I know little of India, less of fabrics but the Fabric of India at the V and A is a delight. It is not just a fabulous parade of colours and materials it shows how important the industry was - even being used by Gandhi in his struggle for Indian independence.
It's a gas
In the days when I worked Saturdays I would sometimes drive to work. The route took me past the mausoleum of St Pancras, the horrible mess of Kings Cross and the threatening gloom of York Way. Now it's all shiny blocks of flats, smart caffs and young men with dodgy beards. One of the symbols of that dystopian past was the gas works which loomed by the rail way line. Now they are coming back, all gussied up as a frame to an original resi block. Given the tedious nature of most new developments shooting up over London, a real attempt to do something interesting.
Really Healey
In the 1980s I commissioned the late Denis Healey to write a piece - and take the photographs - for the Sunday Mirror about a trip he was to take in South Africa. The negotiations over deadline and content were conducted by his ‘secretary’ who had a suspiciously vaudevillian falsetto. It dawned on me eventually that it was the great man himself who perhaps wanted to keep his distance from the sordid business of negotiating a fee (£1,000). He wrote a very perceptive piece on apartheid with pictures to match.
Bitter sweet taste of New Orleans
Ten years on from Hurricane Katrina tearing apart New Orleans I received a note from one Stephen Perry, President andCEO of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, thanking ‘all of you who took us in when we had no place to go, helped us tell our story when we had no voice, helped us rebuild our homes and our city from ruin.’
He doesn’t know me from Adam but it coincided with several stories about the new wave of restaurants and cocktail bars in the city. A sign of regeneration though not a proof - New O is still a complex city of poverty, crime, glamour and music. And food.
My favourites include Bayona’s in the French Quarter, Irene’s and it is hard to resist Galatoires because it represents a past and a history that is woven into the city even if the food is over-rated. Best of all Dooky Chase’s down home cooking and for breakfast - even if the tourists are queuing - Mothers.
Five years ago I talked to the editor of the Times Picayune, the city’s newspaper which had done so much to reflect the anger and pain which followed in Katrina’s deadly wake.
A taste of New Orleans
Ten years on from Hurricane Katrina tearing apart New Orleans I received a note from one Stephen Perry, President andCEO of the New Orleans Convention and Visitors Bureau, thanking ‘all of you who took us in when we had no place to go, helped us tell our story when we had no voice, helped us rebuild our homes and our city from ruin.’
He doesn’t know me from Adam but it coincided with several stories about the new wave of restaurants and cocktail bars in the city. A sign of regeneration though not a proof - New O is still a complex city of poverty, crime, glamour and music. And food.
My favourites include Bayona’s in the French Quarter, Irene’s and it is hard to resist Galatoires because it represents a past and a history that is woven into the city even if the food is over-rated. Best of all Dooky Chase’s down home cooking and for breakfast - even if the tourists are queuing - Mothers.
Five years ago I talked to the editor of the Times Picayune, the city’s newspaper which had done so much to reflect the anger and pain which followed in Katrina’s deadly wake.
Away from the maddening crowd in Barbados
One of the treats to enjoy in Barbados is to take the bus. Most of the hotels on the somewhat over-stuffed west coast do tours but for five Barbadian dollars you can hop on public transport and go to Bathsheba on the unspoilt east coast. The tourist board explains this exotic name by invoking the legend of Bathsheba, wife of King David, who bathed in milk to keep her skin beautiful and soft. The surf covered white waters are said to resemble Bathsheba's bath in both appearance health giving value. Well, why not. It’s a beautiful spot with huge coral boulders along the empty beach and free of the west coast traffic and the crowded hotels.
One exception is Speightstown, which is delightfully ramshackle and relatively uncommercial. Best way to get there is on one of the reggae buses which blast their way along, shaking with music. There is an interesting building for sale in the town called the Old Pharmacy, above. It is painted a bright blue, with tall windows, a balcony that runs the length of the building under a pitched gabled roof and dormer windows.
