the viewer, as if he were sitting down to dine in the royal presence. Again, it’s a decision that works as surely at the level of visual interest as it does at the level of didactic impact.

But then it is also heartening to learn, for instance, that Alan Ramsay’s great portrait of George III (highly familiar to me, as it happens, from childhood afternoons spent copying a copy of it in, of all places, the North Carolina Museum of Art) has been borrowed from its usual place in the State Dining Room of Buckingham Palace for the purposes of the exhibition — heartening to learn that it is still doing, most of the time, exactly what it was originally meant to do. And for those of us with strong reservations about the whole atmosphere of ritualised pointlessness which surrounds most museum objects, this is yet another reason to admire George III & Queen Charlotte.

A modest model monarch
What, then, does this bewilderingly lavish display of art and artefacts tell us about George III and his consort? Quite a lot, actually.

irst and foremost, it completely refutes the notion that the king’s taste was insular and unsophisticated. Being English meant a lot to George III (1738-1820). His father, Frederick, Prince of Wales — having seen both the extent to which George II had neglected his island realm in favour of Hanover, and the baleful impact of this on public opinion — instructed his young son in no uncertain terms: ‘Convince this nation that you are not only an Englishman born and bred, but that you are also this by inclination’. It was a message that George III took very much to heart, famously ‘glorying in the name of Briton’. Yet at the same time, he was also a Continental ruler — Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg (1760-1820), elector of Hanover (1760-1815) and following the decision of the Congress of Vienna, King of Hanover (1815-20). Both his marriage to Charlotte, daughter of the Duke of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, and his own Continental family connections helped to ensure that his world always stretched a great deal further than the shores of the British Isles. On one hand, this probably meant that events like the Seven Years War, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic campaigns mattered more immediately to him than they might have done to other Britons; it undoubtedly gave a particular nuance to his robust protestantism. Yet on a rather lighter note, it also ensured that no matter how much he enjoyed playing the simple family man and gentleman farmer, his taste was educated, outward-looking and sophisticated — taking on board a great deal of the Enlightenment aesthetic more familiarly associated with flashier, more distant, more widely-admired monarchs.

Making images
It is in this sense that George III and his queen found their perfect portrait painter in the intelligent, cosmopolitan, politically alert, mostly German-speaking and invariably underrated artist Johann Zoffany — one of the bright stars of the present exhibition. Born in 1733, Zoffany grew up in Regensburg, Barvaria, where his father was court cabinet-making and architect to the Prince von Thurn und Taxis. Here he received a thorough grounding in German Rococo before undertaking further training, and hugely widening his previously rather provincial horizons, during several years in Rome. In 1760 he moved to London. David Garrick, the actor and theatrical entrepreneur, was his first important English patron, for whom he painted theatre scenes and conversation pieces. By 1764 Zoffany had been introduced to Queen Charlotte, possibly by that hugely influential figure in the early life of George III, Lord Bute. Zoffany spent the next ten years painting portraits of the royal family. Many of these portraits are on show at the Queen’s Gallery.

As a group, the works are sympathetic, inventive, full of crisp detail and narrative interest — and often astonishingly informal by the standards of the day. Particularly remarkable is the 1771 portrait of George III. Horace Walpole, probably Britain’s most influential arbiter of smart taste at the time, pronounced the picture ‘very like, but most disagreeable’. His reaction was, perhaps understandable. In Rome, Zoffany had picked up not only a very fine, smooth way of handling paint — a world removed from the Baroque models so valued by Reynolds and others — but also something approaching a neo-classical idiom, which married strangely yet powerfully with an English taste for down-to-earth informality. Thus the thirty-something king is presented seated, slightly off-centre, looking away, rather flushed, his tunic undone, one hand planted artlessly on his knee, the upholstered chair and gilt table and dark featureless sea of background lending the work a frontality that is startling even today — and that only gains from comparison with the pendant portrait of Queen Charlotte, surrounded as she is by banks of flowers and flounces and festoons. The king, one feels, must have been amazingly self-confident to sit for such a portrait — confident he did not need acres of ermine or a very large column somewhere behind him to proclaim his legitimacy. This, then, is part of the picture that we first begin to form of George III — an issue of style that comments meaningfully on substance, since George III appears to have been both very confident and, by regal standards anyway, not particularly grand in his habits.

