It may be old age sentimentality, but for me, the reopening of the Sainsbury wing of the National Gallery was akin to a looked forward to get together with good friends returned after a long journey. In this case, two years since the Sainsbury wing closed with its major reconstruction, much of it accomplished at street level or below, for purposes- quoting now- ‘to enhance visitor experience.’ Lacking access to the wonderful early period pictures hardly enhanced the experience of this visitor, but I must say, now reopened, the expanded entrance lobby with comfortable seating adjacent to a rather nice coffee bar is a real improvement over the dark and pokey space that served no real function other than to provide guidance to the cloakroom. As I think about it, the grand staircase- preserved from the original footprint- is now made even more grand with the correspondingly grand entrance foyer giving the staircase a properly grand sightline.

Mind, in our visit at its private opening last Friday afternoon, Keith and I did enjoy, respectively, a negroni and Aperol spritz in the newly opened Locatelli on the first floor, this was by way of respite after looking at the pictures. My thanks to the event staff of the National Gallery for the manner in which entry was arranged, as it made it wonderfully easy to get a good look- and a post-look drink- without the usual scrum.

Pre-drink, I leisurely took in every picture I particularly wanted to see. This included a very long look at the sumptuous brocade that forms the floor cloth in a mid-trecento painting by Nardo Cione. Its placement beneath the feet of the depicted saints belies the intricacy with which it is worked, the pigments applied over a gold ground with the figurative design then revealed in gold outline, rendered in sgraffito fashion by the artist. That a splendid brocade might be fitting to support the sacred feet of the sainted figures depicted might also have served to advertise the most famous local Florentine product- luxury fabrics.

But also on show was a new and frankly cryptic picture, the gift of the American Friends of the National Gallery. ‘The Virgin and Child with Saints Louis and Margaret’ is a panel painting dateable to the first quarter of the 16th century by an unknown low countries’ master. Apparently part of an English collection perhaps acquired on the grand tour, its early provenance- which might yield at least some stronger affiliation with a national school, or perhaps even an attribution- is sketchy. Its visual iconography is unusual, with the gallery’s own curatorial description going out on a limb, noting ‘…the eccentricity that pervades the panel.’

This eccentricity extends well beyond the grimacing dragon crushed beneath the feet of St Margaret. The infant Christ child holds an unfortunate bird, its beak open in presumed distress given the upside down posture in which it’s held. Clearly a European goldfinch, this bird is sacred as in Christian apocrypha, it is a goldfinch that pulled a thorn from the head of Jesus as he struggled under the weight of the cross on his way to Calvary. The unpleasant treatment of such a sacred animal by the child does, indeed, seem to amplify the eccentric nature of the panel.

Ah, well- as in all things, all this will be revealed in the fulness of time. In the interim, we can look forward to some juicy texts in full, or partial, explication of the picture’s puzzling features.

Despite years of study, I am yet edging up to an acknowledgement of myself as an art historian. Laggard in this as academic study came mid-life, the ‘mid’ now itself almost a lifetime ago. Even now, however, nothing of what I do feels like real work which perhaps explains why I can’t pin myself with a profession. Real work, whether it feels like it or not, included a jaunt to Charleston, near Lewes.

Even in the guise of a good day out, which it was, visiting Charleston, the Sussex home of Bloomsbury Group artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, was yesterday perfectly timed with glorious spring weather and with the gardens that surround the house in full bloom. It left me in little doubt the subject of the floral still life in our collection could have been gathered at will from the garden just outside the studio Grant and Bell shared at the back of the house.

Perhaps some few of my gentle readers know that Keith McCullar and I have long been collectors of the work of Duncan Grant with an interest stirred originally by our proximity to one of his studios kept in what amounted to only a bedsitting room just around the corner from our old home in Islington, north London. This link was vivified by our contact with the scene painter Sebastian Minton, Grant’s near neighbour in Canonbury Square, and Mary Cosh, a local historian who said she was once a figure model for Grant. That of course linked up concurrently and almost mystically with my reading art history at University College London, with the department then sited in Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and partially occupying the former home of Bloomsbury Group notable John Maynard Keynes.