According to local historians this style of architecture was imported to another British colony - Carolina. And there’s a reason for that: Only the oldest sons of the British colonialists who grew rich on the Barbadian sugar trade could inherit the family plantation. Many of the younger siblings headed for Carolina, bringing with them their lifestyle and architecture. I’m told that only three of these houses exist, the rest destroyed by fires over the centuries.
Read more in the International New York Times
The Aktiv Haus being craned into position
The thinking house
In 1927 a pioneering new estate opened its doors on a hillside overlooking the German city of Stuttgart. It was a radical development with houses and apartments designed by the most provocative architects of the day such as Walter Gropius, Le Corbusier and Mies van de Rohe.
The Weissenhof estate with its concrete cubic forms and functional exteriors boasted swiftly assembled prefabricated buildings with steel skeleton frames which were designed to reduce costs and improve living conditions for the poor. For some it was the future.
Today on one of the estate’s side streets is a small glass box of a house. It too represents the future. The building is 914 square feet, with a prefabricated timber frame covered in glass fiber fabric. The windows which stretch the length of one side of the building are only 17 millimeters thick but consist of three layers of glass and keep cold and heat at bay. There are no environmentally unsound features such as plaster, glue or primer, let alone window frames set in bricks and made to fit with polyurethane, concrete and plaster.
Called B 10 after its street number on the estate’s Brukmannweg, the house was assembled in a few months and hoisted by crane into place over two days. Clean, functional, efficient, the building uses zero energy - absolutely no fossil fuels or nuclear power here - it produces zero emissions and it can be taken down and recycled to leave zero waste.
Another Day Lost by Issam Kourbaj
Window on the Arab World
When the first festival to celebrate Arab culture was held in 2011 it was suffused with the elation of the Arab Spring.
Shubbak; A Window on Contemporary Arab Culture coincided with the fall of tyrannies, the rise of hope, the sense that everything was changing for the better, but today, now that the world has seen the spring wither and die as quickly as it bloomed, what is the role of the third Shubbak? Only weeks after the slaughter of holidaymakers in Tunisia the troubles confronting the Arab world are more disruptive, more intractable.
What kind of festival can celebrate a culture that is tearing itself apart?
Read more: Gulf News July 15, 2015
The struggle after Katrina
One of the greatest cities in the world - and one of the most flawed, is New Orleans. It is almost a miracle that it has fought back from the tragedy of Katrina - despite the best efforts of the Bush government and the legal system. Read more
Life and Chimes. Or just strife
The announcement of the new football fixtures for the coming season bring that annual flicker of hope and pessimism. In fact, the best time of the season for a Portsmouth supporter is the half an hour before kick off. A few pints, still hopeful. The only exception was the 2002-3 season when the club romped away with the second division championship to win promotion. You can read about it in Life and Chimes, a random collection of interviews and commentary.
Doctor No, James Bond and Wellington
During the rather frenetic playback time with the Wall Street Journal for a piece about Waterloo the arts editor had time to send me this gem about Goya's portrait of the Duke of Wellington: Bond and Honey have just met Dr. No in his lair and are on their way up to dinner with him when Bond spots the painting nearby on an easel and does a doubletake. It was an inside joke at the time because the painting had been stolen from the National Gallery a year or two before and, at the time of the movie’s release still hadn’t been recovered, though it was shortly afterwards. Read the serious stuff on http://www.wsj.com/articles/two-hundred-years-on-london-celebrates-a-near-run-thing-1434493812
Read MoreCome on you whites
One of the most disappointing features of the England performance in the West Indies was not so much the efforts or skill of the team but the complete wit and originality of the not-very-Barmy Army. I was expecting many happy hours of boozy insults, witty one-liners and clever chants. Bit like a football match. Sometimes. Instead, apart from the tremendously inventive ‘Jimmy, Jimmy Jimmy Anderson’ and the depressingly derivative ‘Roooo’ for Root the best they could offer was the morning ritual of the first few verses of Jerusalem.
For the most part they sat around in stolid inebriation. How odd it is that the flags and favours worn at the games are for football teams, not an MCC tie to be seen; a group of Sunderland here, a depressed bunch of Scunthorpe fans there - all jealously guarding their flags draped along the perimeter. ‘It’s against protocol to cover a banner’ said one aggrieved West Brom fan when one of our group covered it with a West Indies flag.
