LAST NIGHT I ENJOYED a pint of Moretti beer in a pizzeria on Mersea Island (Essex). The beer company was formed in 1859 in a town in northeast Italy: Udine. The company logo is a man wearing a hat and holding a glass tankard of beer.
In the 1960s, a young lady from Udine, Adriana, came to London to teach Italian at the LSE, where my father was a professor of economics. My parents, who loved Italy and Italians, used to invite Adriana to our home. Soon, she became a family friend.
After her return to Italy, we used to visit Adriana and her hospitable parents in Udine. In Udine and all over the region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia, in which the city is located, there were advertising hoardings for Birra Moretti. The images of the hatted beer drinker were as ubiquitous as were images of Tito in Yugoslavia or of Lenin in the USSR.
As I drank my pint of Moretti in West Mersea, happy memories of Adriana, her family, and trips made to Udine came back to me.
By the way, the Waterfront Pizza in West Mersea, where I drank the Moretti, is a superb place to enjoy an evening. Not only are the pizzas high quality, but also the ambience and management of the place is excellent. Although we were eating on an island next to the coast of Essex, it felt as if we were hundreds of miles away on the shores of the Mediterranean.
MY INTEREST IN the St Martins School of Art derives from the fact that my mother made sculpture there during most of the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s.
St Martins was founded in 1854 by the Vicar of St Martins in the Fields, Henry Mackenzie. It was first housed in Shelton Street (formerly, ‘Castle Street’), near to the Seven Dials and Covent Garden. In 1859, it became independent of the Church. By the 1930s, the school had moved into a Modernist building designed for the London County Council by E. P. Wheeler and H. F. T. Cooper, about whom very little is known. It was in this building, now occupied by Foyles bookshop, that my mother worked as a sculptor.
Central St Martins today
In 1989, St Martins merged with the Central School of Art and Design. The new entity is called Central St Martins. Since 2011, it has been housed in a converted warehouse complex on Granary Square at King’s Cross. Today, the 17th of September 2024, I visited its splendid, spacious premises, which combine well-preserved elements of its industrial precursor with excellent 21st century architectural features. I was there to look at material in the archives, which proved most interesting, and about which I will write in the future.
Whenever I think of St Martins, I am moved, not because it has shifted several times, because I am moved remembering my mother’s association with it.
THE NATIONAL TRUST looks after a house in Oxfordshire, which was once owned by William Morris. When I came across this property, Nuffield Place, I was surprised, because I believed that the artist and socialist William Morris (1834-1896) had lived in properties in Hammersmith, Walthamstow, Bexleyheath, and Gloucestershire, but not in Oxfordshire.
Nuffield Place was the home of another William Morris, who became Baron Nuffield in 1934, and later in 1938, Viscount Nuffield. He lived from 1877 until 1963. At the age of 15, he set up his own bicycle repair business. By 1901, he had a bicycle repair and sales shop on the High Street in Oxford. Two years later, he was manufacturing motorcycles. In 1903, he married Elizabeth Anstey (1884-1959), a seamstress whom he met when both were members of a cycling club. They never produced children.
By 1909, he had set up the Morris Garage in Oxford, and was selling and repairing cars. In 1913, he and his small team of workers had built the first car he had designed. By the time the First World War had begun he had acquired larger premises in Cowley on the edge of Oxford. He was already producing cars that were affordable to the popular market, but during the war, his factory switched to producing products needed for the war effort. While doing this, which was not very profitable, he developed much experience in the techniques of mass-production. One of the many models turned out by the Morris factory was the Morris Oxford. This car has made its mark in India because it was the prototype for the Hindustan Ambassador, which was made in India between 1957 and 2014.
After WW1, Morris began making huge numbers of affordable Morris cars, which sold well. William Morris became incredibly rich. However, he was a modest man and extremely generous. He spent most of his money on philanthropy, particularly in the medical field. Many of the institutions he paid for, which bear the Nuffield name, including Oxford’s Nuffield College, still exist. The number of ways in which he helped are far too numerous to be listed. As a child, he wanted to study medicine, but economic circumstances did not allow that to happen. However, because of all he did to promote healthcare and medical research, he was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1948.
Nuffield Place, the house which William Morris purchased in 1933 and lived in for the rest of his life, was built for the shipping magnate Sir John Bowring Wimble, also chairman of an insurance company, in 1914. It was designed by Oswald Partridge Milne (1881-1968), who worked in the office of Edwin Lutyens between 1902 and 1904. When Sir John died in 1927, his widow sold the house, which was then called ‘Merrow Mount’, to Morris in 1933.
The house is spacious and must have been comfortable to live in, but it is remarkably modest to have been the sole residence of a man as wealthy as the automobile manufacturer William Morris. We were shown around it by a knowledgeable lady, who helped us to appreciate how modest were the lives led by William and Elizabeth Morris. Among the many things that interested me was William Morris’s bedroom. In one corner of it, there is what looks like a wardrobe. However, when the doors are open, it can be seen to be filled with tools and a workbench. Morris had his own workshop in his bedroom. His wife continued her seamstress skills, and many chairs were covered with textiles she had worked on. The house contains many books on a variety of subjects including history and politics. One bookshelf is filled with medical treatises. Morris, although he never became a doctor, was interested in reading about medicine.