The picture broadens out as the exhibition unfolds. The king was open to advice — not least, that of Lord Bute — when it came to buying pictures and drawings, and some of his greatest successes came from his decisions to purchase existing collections, such as that of Joseph Smith, the consul at Venice, and Cardinal Alessandro Albani’s treasure-trove of Old Master drawings. Both are richly represented here, not least in the wealth of drawings by Guercino and the perfectly delightful little Longhis. But there are other paintings where the king’s own taste may perhaps shine through. One great surprise is a portrait of John Cuff, a master lens-grinder and maker of scientific instruments from whom the king had purchased items and with whom he may possibly even have consulted. Executed by Zoffany, it is almost hyper-real in the lucidity of its detail. This startling work celebrates skilled labour in an almost Hogarthian vein while stopping short of the humour Hogarth would have injected. Here, surrounded by gilt and furniture polished like glass, its plainness is downright triumphant. If George III commissioned this work, as he may well have done, it surely tells us something about his attitude towards technical skill and scientific achievement. It could also hardly differ more from the other stand-out Zoffany work on show, that great monument to the Grand Tour, The Tribuna of the Uffizi. Zoffany was sent to Florence in 1772 to create this work and hoped that it would be the culmination of his success. Alas, the painting’s strange mixture of literalism and parody had as unsettling an effect on contemporary audiences as it has on subsequent generations. When it appeared at the Royal Academy (another George III creation, incidentally) the abuse heaped on it was enough to propel Zoffany off on another journey — this time, to India, where he lived and painted from 1783-89, before returning to Britain to die, his artistic career never quite recovering from that final setback.

The Tribuna of the Uffizi is not only a very famous painting, but one whose detail very much benefits from examination in good light, hung at a sensible height from the floor. By the same token, Benjamin West’s The Departure of Regulus is fascinating up close — not, in this case, because it is a particularly famous painting, but conversely, because it is such a stunning example of a type of British art that has all but dropped out of public memory.

Can we adduce from his choice of pictures that George III liked his art to have a fair amount of intellectual, discursive content? Possibly we can. We also know that the king not only purchased Van Dyck’s magnificent The Five Eldest Children of Charles I (it had twice escaped from the Royal Collection before he repatriated it) but hung it in his personal apartments in Buckingham Palace — although in later years he let an equally splendid equestrian portrait of Charles I get away. (The latter painting now reposes in the Louvre, where at least one has the chance to compare it with Rubens’ Medici Cycle nearby.) And perhaps, given his architectural interests, he genuinely enjoyed the two pairs of excellent Canalettos here — the sort that remind one exactly how good this painter could be when he was really concentrating on the task at hand.

These are the grander works on show, and it is a delight to have the chance to see them. Every bit as impressive, however, are some of the smaller, topographical paintings, which were presumably admired as much for their practical, information-conveying value as for their skill in execution. These include a group of absolutely beautiful Sandby watercolours depicting royal residences or architectural fantasies. And indeed, one could also go on about the furniture, or the silver, or the porcelain. Each picture, each object, both reflects the king’s tastes and priorities, but also seems — perhaps deceptively — to offer us access to both. In this way, the picture in our minds continues to form. George III grows more complicated, more engaging by the moment.

At home with Farmer George
The wealth of items in this exhibition also conveys something of George III’s domestic life. Although his marriage to Queen Charlotte was entirely one of political expediency, the couple got on companionably enough and eventually produced fifteen children. The king and queen were affectionate parents. Yet there was plenty of sorrow in the lives of the family. Two children died young and were much mourned. Of those who lived to maturity, virtually all of the royal princes drifted aimlessly, spending money, drinking too much, contracting unsatisfactory liasons and failing to take to heart the lessons of selfless service set to them by their parents. Of these, ‘Prinny’ was perhaps not the worst, but was certainly the one with the greatest scope to cause woeful damage — scope he exploited to the full. The princesses, for their part, were largely locked away from society in an attempt to keep them pure — a scheme that succeeded, albeit at the cost of turning them into a pack of lonesome, unhappy spinsters.