This all sounds made up but I assure you it is not, and the net effect of it was that it brought the work of Grant and Bell to our attention. With all that, had we not, once we became aware of it, actually liked much of their work, particularly that of Grant, the paragraph above would just be a story we might tell over a glass of wine at a gallery opening. By the way, we, or I should say ‘I’, have done so on more occasions than has proved enjoyable for Keith McCullar.  

Charleston has long been a site we had wanted to visit, long delayed with one thing or another, although we’ve been interested in and collecting Grant’s work for over 25 years. The house adjoins a working farm that Bell and Grant never had anything to do with. I am aware that Bell spent quite a bit of time working in the garden, though I suspect, if the exterior were of a piece with the interior of the house, the gardens these days are probably much better kept.

The interior of the house, however, is painted top to toe with fanciful scenes, images and flourishes that are mostly the work of Duncan Grant. The walls themselves are hung with paintings by both Bell and Grant, with imagery, including some sculpture, depicting Bloomsbury Group worthies including Lytton Strachey and Bell’s own sister, Virginia Woolf.

I suspect, however, that the fanciful vivacity of the decoration inside the house has very much to do with Grant’s character, friendly and amorous with a series of gay liaisons that extended up to the end of his very long life.

That Vanessa Bell was more acquiescent than tolerant of Grant’s sex life is the general run of opinion and perhaps it is this that makes very many of Grant’s depictions of Bell of a woman who does not present a happy face to the world, if, in fact, Grant has painted her face at all. Very many pictures show Bell at work in the garden, say, with distance or pose or viewpoint obscuring her face.

One thing that struck Keith and me was how far out in the country Charleston is, some seven miles from the nearest train station in Lewes. During the early years of their occupation, it would have taken some time to get to the farm and in the phrase Keith and I have come to use when describing a location pleasant but otherwise remote from other amenities, when you’re there, you’re there. And Grant wasn’t there all the time, witness the studios- that worked as well as trysting spots- he kept in various places in London, including that in our old neighbourhood in Islington.  

The bright colours and jollity of Grant’s decorations within the Charleston farmhouse dissemble what was not always a happy house. With the interior in particular kept as it was at the time of Grant’s death in 1978, it is nearly a shrine, but with the house and its pictures and decorations hardly inert, they show the effect of years and perhaps it is this that compounds the spiritually mournful feel of the place. The gardens, of course, can be renewed, as they clearly are, with ministrations currently in the charge of a talented gardener. The inside of the house cannot be kept in the same way.  

Mind you, I am glad I went and no question, it did provide some insight into the lives and consequent productions of its two most famous residents. And, in reflection, perhaps it is my own discipline that makes a methodology of building context to add a sight of meaning to that production. And, too, contextual theory can only go so far- Bell and Grant are long dead and it is impossible to measure how much of their spirit remains about the place. Even so, and even on a brilliantly sunny day, there is more than a hint of melancholy that lingers about the place. 

Charleston, Firle, near Lewes, East Sussex

October is Gay Pride Month in Hawaii. Rather than just enjoy the festivities and overdose on aloha- and mai tais- a bit of literary sobriety might be in order. A few thoughts, therefore, penned a few years ago, but worth repeating, and remembering.

On the drive home from the gym this morning, I was caught up short by the squib on NPR about LGBT pride month, marking as it does 50 years since the Stonewall riots. As it happens, it is also 39 years this month since Keith McCullar and I plighted our troth, and the confluence of the two events bears some more than modest consideration- primarily for myself, but briefly told for benefit of my gentle readers who might find these musings of interest, too.

In June of 1969 I was 15 years old, and in benighted central California had no knowledge of anything about the Stonewall riots. Indeed, The Fresno Bee, our local newspaper and source of most information, was absent about what was probably considered in New York at the time a minor incident. Let me tell you, though, I was sufficiently self-aware to know I was gay as pink ink, not out, but certainly aware of what I was about, so Stonewall anything that was printed in our local rag would not just have caught my attention but seared itself in my memory. All this by way of saying, at the time, there was little or no coverage beyond what little there was in far, far away New York.