Nuffield Place contains an iron lung machine, such as was used to help sufferers of poliomyelitis to breathe. On learning that there was a shortage of these machines in Britain, Morris used his factories to produce many of them to distribute to hospitals that needed them. The model he helped design, and his factories manufactured, has some curious details. The handles that were used to adjust the apparatus look just like car door handles. And some other components on the iron lung look very much like the hinges of car doors. These iron lungs were a valuable contribution to the treatment of diseases such as polio.
I could describe much more of what we saw at Nuffield Place, but it would be better if you visit the it. Lovers of gardens will also enjoy visiting this house owned by a William Morris, who did not design flowery wallpapers.
RECENTLY, WE HAVE viewed two exhibitions, one in Cambridge and the other in Dulwich (South London), which contain site specific works. The website of New York’s Guggenheim Museum (www.guggenheim.org/artwork/movement/site-specific-artenvironmental-art) defines site specific art as follows:
“Site-specific or Environmental art refers to an artist’s intervention in a specific locale, creating a work that is integrated with its surroundings and that explores its relationship to the topography of its locale, whether indoors or out, urban, desert, marine, or otherwise … No matter which approach an artist takes, Site-specific art is meant to become part of its locale, and to restructure the viewer’s conceptual and perceptual experience of that locale through the artist’s intervention.”
It seems that site-specific art is the name given to a relatively recent artistic trend or movement.
By Megan Rooney
In Cambridge’s Kettle’s Yard, we saw a room whose walls were entirely covered by paintings created by the artist Megan Rooney. She spent several days painting on the walls. When the exhibition is over (on the 6th of October 2024), the walls will be whitewashed, and her site-specific creation made especially for the room will disappear. At Dulwich Picture Gallery, there is a room whose walls have been decorated by the Japanese artist Yoshida Ayomi. Her beautiful evocation of cherry blossom was made specially for the room in which it can be seen. Her site-specific work will be removed when the exhibition is over on the 3rd of November 2024. These two artworks, like those of the artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), who temporarily covered buildings with sheets of various materials, are classed as site-specific. Currently, it seems to me that site-specific artworks are usually temporary in nature.
Michelangelo covered the walls and ceilings of Rome’s Sistine Chapel with paintings. Likewise, the ceiling in the Residenz, a palace in Würzburg, were covered by paintings created by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo and his sons specially for the room. Should these examples and many others like them be considered ‘site-specific’ art, or is the term only to be applied to creations of artists made during the 20th and 21st centuries? Probably not, because those who commissioned frescoes and murals for rooms many centuries ago, usually hoped that the artworks would outlast them and their creators. The artists who have made site specific art currently and in the recent past do not always expect them to last for as long as those made several centuries ago.
When I was eleven years old, we stayed in Chicago (Illinois) for three months.
One evening, our parents took us to something wonderful. It was at the Kungsholm Restaurant in the centre of Chicago. After dining at its self-service Danish ‘smörgåsbord’ (a kind of buffet), we were ushered into a small theatre. The lights went down, and the curtains of a small stage opened. Then we watched a whole opera performed by puppets operated by people out of sight below the stage. I do not recall which opera we watched, but I do remember at the end of the performance, the puppeteers raised their heads above the stage. As my eyes had become used to the short puppets during the opera, the heads of the puppeteers looked gigantic.
WE VISIT DOVER Street in London’s Mayfair frequently to view exhibitions at the commercial art galleries along it. Laid out in the late 17th century, the street is named after Henry Jermyn (c1636-1708), 1st Baron Dover, who was a member of the syndicate that developed the area in which it is located.
Despite having walked along this street countless numbers of times, it was only this September (2024) that we spotted the entrance to a narrow alley way on the west side of the street between numbers 41 and 43. The alley is called Dover Yard. The first 12 yards of this passageway are covered by a high barrel vaulted, brick-lined ceiling. Then, after a short stretch open to the sky, one enters a wide yard made attractive with plenty of plants.
The yard itself is surrounded by modern buildings. In the 1970s, the yard, which has existed since the 18th century, was bought by developers and used as service area and parking lot (www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/londons-alleys-dover-yard-w1-64590/). It was redeveloped recently, and is now flanked by the elegantly designed Nightingale coffee bar and restaurant (part of 1 Hotel Mayfair) on the north side, and Dovetail, a Michelin-starred restaurant, faces it. West of the wide yard, there is another narrow alleyway leading to Berkely Street. It has become a peaceful, almost hidden oasis in the heart of a busy part of Mayfair not far from Piccadilly.
As is often the case when revisiting places we thought we knew well in London, we come across places like Dover Yard, which we have passed often but never noticed. Although we did not try it, the Nightingale looks like it would be a very pleasant place to stop for refreshment.
WE HAVE WALKED along Jermyn Street and visited Christopher Wren’s church of St James (Piccadilly) innumerable times without being aware that right next to both, there is an attractive public garden. It was only today (the 10th of September 2024) that we first became aware of its existence. The place in question is Southwood Garden. It lies west of the church and along part of the north side of Jermyn Street.