Yet there was also a great deal that bound the family together, including a shared enthusiasm for art and music. And while we cannot be sure what George III’s harpsichord-playing sounded like, of the great surprises of the present exhibition is the skill that the king brought to his architectural drawings — matched by Princess Charlotte’s practiced and versatile draughtsmanship. (Queen Charlotte apparently also enjoyed drawing, but little of her work has survived.) The king was a good amateur ivory-turner. The queen was a formidable seamstress who not only sewed a great deal herself but who bankrolled a number of English embroidery enterprises. So this becomes another part of the aggregate picture: the endless projects — botanical compositions, the creation of a snuff-box, an architectural fantasy, a series of silhouettes, a decorated table, experiments with early chemistry sets or model machines, — that filled the royal days, which were ultimately as much focused on encouraging desirable trades and industries as they were about passing time and driving off boredom. Poor Marie Antoinette and the fantasy world of Le Hameu de la Reine seem very far away indeed.

Out of the picture
Also far away from this exhibition are the various troubles that afflicted George III’s reign. The famous ‘madness’ best known from Alan Bennett’s in some ways surprisingly subtle play — not dementia or mental illness, really, but rather the destructive effects of an inherited metabolic condition called porphyria that left this kindly, gentle, strong-minded man unable to function for twelve years of his time on the throne — is only alluded to indirectly, as in a particularly charming set of china commissioned to celebrate his recovery from one bout of the illness.

Politics, too, are kept at a long arm’s length, except where they relate to commissions. And while other parts of the empire sometimes slip into view — as in the case of a marvellously gaudy, jewel-studded bird of paradise ‘acquired’ by Marquess Wellesley for the directors of the East India Company from Tipu Sultan’s citadel at Seringapatam and presented to the king soon thereafter, or two lovely ivory armchairs from Murshidabad given by Warren Hastings to Queen Charlotte, or a strange and rather frightening Maori amulet brought back from his first voyage to the South Seas by Captain Cook — those notorious American Colonies don’t appear at all — probably, one imagines, because America did not contain anything sufficiently strange, rare or magnificent to warrant presentation to the royal couple.

And when the realities of geopolitics surface, it is generally, once again, in the context of their impact on the Royal Collection. Alas, by the time of the French Revolution, the royal palaces had run out of wall-space (watercolours in this exhibition by Charles Wilde, James Stephanoff and others convey an amazingly vivid impression of the interiors of these rooms) and the king had stopped collecting pictures, so the accident whereby so many important French paintings still remain, today, in Britain has had less impact here than, say, in Dulwich. Still, when Napoleon was rampaging round Europe it became important for the king to recall some of his prized Continental pieces of art and furniture to the safety of Britain. This is European history, in other words, seen through the collectors’ spy-glass, and not the plastic arts seen through the eyes of the hindsight-gifted historian.

Yet the decision to concentrate on the main point of the exhibition — patronage, collecting and court taste — is surely the right one. Not least, it avoids drowning these many marvellous objects in the tepid and damaging sea of our own preoccupations. Hence there are no apologies for imperialism, and despite the king’s friendly patronage of Josiah Wedgewood, no sighing over the horrors of the slave trade. George III designed model cottages for labourers; he and his queen gave generously to every good cause going. Nor did he stop with good causes. Regrettably, it turns out that the king gave a pension to Jean Jacques Rousseau — all very trendy at the time, and doubtless well-intentioned — but in retrospect, other than by bank-rolling the even more appalling Voltaire, he’d have been hard pressed to have spent his money more foolishly.

Yet aside from a select coterie of high-profile artists, craftsmen and inventors, the British people are also kept at some distance from this exhibition. They don’t have much to do with collecting or patronage, so they don’t really figure. It takes an effort of will to remember the extraordinary level of civil disorder in Britain’s cities (making the events of the 1970s and early 80s look trivial by comparison), the Gordon Riots, the regular assaults on the king’s ministers and, at least once, on the monarch himself, the violence done to a statue of George II within moments of erecting it, the fear of invasion, the paranoia regarding foreign spies in our midst, agrarian unrest, that filthy demagogue Wilkes, the sense of crisis that emerges from the letters of Wellington and others during the last years of the king’s reign — the black premonition of impending disaster that haunted intelligent men through so much of the early nineteenth century.