It is astonishing to consider, though, how just a few years post Stonewall, there was the florescence of gay liberation that also enveloped me, but I must say, with the assassination of Harvey Milk in 1978, I wondered if we had seen the highwater mark, and that the backlash his killing seemed to represent might betoken a return to repression. It didn’t happen, and I was fortunate enough in 1979 to attend the memorial 50th birthday party for Milk hosted in San Francisco by the Alice B Toklas Democratic Club, with Jane Fonda as the featured speaker. It was a wonderfully celebratory evening and as I think about it, something of a relief that, with so many local and state officials in attendance, everything appeared to be proceeding apace.

As they were for me, too. Not all that long after, Keith and I met- in benighted Fresno of all places, gold being where you find it- and the rest is generally pleasant sometimes blissful occasionally fraught history. But what I mean to say in this paragraph is that, with all the opportunities for dating, for tricks, for social outlets, and for lovers- everything that was on offer for a gay man in his 20’s- it seemed to me then that there could be nothing more gay than there then was. Hedonistically shallow as this sounds, yet aware that Stonewall was the watershed I was without apology having a great time.

What was yet to come was the tragedy of the HIV/AIDS epidemic. After a certain point, I became numb to the suffering of so many of my friends. Indeed, Keith and I now have very few gay acquaintances of our own age, as very nearly all of them died in the 80’s and early 90’s before drug therapies developed to stem the tide. Not entirely numb, as I become sad as I write this, thinking of those friends with whom I looked forward to growing old. Shared experience is a cornerstone of friendship, and for those friends with whom one came out, there can be no substitute. Early on, it seemed that what Dan White couldn’t do with the assassination of Harvey Milk, HIV could do, and we braced for ostracism at the very least, if not broadscale exclusion, as the mysteries surrounding the disease frightened everyone. ‘Frightened’? What understatement- I should more accurately say ‘drove everyone straight or gay to the panicked fringes of rational thought and beyond.’ I will never forget receiving a letter from someone very close to me, asking Keith and me to avoid playing with her small children, as we might infect them.

Neither Keith nor I from the beginning hid the nature of our relationship, and if it made any kind of difference even in our work lives, we were at the time so focused on our careers, and of course the lives we were making with each other, we were not aware. What I did see, though, was in the late 80’s and early ‘90’s a gradual, more than a tolerance but less than an acceptance of gay men in the straight community. Perhaps it might better be said as an easing of tension. It occurred to me the why of this, as so many gay men having moved away post Stonewall to live in the big cities, they then came back home when desperately ill and absent all else sought family to provide care for them. The tragedy of HIV/AIDS brought gayness literally inside the homes of very many Americans. That there was a paucity of national recognition of the crisis is probably best characterized by President Reagan’s laggard acknowledgement, but the fact is, those who lost their lives were martyrs to the emergence of a broadscale realization that gayness was a human phenomenon, common to all populations- white and people of color, rich and poor, urban and rural. And liberal and conservative. The Bible thumping fundamentalist had to, and did, have a rethink about the nature of love and Christian commitment when their gay son returned to his childhood bedroom to die.

And all the eventual good for surviving and newly out gay men wrought of this tragedy proceeds, well not apace, but forward. We’re married Keith and I, file our tax returns jointly, and if one or the other of us pops his clogs, will be eligible for Social Security survivors’ benefits. What I thought 40 years ago of an environment about as gay as one could get was substantially less than, and it is with my own advancing age and experience that I’ve come to realize what in fact we lacked, and what the human cost has been in trying to achieve what we have a right to. A bit of a sidebar, and you can call me a recidivist, but the moves forward in this country have had some effects that, to my mind, are wistfully bittersweet. The gay ghettoes in the larger American cities are dwindling, as those who formed them finding safety and comfortability in numbers now find they don’t require what they formerly found in places like The Castro in San Francisco or Boys Town in West Hollywood or Greenwich Village. And I do miss the plethora of gay bars, with one or more even in small communities, always fun to hang out, in the manner of a private club. Mind you, very many of those private clubs were about as pleasant aesthetically as a public restroom, but perhaps for the sake of nostalgia, Keith and I yet make some effort to visit gay bars whenever we travel.