For 200 years the plot to the west of the church was used as a burial ground. At the end of WW2, the newspaper proprietor and Labour politician Viscount Southwood (1873-1946) paid to have the burial ground made into a garden to commemorate the bravery and courage of the people of London. The garden was opened in 1946 by Queen Mary (the wife of King George V).
The garden is approached by short flights of steps, which flank a small pond with a fountain. The pond is flanked by bronze sculptures of two children, each riding on the backs of a pair of dolphins. There are two other sculpted children, one on each side of the steps. At the top of the steps, there is a stone inscribed with “Viscount Southwood”. The few steps lead to a paved area, at the back of which there is an inscribed plaque explaining that Viscount Southwood provided the garden that stands on what had been a bomb-damaged burial ground. Another couple of steps at the southeast corner of the paved area lead up to the well-tended grassy, rectangular garden.
In addition to the sculptures of children astride dolphins, there is another bronze sculpture in the garden. It depicts a standing woman holding some leaves in her right hand. It is called “Peace”. All the sculptures at Southwood Garden were made by the English sculptor Alfred Frank Hardiman (1891-1949).
How could we have missed this delightful garden? There are two possible reasons. First, you cannot see it from Jermyn Street. Second, the fountain and entrance to the gardens are almost hidden behind the food stalls, which are set up during the day in the paved courtyard on the north side of the church. Well, I am pleased that we have ‘discovered’ it at last.
UNTIL THE 22nd OF SEPTEMBER 2024, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London’s South Kensington is hosting an exhibition called “Tropical Modernism: Architecture and Independence”. It focuses on two countries: Ghana and India. It was the exhibits relating to India that interested me most, although those connected with Ghana were also intriguing.
The Royal Institute of British Architects describes Modernism as follows:
“Rejecting ornament and embracing minimalism, Modernism became the single most important new style or philosophy of architecture and design of the 20th century. It was associated with an analytical approach to the function of buildings, a strictly rational use of (often new) materials, structural innovation and the elimination of ornament.” (www.architecture.com/explore-architecture/modernism).
Modernism began both in the USA and Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Its better-known pioneering exponents include Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius, Maxwell Fry, Louis Kahn, and Eero Saarinen. The Modernist architects, like the abstract painters of the early 20th century, broke with traditional approaches to form and style.
On the 15th of August 1947, India became independent. The country was no longer ruled by foreigners. Jawaharlal Nehru (1889-1964) became India’s first Prime Minister, a position he retained until his death. His vision for India was for it to shake off the shackles of the past (both colonial and traditional) to become a modern state. This extended to architecture in his new India. He invited Modernist architects including Le Corbusier and his cousin Perre Jeanneret to design a new city in the Punjab (following the loss of Lahore to Pakistan): Chandigarh. This is illustrated well in the V&A exhibition. Le Corbusier wanted to create his ideal of a city, which included forbidding street markets and cows to wandering in its streets. His pupil and collaborator, Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi, who died in 2023, had a more human approach to architecture. Having seen some of his buildings, notably in Ahmedabad and Bangalore, I would say that Doshi developed an architectural opus, which might be loosely described as ‘user-friendly Corbusier’. Incidentally, Doshi was also taught by Louis Kahn, who worked in India, notably in Ahmedabad.
A label in the exhibition noted that in 1959, at a conference about national identity in Indian architecture, Nehru urged Indian architects not to be “imprisoned by tradition”, but to experiment as had been done at Chandigarh (built between 1951 and 1956). Examples of this experimentation can be seen in the exhibition.
Naturally, since Nehru’s death, there have been many changes in India. I notice new changes every time we make our annual trips to the country. Nehru’s vision of a secular India has been replaced by a different vision in the minds of the leaders of the present Indian Government. Modernism’s internationalist aspects, which attracted Nehru and some of his successors, appear to have lost their appeal currently in India.
Immediately after gaining independence, both Ghana and India favoured Modernism in architecture. The exhibition at the V&A shows that even before independence, architects (almost all European) in Ghana had been building in the Modernist style, but specially adapted to cope with intense heat and high humidity. Ghana’s first leader, Kwame Nkrumah, encouraged the continuation of this architectural style. The exhibition includes a fascinating video about this. In India, Modernism seems to have been introduced post-independence. Both leaders wanted to project visions of a emerging modern countries, freed from the constraints of colonialism. Yet both promoted an architectural style developed largely by architects who came from countries that had had colonies in Asia and Africa.
Before ending this piece, I must not forget to mention two exhibits, which caricatured the great British colonial architect, Edwin Lutyens, who was certainly not a Modernist. One of them is a model of Lutyens’s head which has been combined with a model of one of his imperial buildings in New Delhi. The other, which is painted in the style of a Mughal miniature, shows Lutyens offering a model of the (British) Viceroy’s House (in New Delhi) to the Viceroy.
The exhibition was fascinating. Despite its rather obscure title, a good number of viewers were there during the Monday mid-afternoon when we visited it.
yamey 