March 2017
Kensington, Chelsea & Westminster Today
www.KCWToday.co.uk
Arts & Culture Classical and Modern Chinese Paintings 15 May 2017
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t has been three years since the V&A’s blockbuster exhibition of classical Chinese paintings but the capital’s reputation as a go-to place for Chinese paintings may be set to continue with London’s first ever dedicated sale of Chinese paintings. The sale will be held at Chiswick Auctions, West London, which has already established a strong reputation in the field. The watery landscapes which make up the primary genre of ink paintings are often considered to be inaccessible to a Western audience, and yet the prices achieved in UK auctions have never been so strong. Indeed Chinese painters have been less interested in direct pictorial representation for much longer than artists of the West. Thus many works will attempt to evoke an emotional response in the viewer through a combination of brushwork, shading, calligraphy and poetry.
Neural Architects Unicorn Publishing 136pp. £30. ISBN 978-1-910787-48-9
The president of Stanford University Marc Tessier-Lavigne states rather vauntingly that ‘the whole idea was to design the building from the inside out’. Is that not how all buildings are designed? The architect Ian Ritchie professes to not doing any preliminary drawings, preferring to use mind-maps and poetry to establish the parameters. ‘My architecture starts in the space I create in my mind,’ he cooed. This book tells the story of how the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre for Neuroscience was designed and built in Howland Street, off the Tottenham Court Road in London. It has to be said that in spite of the self-congratulatory tone of the design process, it is quite a pleasing building from the outside, at least on a dingy evening in February, where it exuded an inner glow. Above the colonnaded walkway hang row upon row of rectangular flags, or ‘pixels’ as Ritchie calls them, inspired by the pennants that used to hang in the 40 kilometres
Paintings typically come in the form of hanging scrolls which are unrolled and displayed on a wall, and hand scrolls which are unrolled gradually, right to left, along a flat surface. Many works are now framed for the convenience of display and storage. Works often bear the signature or red seal mark of an earlier artist and part of the fun of studying Chinese paintings for connoisseurs is deciphering how close a painting is to the work of the original artist. Perhaps one of the most accessible areas of Chinese are the works of Chinese modernist painters working during the 20th Century. At the same time as Matisse and Picasso were transforming Western art, artists like Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian were transforming the hallowed traditions of Chinese ink paintings. The artists now have annual global sales which rival their Western counterparts and hold an important and increasingly acknowledged place in World Art. A work by the artist Qi Baishi, dubbed the ‘Chinese Picasso’, from the collection of esteemed journalist David Chipp (1927-2008), will be offered in the Classical And Modern Chinese Paintings Sale at Chiswick Auctions on May 15th, 2017. The painting is from the collection of David Chipp (1927-2008), former editor-in-chief at Reuters and the Press Association, and the first Western
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March 2017
Arts & Culture journalist in Communist China, where he was Reuters’ correspondent between 1956 and 1960. Whilst at a party, Chipp inadvertently stepped on the toes of Chairman Mao, the notorious leader and founder of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1976. His published memoirs recollect that the leader was greatly amused by the incident, a tribute to Chipp’s charming and personable manner. In his memoirs, Chipp mentions that his translator “encouraged me to buy paintings by the 93-year-old Qi Baishi. These proved a great investment”. Indeed, the last Qi Baishi painting sold by Chiswick Auctions fetched £48,800 (including premium) in November 2016. Lazarus Halstead, Head of Asian Art commented “The painting is not only an important work in its own right but it also bears testament to Anglo-Sino relations at a time when few Westerns were allowed to visit, let alone live in China.” Provenance, the history of what has happened to a painting since it was first created, is a key consideration of successfully selling Chinese paintings from the Modern and Classical periods. The sale will be on view for the week up to the 15th May and is open for consignments. If you have a painting and would like a free valuation please get in touch before the 10 March 2016. www. chiswickauctions.co.uk of elegant colonnades in Bologna, and feature pages from the score of J S Bach’s Musikalisches Opfer (Musical Offering) on one side, and UCL’s eleven Nobel prizewinners on the other. On the back of the building, the same lamellar device is used as a screen, but ice-white, which moves and ripples in the wind. The facade is a series of undulating vertical waves, punctuated by triple-glazed windows that actually open. The book is also puntuated with spurious pictures of neurons and neural circuits, alongside photographs of other laboratories across in the US. Some will find the ‘cluttered’ lab at the Salk Institute, where Joseph Salk discovered the vaccine that so nearly eradicated polio worldwide, more appealing than the squeaky-clean white work-stations in the SWC. How soon before the neuroscientists introduce a framed photograph of their children or a postcard from a friend or a model of a Star Wars Stormtrooper onto their desks? The building certainly does brighten up an otherwise dull street, particularly as the building for the Structural Civil and Building Services Engineers for the SWC, Ove Arup, is across the road, with its phoney ducting, described by one observer as ‘an alien parasite sucking the life out of an office block’. One question remains; who would buy this book? Architects, designers or neuroscientists? It’s a no-brainer. DG
Electricity: The Spark of Life Wellcome Collection Until 25 June 2017 Free admission www.wellcomecollection.org