It may be my style of writing, or my way of thinking, but the sort of linear narrative I’ve communicated about the progress of gay liberation shouldn’t even in this brief squib detract from what it is that concerns me now, that is, how much further we have to go. I am reminded of this frequently, with continued back of the bus treatment from people who would deny to their last breath they’re any way homophobic. For those who know us, gay or straight, close friends to casual acquaintances, Keith and I probably wouldn’t be identified as anything other than bright, ambitious and hardworking. Nothing unusual in that, but faced with us in a business setting, we’ve both of us often been dismissed and shunted aside in ways and by people that seemed otherwise friendly disposed to us. Finally, after years of this treatment- not constant, but frequent enough to become notable- it occurred to me that to this day the straight world has an enduring notion certainly of gay men that’s concretely fixed. Keith and I should and must be limp-wristed sissies, addle brained and more interested in flower arranging than debt swaps or real property syndications or inventory turn days. And these same homophobe deny-ers will fight to maintain those opinions and fight to relegate us to a role that they think, actually, no, that they know is appropriate for gay men. The older Keith and I get, the more combative we become, and we’re given to confront this phenomenon more and more, and in an in-your-face manner.

Well, we’re up to it. In fact, I find myself, where in former times I would just not hide my gayness or the fact of my relationship with Keith, now make a point of communicating all this immediately, becoming, as it were, a solo swat team for gay socialization.

Pride Month has gone, and LGBTQ+ has broadened gay liberation beyond anything anyone could have imagined in 1969. While at times I wish for a return to the fun of those very brief halcyon years just post Stonewall and just pre-HIV but am now old enough to realize that with fun and good times comes complacence, and that complacence beckons a return to repression. We are then, Keith and me, as we look forward to our fifth decade together mindful of the past and unwilling to allow a creeping social conservatism to disintegrate what we’ve at last achieved. Again, I’ll correct myself, as ‘at last’ implies we’re at the top of the mountain in terms of legal and social equality. Closer to the top, perhaps, but further to go to crest the hill. In our home, we’ll always be mindful of Stonewall and its effects and fight for a brighter future. But to repeat what I wrote just a moment ago, we’re up to it.

In response to what my friend Max thought I would interpret as a rhetorical query, as to whether we’re still buying artwork, my answer was that we yet have space where the walls are adjacent to the floor, so plenty of stacking room. Mind, there are collectors and there are those who aren’t. A collector and I claim unashamedly to be one, is always collecting.

There are those whose range of collections is narrow. One particular artist, one particular school, one particular medium. I term that kind a constipated collector. My innards are in good working order, and as such, our collecting habits are varied and regular. In case you were worried, the scatology ends here.

Lest you think we’re entirely unrestrained, we do have some particular areas- British modernists and ukiyo-e most prominent. These two areas are not so disparate, as the likes of Duncan Grant and Vanessa Bell – two artists we collect- were not unlike impressionists of a generation earlier in borrowing colours and general themes from the Japanese woodblock prints that made their way into Europe from the 1870s. A surprising booty, worthless ephemera in Japan, the prints served to wrap and protect against damage Japanese porcelains and earthenware shipped to the west.

In further restraint, we do apply the same rubrics as we always have- an object must be a confluence of quality, condition, and price. Price, indeed, as so much of what’s out there to collect is in sufficient quantity we can consider it a fungible commodity. If my gentle readers need a reminder, Keith McCullar is an accountant and I spent decades in the banking business so money remains a primary loyalty- and we do in whatever we purchase expect good value for it.