So; cricket lovers as football fans or vice versa. Strange. Still, I was able to catch up on the latest Portsmouth score. Pompey 1, York City 1. I knew where I’d rather be.
Of language and timing
I write the occasional reviews for the New York magazine, ARTNews. They are splendidly relaxed about deadlines and invariably publish reviews after a show has closed. Makes them that rare thing, a publication of record. Not to be sneezed at, though I did jib at the addition of ‘tween’ in the Epstein piece. Two countries separated only by common language….
Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915-2015
Whitechapel Gallery, London. January 15 – April 6
Black Quadrilateral, an undated painting by the Russian-Polish artist Kazimir Malevich (1879–1935) consists of a slightly off-kilter black rectangle on a white field. A mere six and a half by ten inches, the painting is small, slightly scruffy, and unassuming. Yet it was among Malevich’s works that inaugurated the Supremacist movement, whose artists were closely associated with the Russian Revolution.
The painting, which was one of more than 100 works by 100 artists, opened “Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015,” which examined the influence of Modernism’s utopian ideals through the lens of geometric abstraction.
Like Malevich, Aleksander Rodchenko spoke to the Russian avant-garde’s rejection of bourgeois figurative art with the black-and-white photographs, Shukhov’s Tower Moscow, 1929, like a spirograph doodle, and the stark spike of Radio Station Tower, 1929.
One of the most radical members of the early movement was El Lissitzky, who regarded art and architecture, design and typography as shared disciplines. His Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1920) represents the red, revolutionary Russians overthrowing the old regime and paving the way for cities which were functional, free of elitist pomp and fit for the workers.
The theme of abstraction’s relationship to society and politics and the purity of the artists’ vision becomes less precise with the later works on show as typified by Mexican Gabriel Orozco’s Light Signs #1 (Korea), 1995, for example, which, with its lustrous coloured circles, is more pretty than political.
Jacob Epstein; Babies and Bloomsbury.
The Foundling Museum, London. January 31 – May 10
Think Jacob Epstein and you most likely conjure up images of angular modernistic works such as Rock Drill (1913-15), blocky primitivist monuments, or expressionistic portrait busts. But the exhibition “Jacob Epstein: Babies and Bloomsbury,” a selection of likenesses of Epstein’s children and their mothers, revealed an unexpected side to the British sculptor.
The venue was appropriate. The Foundling Hospital was London’s first home for abandoned children, and between 1914 and 1927, the period covered by the show, Epstein lived in its environs. His life was complicated; his first wife was unable to have children, but he fathered five—three daughters and two sons—with three other women.
On view were strikingly sensual portraits in bronze of two of these women—Kathleen Garman, Epstein’s longtime mistress and second wife - pouty and fierce - and Isabel Nichols, an art student who lived in Epstein’s household and was the mother of his youngest child, Jacky. But it was the likenesses of children that held one’s attention. Among Epstein’s most appealing sculptures are those of his eldest child, Peggy Jean, which show her as a laughing, pointing infant, and, in Sick Child (1928), a dejected tween.
Epstein’s interest in depicting the young predated parenthood; the show included two bronze heads of babies made when the artist was only 24. As the exhibition made clear, he had a talent for capturing not only the appearance of children but also, surprisingly, the ability to capture their inner lives with tender insight.
Not so grand, National
I used to write pieces for a paper in the Middle East called The National - big on ambition, small on circulation. When I racked up well over £5,000 in unpaid fees I had the temerity to mention it. The result: instant dismissal.
I was surprised to notice that the paper keeps a record of my works online - just shows how little I go searching. Here it is: http://www.thenational.ae/authors/richard-holledge
The day after I was shown the metaphorical door I started working for Gulf News, just down the dusty road in Dubai. Just as big on ambition; much bigger on circulation. Efficient, charming, a pleasure to work for.
Here's a selection: http://gulfnews.com/writers/richard-holledge