So, then — why bother to remember any of this? For one reason only. The curators of George III & Queen Charlotte were right not to make a fuss about this issue, but for me at least, it forms perhaps the most important leitmotiv of a fascinating, perceptive, occasionally moving exhibition. The point is this. Britain was almost unique amongst proper Western nations in not having some sort of revolution or other serious disruption, either during the time that George III sat on the throne or in the years that followed shortly thereafter. (However bad the Reform Act may have been, it could have been an awful lot worse.) And the plastic arts are the quiet, long-suffering witnesses to all of this. Versailles, for example, is one of the most handsome man-made things on earth, but for me at least, it is impossible to spend any time there without a bitter recognition of how incompletely all that rebuilding, all that re-gilding and replanting, all that De Gaulle era restoration could begin to cover up the stains of the violence, the pointless destruction, the inhuman and ungodly acts that have taken place there. The same is true, I suspect, of the San Souci or the Hermitage. I can’t imagine I’m the only person to be struck by this, either, although it became even more real to me when, in early 1990, I was showing a Romanian visitor around the National Portrait Gallery and had to confront her highly emotional reaction at seeing all the royal portraits — ‘you are so lucky in Britain to have all your past!’ Well, we are lucky, not because furniture and pictures matter much, but because they are outward and visible signs of something that matters enormously. Here in London, now, we can admire the riches of the Royal Collection, get to know its treasures and smile over its occasional eccentricities — all of this, in a royal palace that still belongs to the descendent of the man who collected so many of these things and which, although it is not the most pleasing piece of architecture in the world, at least has the signal merit of never having known the indignities either of popular insurrection, or of the tyrannies that invariably follow in popular insurrection’s wake.

All of which might sound like rather tangential — but which in fact leads us right back to George III and to the puzzle at the heart of this exhibition. The more one thinks about it, the odder it seems that a reign full of so much achievement — full of successes both at home and abroad, paving the way for Britain’s zenith as a world power — ought to be remembered these days, if at all, for its perceived failures and inadequacies. Often, indeed, these failures are blamed on the king’s personality. He is, for instance, frequently criticised for ‘intransigence’ and ‘harshness’ in his support for Lord North’s policies in the American colonies. This line of criticism only works, however, if one really believes that the shoddy tax revolt and subsequent even shoddier coup d’etat which launched the country of my birth was not only entirely reasonable but also somehow inevitable, in a way that made standing against it as foolish as trying to reverse the incoming tide — ‘intransigence’ indeed. Whereas, in contrast, if one believes neither of these things, then the king’s position looks entirely reasonable. All of which is, I guess, if not a tangential point, then at least an argument for another day. Yet it does seem to me that America’s escape from the imperial fold had very little if anything to do with some sort of failure on the part of George III, and much more to do with something much less fashionable in present-day history, whether of the post-Marxist or the liberal variety — boring military practicalities, interleaved here and there with a bit of political contingency. Or to put it another way, if there was a problem with George III and Lord North’s colonial policy, it was perhaps simply that they were not allowed to pursue it long enough and hard enough.

It should also be said that, despite all the caricatures and the effusions of coffee-house republicanism, George III ended his reign genuinely loved by the vast majority of his people. As with his recoveries from illness, his 1809 Golden Jubilee saw outpourings of popular rejoicing every bit as real as those we saw in 2002 — and, to some observers, every bit as surprising. Amid his turbulent and troublesome offspring, he remained dutiful, perhaps a little dull, his modest ways perhaps a little easy to mock — yet in the end, his selfless commitment to the work that his birth had entrusted to him won the sort of quiet respect and bemused affection that most Continental monarchs, with all their anxious ceremonial and sporadic unseatings, could only watch with envy. He wasn’t a romantic figure, nor was he — despite his illness — really a tragic one. His virtues were mostly the understated sort that do not lodge themselves readily in historical narratives. So it is greatly to the credit of George III & Queen Charlotte that the exhibition manages to enrich and revise our understanding of this complicated, interesting, decent man, reminding us that he was, inter alia, a greater patron of the arts than his spendthrift son and indeed a highly influential figure in the history of our country. And if, from time to time, it sends our thoughts skimming over the surface of our own age as well — well, where’s the harm in that?

George III & Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste is showing at the Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace, until 9 January 2005. Tickets cost £7.50; concessions apply. The large, fully-illustrated and informative catalogue costs only £19.95 and is, like every other aspect of this exhibition, very highly recommended.