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or an exhibition about electricity, I am afraid this just lacked spark. I could go on and say it didn’t really turn me on, but there were enough diverse objects and some fine film clips to just about galvanise the visitor. In spite of the neo-brutalism pylon-like steel cabinets, it had an old-fashioned look, falling back on the things-in-glasscases school of display. One contained a copy of a science-fiction book called The Coming Race, written in 1871 by Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton, who coined the phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword.’ In the novel, the plot centred around a superior race of people, the Vril-ya, who derived their powers from an electromagnetic substance called ‘Vril’. Bovril added that to the Latin for ox, namely bos, and came up with the famous beef extract in the 1870s. One grotesque press ad shows two oxen strapped uncomfortably into electric chairs with the caption ‘Bovril by Electrocution’, which the company
Lonely Courage By Rick Stroud Simon & Schuster 296pp. £20 ISBN: 978-1-4711-5565-9
Rick Stroud has been buiding up a small arsenal of true stories from the Second World War, if not to rival Ben McIntyre, certainly to fire a warning shot across his bows. He wrote no less than three with Victor Gregg, Rifleman, King’s Cross Kid and Soldier Spy, followed by a fascinating account of camouflage in the Western Desert, The Phantom Army of Alamein, then Kidnap in Crete, about the capture of a German General by Patrick Leigh Fermor from the Special Operations Executive and the Cretan resistance. In this tale, he focuses on seven of the 39 brave women agents who were trained by the SOE and infiltrated into occupied France to help and organize the Resistance against the Nazis. Stroud uses an episodic narrative technique to draw the reader in, threading many different strands, which eventually are woven together to produce a coherent story, like a patchwork quilt. There are a bewildering number of names to remember, and the author has made it easier for the reader by trying not to mix real names with code and field names.
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online: www.KCWToday.co.uk patently thought would enhance their product through the novelty of electricity. Alongside is a photo of an electric chair from Sing Sing Prison, New York, and a 2 minute clip from James Whale’s 1931 classic film Frankenstein. The exhibition is notionally split into three core sections; generation, supply and consumption. In Supply: Wiring the World is a ten minute film called Berlin: Symphony of a Great City by Walter Ruttman, showing many aspects of the effects of electricity, from shop windows to stage shows and neon signs to trams. Another extract shows the moving boardwalk at the Paris World Fair in 1900, made by Thomas Edison. In Consumption: The Silent Servant is another 2-minute film clip, this time from Buster Keaton’s The Electric House, which is as mad as it gets. Apart from book illustrations, a pair of ‘rayographs’ by Man Ray and an Underground poster for Lots Road Power Station, there is not a great deal of art, something the Even so, the detail, at time, is so dense, one wonders how Stroud can possibly know every single event, from lighting a cigarette, to crossing the road, to what was said in a Gestapo interrogation, but the stories rattle along at a pace. Three things emerge whilst reading this book, the first being the extraordinary courage these women displayed, in some cases, right up until their capture and subsequent torture and death. The second is the incompetence shown by some of their British masters back in SOE headquarters in Baker Street, particularly by Col Maurice Buckmaster, whose ineptitude was only matched by his stubborness. On one occasion, an agent Gilbert Norman had been captured and the Germans carried on transmitting as though he was still at liberty. When a decoded message arrived, it was noted that the transmitting hand had been ‘stilted’, and the secret security check had been omitted. He ordered a message to be sent, in spite of loud protests from his staff, reading, ‘You have forgotten your double security check. Be more careful in future’. The Germans were thrilled and showed the message to their prisoner at the Avenue Foch, who was both amazed and angered at his crass stupidity, as they carried on using his radio transmittor. The third factor to come out, is the shear brutality of the occupying forces and how disgracefully they treated their captors. One of the most famous agents featured by Stroud is the young and stunning
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Wellcome had become relied upon to provide in previous shows. One of the three commissioned works of art is a zoetrope installation featuring origami animals made from folded electricity bills, but, as it involved intense strobe lighting, the only effect it had on this visitor was to make him dizzy. Electricity
has become such a part of our everyday life and is a component in virtually everything we do, including the function of our brains and the structure of the atom. This show goes some way to tell how ‘the great invisible’ has been viewed over the years, but it needed more charge. Don Grant
Violette Szabó, immortalised in the book and subsequent film Carve Her Name with Pride. The cryptographer Leo Marks, who clearly appreciated female beauty, was smitten with her, and gave her, for encryption, his moving poem
‘The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause. For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. . .’ He also took a shine to Noor Inayat Khan, a delcate and slender woman, who was the first wireless operator to be infiltrated into occupied France, and who was awarded the Croix de Guerre and
the George Cross, as was Violette Szabó. After the war, Marks wrote Between Silk and Cyanide, which was critical of the leadership of SOE, which had been described as ‘a mixture of brilliant brains and bungling amateurs’. There is one quotable throwaway line in this absobing book. Some German officers went to meet Picasso, described by their Fuhrer as a ‘degenerate artist’, and coming upon a reproduction of Guernica, asked him who did it. Picasso replied, ‘You did.’ Don Grant