That we do, with a reluctance to as it were splash out, happens to allow our acquisitions to proceed apace. Unless, of course, an artist we happen to collect is having a moment. A well-received monographic exhibition, for instance, can cause an escalation in prices that may be short lived. Right now, for instance, the artist John Craxton is having one such, apropos the wonderful monographic exhibition that ran late last year at Pallant House in Chichester. A painting from that exhibition is on offer at auction as I write this, estimated into the low six figures. We’ll see how it does.

Also in the same sale are a number of pictures by Keith Vaughn, one of which, I’ll admit, I had an eye on, until I actually inspected it, that is. Vaughn’s prolific output very much ran to pattern- similar pallet, similar angularity to the figures, which tended to run to depictions of nude men. An artist in the tortured homosexual class, his own homoerotic images were, although nude, fairly chaste. Angular, with flattened perspective, and largely absent of genitalia.

For reasons that I do not know, Vaughn too is having a moment. Pallant House had an excellent monographic exhibition of his work, on the centenary of his birth, but that exhibition was in 2012. But looking at one of the databases we normally consult, there has over the last couple of years been an almost five-fold increase in the number of Vaughn’s works that have passed through the salerooms, driven by an unaccountable increase in the value of the works on offer.

Not surprising, price increases bring works by an artist out of the woodwork, with owners, including more than a few dealers, seeking to cash in. That’s the good part. The bad part is, it also brings to the market a fair number- I won’t say fakes because I don’t want to be sued- but shall we say ‘enhanced’ images. Did I say no penises? Well all of a sudden, they are there a plenty, plumped up a bit for effect. One would not know, looking solely at so many of these travesties that Vaughn was indeed deeply troubled by his sexuality which no doubt contributed, along with ill health, to his ultimate suicide in 1977. Erotically suggestive, but chaste in their way, a visual reticence that perhaps reflected Vaughn’s own sexual stricture.

But now, in the age of the overt, visual eroticism if it means anything it means everything on view, and Vaughn’s visual restraint is not to the taste of the buyer of the present day. Everything that used to be a shaded sexual byway is now labelled queer, whether it is so or not. And I presume the penchant for queerness is at least partially driving interest in Keith Vaughn. With his standard palette of greys and greens and typically small size of the support for his very many gouaches that have made their way onto the retail market of late, fairly easy to, shall we say, enhance. With a bit of water as a diluent, the pigment at the top of an appropriate figure’s pelvic ‘v’ can be dissolved and then shall we say anatomically strengthened with a few strokes of the brush.

Having a moment, and for all that’s resulted, I’ll be avoiding Keith Vaughn for the next little while.

You know the rest, but in the case at hand, the cows have already gone to the knackers, made into mince and the leftovers, hides and tallow, doubtless someone’s shoes or a lady’s handbag, and a bar or two of soap.

I am in crude metaphor referring to the British Museum’s current exhibition in Room 3 of gems that have been returned- 10 out of a count into the several hundreds. But no one really knows because, as the tombstone plaques on the wall tell us, the engraved gems had never been catalogued.

Oh, yes, of course, pressure of work and all that, but the fact is, many of these, again information the museum admits to within the exhibition, were part of the collection put together by the antiquary Charles Townsend and acquired by the British Museum in, wait for it,1814. Well, it’s been a nightmare of work for the BM, and perhaps the curators had planned to prepare some accession information in the upcoming 210 years.

That the museum has prepared this exhibit is something, caught with their pants down, they had to do. Ostensibly, it also serves the purpose of alerting the public to be vigilant, letting the museum know when and if someone sees something that might have been stolen from its study collections and acquired innocently on eBay. Fat chance. Were there any images of anything on view that one might look out for? No, of course not, because such images do not exist. Let me remind you, none of these items were catalogued. It was only the result of a sharp eyed academic who had seen first hand some of the items who recognized them when they turned up offered by an online seller.

‘On the advice of recovery specialists, we are not sharing full details of the lost and damaged items at this time.’

British Museum

‘Not sharing…’ because there is nothing to share. The museum has a group of experts in the policing services and the field of art loss recovery assisting in their efforts to locate the missing items.

As if, fat chance- whatever efforts are being made cannot be considered as any more than window dressing. Close the barn door, at long last- the cows are gone for good.