Bunny Smedley, April 6, 2004 12:56 PM

Ahead of the curve: the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion 2003

[The following article originally appeared on the Electric Review website.]

How often does it happen that London’s summer weather outshines its art? June 2003 started out by giving us plenty of brilliant sun — plus the hyper-depressive ‘realism’ of Tate Modern’s Cruel and Tender, some predictably boring snaps by Wolfgang Tillmans at Tate Britain, and possibly the most flaccidly aimless Royal Academy summer exhibition in recent memory. So does this mean that we should all stick to slapping on the Factor 18 and concentrating on those tan-lines, at least until Bridget Riley’s dated but now weirdly retro-chic 1960s stuff starts to work its undemanding magic at Tate Britain next week?

Well, no. Help is at hand, or rather, at the Serpentine. For several years now, the presiding forces there have commissioned a temporary summer pavilion from a well-known architect. This time they have chosen Oscar Niemeyer, the 95-year old seminal modernist and the man who brought us Brasilia, as well as plenty of other concrete wonders drooled over extensively by the photographers at Wallpaper*, among others. And this, like the Riley show, was an inspired choice. Now that even postmodernism has been reduced to being an ironic and quotable tic of the long-ago 1980s, and now that we don’t have to take modernism’s endless vaingloriousness seriously any more, there is something adorable and soothing and innocent about it all — like watching the television sitcoms of one’s own childhood or laughing at photos of one’s parents’ fashion mistakes circa 1973.

So it is no wonder that everyone has, entirely correctly, embraced Niemeyer’s pavilion as a marvellous success. It is a success. Made — inevitably — of concrete, aluminium and steel, and with a great sheet of brilliant red down one side of it, the structure looks rather like a large white curving ‘M’ drawn rather casually across the green landscape of Hyde Park. Indeed, if one goes down into the lower level of the pavilion — sunk a few feet below the level of the lawns beyond it — one can watch a small film in which the Modernist Master himself casually draws the ‘M’ and speaking meaningfully about the need to ‘explore the meaning of the curve’ or something like that — presumably leaving his collaborator José Sussekind and the capable people at Arup to sort out the details. From the inside, this lower level produces interesting worms’-eye views of the undulating lawns beyond. The real point, though, is the upper level. Above, the roof of the pavilion swoops with the illusory lightness of a tent or marquee, letting in great vistas of blue sky and green park on either side; a circular window at one end frames the pastoral scene beyond, while a ledge on the aspect facing the Serpentine Gallery itself provides what must be one of London’s greatest, if most evanescent, lounging and looking opportunities. Inside there are low tables and rounded benches of the sort that one might find in any improvised metropolitan bar, except that the dusty concrete floor, the rush of open air and changing light effects keep insisting that this is something different. The fact that it won’t be there forever probably helps, too. Over the summer the pavilion will serve as a sort of improvised cafe, and then as the leaves start to fall it will vanish as suddenly as it appeared. Unlike so much modern art and architecture, this is a pavilion that has enough sense not to hang around once it ceases to please and amuse.

In the meantime, it looks marvellous. From the outside, its simple white-and-red formula is set off brilliantly by the midsummer greens and blues of the park beyond. On the inside, it forms a sexy, light-hearted space that makes its inhabitants look sophisticated and sleek. It shows no signs of taking itself too seriously. It shows every sign of making lots of people — modernist groupies, middle-brow dating couples, simple thirsty wanderers — very happy indeed. In this way it seems to have much more of a ‘point’ than many things inflicted upon us in the name of art.

Of course one can go too far in insisting on the ironies inherent in, err, a glorified tea-room. But those ironies are there all the same, as obvious as Niemeyer’s apparently effortless skill in using glass, concrete and colour, and most of them connect directly to Niemeyer’s stature as a hero of modernism.

Take the simple matter of function. On one hand, despite a parallel emphasis on form (that curve again) it is a central feature of modernist self-understanding that architecture not only can but in fact must have a political, even a moral impact. The concrete (as it were) proof of this can be seen everywhere from the anti-fascist posture of the Barcelona Pavilion to the slightly anxious New-World boosterism of the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square to Brasilia itself. Needless to say, to believe this is to accord architects an awful lot of power — far more, obviously, than one should entrust to anything as vulgar as, say, a patron.

