RB Kitaj - RIP

I met RB Kitaj in 1979 and 1980 when he worked on an exhibition in the Artist's Eye series at the National Gallery. He was immensely charismatic without ever being loud - you were just aware of his great force of character and thoughtfulness. What I found extraordinary about Kitaj was the depth of his knowledge and the spread of his reading. I visited his studio on one occasion and was surprised to find it piled with books. His view of the world appeared to be one of constant and complex cross-reference, and certainly the exhibition we worked on (me as designer) was one in which Kitaj laid out the works according to a language of relationships that I suspect would have been imperceptible except to a handful of extremely acute scholars. I don't know if he was married to Sandra Fisher at that time, but she too was charming. She said she wanted to do my portrait in pastels, as my colouring reminded her of the walls of Jerusalem. Sadly, as with so many things in life, I never followed this up, and Sandra died tragically early in 1994.

I have a memory of everyone calling him Kitaj, except for the the Gallery's director Michael Levey, who called him Ron. Somehow it didn't seem quite right.

Mivvis

Age about thirteen or fourteen*, I guess, I went off one summer's day to the sweetie shop at the bottom of Crewe Road and found there, to my great delight, a pineapple Mivvi ice-lolly, just launched. Irresistible. Licking this, I wandered back towards home and noticed that the telephone exchange on Crewe Road was having an open day, so as I had nothing better to do I went in and a large group of GPO employees gathered round and showed me all the exchange had to offer, using incomprehensible words like Strowger from time to time. So when I got home about 40 minutes later I told my brother Si that there were two exciting things he should know. One, you could now get pineapple Mivvis, and two, the telephone exchange was open and you could look around. After a while off he went too. About an hour later he got back, and I asked him how he had enjoyed the visit to the telephone exchange. "Well," he said, "it was a bit strange. The first thing they asked was 'Have you got a brother?'. I said yes, how did they know? They said, 'Well, we've only had two people in here the whole day. And both of them have been sucking a pineapple Mivvi'."

* I see from the Lyons history that the pineapple Mivvi was introduced in 1973, a long time after this when we no longer lived in Carrington Road, and I was at art college. So have I got the wrong flavour, or what?

Mother's Day story

Phoned my dear mother today to wish her love, and we were reminiscing about the days when my father was a teacher at Fettes College. There was a much-loved groundskeeper at the school, who died after many years of service. A few days later, two of the Fettes masters in charge of a hockey match noticed with horror that the cricket square appeared to have been vandalised in the night. Blotches of white powder were all over it. They looked, they discussed, eventually they licked a finger and had a quick taste, to try and discover what this powder was. They were still perplexed (stumped, perhaps). It was, of course the ashes of the groundskeeper, which his sons had scattered on the cricket pitch the previous evening, feeling their father would want to rest on the turf he had cared for so well.

Ways of Seeing and Kitaj

I re-read John Berger's book Ways of Seeing on the plane back from London recently. It lacked the extraordinary power I remember from the original television series, and as a book felt rather small and cheaply produced. Most photos are in black and white and on fairly ordinary paper. However, I enjoyed once more his thesis that the Leonardo Cartoon in the National Gallery took on a whole different meaning once an American collector had tried to buy it for a record price. It became famous for its price tag and, Berger argues, looked at and treated in a new way. On a different scale, something similar happened at the V&A while I was there. In those days London Underground published a series of destination posters, promoting places to visit by Tube. To the consternation of the V&A's sculpture department, one of these posters appeared featuring a Young Slave by Michelangelo at the V&A. The image was a charcoal sketch of the work by - I think - artist RB Kitaj, and focussed on a detail of the figure's torso. It looked marvellous, significant and bigger than life-size, and it was also delightful that London Underground were promoting the V&A.

The only problem, hence the consternation, was that visitors were turning up to see this great statue, couldn't find it, and noone at the information desk knew anything about it. In fact the work was not, as it appeared from the poster, a huge prominent statue but a small blackened wax model, perhaps 15 cm high, and it was displayed in a badly-lit case with dozens of other wax models, all looking a bit like an Anthony Gormley assemblage. Kitaj had not chosen one of the museum's featured pieces but had plucked one from all-but obscurity and made it a star. He had danced with the wallflower. Somehow the V&A had now to give it the treatment. There was a hurried discussion, and the wax Slave was quickly given a case of its own, still badly lit, but at least easier to find and look at. In its new case it then took on the attributes of a signature object, one worthy of special attention. Later, it was one of the works included in an exhibition of pieces from the V&A's collection that toured North America. Like Leonardo's cartoon it took on new significance, not this time because of a price tag but because someone with an eye plucked it from the heap, and opened other eyes as well. The piece, by the way, is great. You can see the sculptor's thumbprints on it. Had I ever noticed it before Kitaj? No.

Pic courtesy of V&A

Maggi Hambling

Picking through a recently published history of the National Gallery by Jonathan Conlin, I noticed he had listed Jock McFadyen as the gallery's first artist-in-residence. In fact that honour went to Maggi Hambling, an inspired choice for this novel position. Gruff, impatient and straight-talking in the polite and slightly fey world of curatorial delicatesse, a furious smoker in a non-smoking environment, outrageous, fedora-wearing and paint-covered, Maggi at first seemed like a being from another planet when she first arrived at the gallery. Used to painting in natural light, she was of course allocated a studio space almost entirely without daylight, and instead lit mainly with spotlights. After some expletives, Maggi went on to do a series of atmospheric sketches and portrait paintings making use of the strong shadows and highlights thrown by the spots. I have a charcoal sketch from 1980 for a painting she called Mac with Shadows, which the gallery now owns. I remember wandering into her studio once and finding her with her trousers round her ankles having a pee in the sink, the loos being too far away. I of course was covered with confusion. Maggi was hooting with laughter. She was marvellous with the public, and established the role of artist-in-residence as firmly as if it had been running for a decade.

Using metaphors

I heard someone on television this morning, talking portentously about global warming, use the phrase: "lighting the fuse on a ticking time-bomb". Now, does one have to light a fuse on a time-bomb? Don't they just get set? I would have thought if it were ticking then lighting a fuse would be unnecessary; the thing was already getting ready to explode. All a bit of a muddle, metaphor-wise, and it rather masked whether what she was saying was right or not.

On a similar note, I can't watch Lord of the Rings without wincing every time archers are told to "fire". You don't "fire" an arrow (unless I suppose it is a fire-arrow); the term applies to gunpowder-based weapons, logically enough. For archers, the term is "loose" or "shoot". That's the trouble with being a pedant, you get niggled by everything.

I remember being invited to the premiere of a period film based on a Henry James novel - Michelle Pfeiffer was in it I think - with a lot of then-colleagues from the V&A. It was a good enough film in many ways, but all the way through, the art curators were whispering things like: "oh no, they never wore the collar buttoned like that," or "look at that chair, completely the wrong period, ten years later at least". So generally I keep quiet about my hair-splitting when in company.