And yet when it comes right down to it, modernism does not have a brilliant track-record at producing things that actually do what they are meant to do. Some of modernism’s most stunning offspring — one thinks of Mies van der Rohe’s prism-like skyscrapers of the early 1920s — remained stillborn on the drawing-table, either because they could not yet be built or — more likely — because they worked better as dreams than as buildings. With its opulent materials and self-conscious lack of functionality, the Barcelona Pavilion may in fact have had more in common with sculpture than with architecture. Can there be a single modernist architect who never built an art gallery that won prizes for its good looks while remaining stubbornly resistant to the showing of art within its often glassy, often sloping walls? As for Brasilia, half its Wallpaper* charm lies in the aestheticism of its empty corridors and onward-rushing ruin, as poignant as anything etched by Piranesi. (Rio, meanwhile, scruffy and demotic, thrives apace.) Modernism was supposed to elevate mankind, but we never really rose to its challenge. This is why, today, it is the ultimate in irresponsible luxury styles, suitable only for those sophisticated enough to appreciate its rebarbative simplicity, intelligent enough to be able to separate it from its bad historical memories, and rich enough to work around its practical defects and demands.

Hence, perhaps, the 2003 Serpentine Gallery Pavilion. Given a light-hearted commission, Niemeyer has created a light-hearted structure. It will not have to look very good for very long. It will not have to achieve a high moral purpose. The beers and glasses of wine it sells will not have to transform their recipients into newer, better men. Instead — and despite the insistent modernist allusion both of its form and of its creator’s name — it appeals to another tradition altogether — a frankly pastoral one. Giorgione, I suppose, started off on this path, later explored so magically and hauntingly by Titian, Claude, Boucher and others, ending up — with only the faintest haze of irony starting to draw in — on the plein air scenes of Manet and the Impressionists. Et in arcadia ego … Such art, and the architecture that referred back to it, were ways of framing and regularising the relationship between man and nature, seen most obviously in those moments when man was sufficiently removed from the realities of the natural world that he began to miss what had previously been an integral if often burdensome bond. So forget modernism. If this pavilion is about anything, it is about a pleasure-dome built in the wilderness where those who no longer need to labour on the land can enjoy the fresh air, the open vistas, the glint of light on water. All of which is some long way from the aspirations behind, say, Brasilia, or the various communist party headquarters built by Niemeyer, or the aspirations of modernism, full stop.

I first saw the 2003 Serpentine Pavilion on a beautiful summer evening. Gradually, twilight started to fall. Shadows lengthened and the sky darkened from indigo into lingering violet. Green treetops turned first gold and then ultramarine. A private view was taking place. Across the lawns strolled elegant old men in immaculately-cut suits, effervescent 30-somethings flirting over their glasses of wine, the odd barefooted middle-class infant running delightedly wild under the blessing of a hundred tolerant grownup smiles. Like the nymphs and shepherds in a painting by Giorgione, couples lounged on the grass, while the odd celebrity passed amongst us like classical gods in a renaissance conceit: supermodel Liberty Ross, a kindly-looking Lord Rothschild, tiny elfin Tracey Emin who alighted briefly amongst the mortals and then was gone. This was, perhaps, as close as I shall ever come to living out a life familiar only from Boucher’s paintings — beauty for pleasure’s sake, a gilded twilight anticipating a long green dusk — and none of it would have been possible without the pavilion, conferring, however inadvertently, its elegance and nostalgia on all of us. So as long as the good weather holds, I’d very much recommend making your way to the Serpentine Gallery and experiencing one of the most real if fleeting delights of this London summer.

Bunny Smedley is ERO’s arts editor.

Mies van der Rohe at the Whitechapel Gallery

[This article originally appeared on the Electric Review website.]

There’s something to be said for exhibitions that position themselves less as didactic accounts of their subject than as star-struck cheerleaders on their subject’s behalf — or for those that display not only literal artefactual evidence of their subject’s career but also adopt his own prejudices and predilections. Anyway it’s hard to fault Mies van der Rohe 1905 – 1938 on either regard. This major examination of the first, Europe-based half of Mies’ career, organised by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and currently showing at the Whitechapel Gallery, pulls off its retro-modernist take with an enviably straight face — although whether you find this delightful or just a little unnerving is a matter of taste, perhaps even of mood.

Put bluntly, Mies van der Rohe is an architect’s retrospective that includes lots of architecture and virtually nothing about the architect himself, let alone the world around him. All of which is, in some sense, very much in keeping with Mies’ belief that architecture is simply ‘the will of an epoch translated into space’, rather than the creative interaction between an individual and the traditions he inherits. According to Mies,

We are concerned today with questions of a general nature. The individual is losing his influence; his destiny is no longer what interests us. The decisive achievements in all fields are impersonal and their authors are for the most part unknown. They are part of the trend of our time towards anonymity.

Thus the exhibition provides an account, as rich in fulsome appreciation as it is in certain types of detail, of 38 projects developed by Mies between his arrival in Berlin in 1905 and his departure for America in 1938. What is does not do is to tell the viewer much about Mies himself, or about his friends and colleagues, or his patrons or critics, or the traditions within which he was working or about the world in which he lived. The story, in other words, is entirely a formal one. Who needs personalities when there’s formal development? Who needs history when there’s modernism’s own privileged account of itself?

Ludwig Mies was, for those of us who like this sort of detail, born in Aachen, deep in the Catholic Rhineland, in 1886. His father was a stonemason — a personal circumstance with considerably more than Hello! magazine-type relevance, since it arguably played a part in shaping his attitudes towards the quality and treatment of building materials and his understanding of the way in which structures should support themselves — and since this craftsmanly ethos may well have encouraged remarks like his revealing ‘God is in the details’. (It was a strange feature of Mies’ mature work that although it could, as countless provincial ninth-rate imitators have since made all too clear, be executed on the cheap, Mies insisted on extremely fine materials in his own constructions, perhaps most famously in his use of bronze in the Seagram building but also, discernibly, in the Barcelona Pavilion.) From 1908 to 1912 he worked with a progressive architect named Peter Behrens who also (as this exhibition will not tell you) employed Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius around this time. What became of Mies during the First World War I have no idea, which perhaps says all one needs to know about the biographical detail provided by this exhibition.

In Berlin afterwards, however, having left a wife and family elsewhere, Mies found a role for himself on the cutting edge of modernism. He became involved with G magazine (contributors included El Lissitzky, Walter Benjamin, Man Ray, Georg Grosz, Kurt Schwitters, Piet Mondrian, Constanti Brncusi and Fernand Léger); he also designed amazing fantasy skyscrapers that could almost certainly never have been built given the technology of the time. But that was hardly the point. It was during this period that he changed his name from prosaic ‘Mies’ to the more cosmopolitan-sounding Mies van der Rohe. Mies was the last director of the last Bauhaus School of Art & Design (it was shut down by the Nazis in 1933) and by the late 1930s, came to believe that the United States offered greater scope for his architectural vision than did Europe. He emigrated in 1938. His years in America were successful and fulfilling ones, but are beyond the ambit of the exhibition.

Instead, the exhibition is made up of many, many studies of individual architectural projects, from the Riehl House (Potsdam-Neuabelsberg, 1907) to the Resor House (Jackson Hole, Wyoming, 1937-38). Most of Mies’ earliest works are rather ordinary suburban houses built for well-to-do middle-class people. Try as the curators might, they have a difficult time making a case for the architectural greatness of these pleasant bungalows, set in tidy little gardens, full of Arts & Crafts detail. A German artist named Thomas Ruff has photographed a number of Mies buildings for this show. These opulent, appreciative chromatographic prints, with their luxurious finish and mildly hallucinogenic colours, seem again to make one sort of case for these early buildings — conferring on them a measure of formal power, as well as near-infinite glamour. But these recent photos also stand in humorous contrast to a few much earlier photographs of these houses, looking as they did when they were actually being lived in by the men and women who’d commissioned them — at which point they were smothered in vines, hung with patterned flock wallpaper, and cluttered with endless, comfortable, inelegant and thoroughly old-fashioned-looking tat.

This makes an inadvertent point about modernism — it’s a dated period style now, not a road to enduring aesthetic truth — but at the same times says about Mies’ architectural priorities, too. Mies did not seem to care very much about the functionality of his buildings, about any of their qualities other than design per se. His eye-catching glass skyscrapers of the inter-war period were unbuildable. His masterpiece, the Barcelona Pavilion (1929) had no purpose at all other than its formal elegance. Has there ever been a building that was closer, in terms of intent and effect, to pure sculpture? Compare this with the impact of building like Durham Cathedral, or the Petit Trianon at Versailles, or even St Pancras Station, and one gets some sense of the self-regarding nature of the modernist project — but this is not an exhibition that allows comparisons.

Nor was Mies exactly over-engaged in politics. It says something about Mies that this exhibition could include proposals for a monument to Bismarck, a monument to Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht (Communist ‘martyrs’ of the November Revolution), as well as the German Pavilion at an international exhibition circa 1934 decorated with the eagles and swastikas of the National Socialist Party. Mies’ beloved prisms were nothing if not versatile. And when Mies eventually left Germany, he did so not because of the objectionable nature of the regime or its persecution of his colleagues — both pretty evident by 1938 — but because he was seeking a better environment for commissions. For Mies, one suspects, the architect existed in a place beyond good and evil, beyond the needs of the people who might commission or inhabit his buildings, beyond the need even to build the buildings. It isn’t easy, after all, being the conduit through which the will of the epoch expresses itself …

Thus the stars of this exhibition, along with Thomas Ruff’s sumptuous prints, are Mies’ own plans, often executed with considerable style, and backed up with models and the odd computer simulation. The curators succumb to a brief flurry of excitement over G magazine — who wouldn’t? — but this only serves to underscore the lack of colour, context, variety in the rest of the exhibition. The circumstances of the commissions? The building materials? Did the buildings work? The curators’ implied contempt for such questions surely mirrors Mies’ own. Similarly, in the exhibition Mies’ architecture seems to appear more or less out of nowhere. Only three other figures — the neoclassical architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Peter Behrens and Frank Lloyd Wright — get a look in. So the effect is to suggest that Mies grew out of no tradition and learned nothing from his colleagues and critics. But the lack of biographical background precludes reference to that stock-character of romanticism, the sui-generis genius. Instead the plans simply develop, the structures form themselves on the page, with all the satisfying naturalness and inevitability of the growth of a crystal. And then they stay there. There is no hint of the contingent, the accidental, or the flawed and failed. By the same token, Mies was surely one of the most influential architects of the last century or two, but in this exhibition one gets little sense either of what his fellow architects borrowed from his achievement, or what they ignored. That is, one suspects, because the assumption that these ‘projects’ stand outside history. And as I wrote at the beginning, while some people will adore this, others may find it seriously alienating.

This is not, of course, to say that it’s a bad exhibition. There is much in Mies van der Rohe that is both skilful and beautiful, and even more that is interesting. Anyone with an occupational interest in design will, I suspect, find parts of it genuinely inspiring. And for the broader public, it’s a worthwhile show. Mies deserves to be brought to our attention fairly frequently. Not least, he did as much as any single individual to give most of the developed world its urban environments of glass-clad skyscrapers, its suburban environment of flat-roofed shells. At their best, these sorts of structures look spare, clean and fresh; they are cheap to build, suitable for all sorts of site and adaptable to a host of purposes. Of course, in the best post-modern tradition, there’s an irony in the fact that so much of the charm — I choose the word purposefully — of this sort of thing now lies in the complex fact of its dated quality, its resonances with the villas of East European dictators and perhaps our own parents’ more adventurous friends — its rootedness in a particular time that has now passed. Mies would have hated this, but of course for many of us it no longer much matters what Mies thinks. It is perfectly possible to admire, indeed even to love the fruits of modernism without having much time for the climate and soil that nurtured them.

For the curators of this exhibition, however, it’s a different story. In their decision to adopt a tone of uncritical acceptance in the face of Mies’ whole approach to architecture — indeed, his whole approached to the whole vexed business of modernism — the curators may have missed an opportunity to provide an even better show, which might at least have cast the odd raking beam of criticism across Mies’ achievement, illuminating it to greater effect. The fact that the ethos underpinning his work is, in many senses, still highly controversial hardly makes it any less interesting. Instead of engaging with this, though, the exhibition simply ignores it. There’s an elegant arrogance in this decision; there’s also a degree of myopic silliness. Sometimes, less really just isn’t more.
Mies van der Rohe 1905 – 1938 will be at the Whitechapel Gallery from 10 December 2002 – 2 March 2003. Admission is free.