At Tate Modern I found myself liking Saloua Raouda Choucair more than I thought I might. She is a Lebanese artist, and I never heard of her, but then I don't think I have heard of any Lebanese artists. She was born in Beirut in 1916, studied in Paris, and her work seemed to me to inhabit the same Western mainstream as Picasso, Henry Moore and Naum Gabo, with a nod to the Vorticists. It is not a large exhibition, with only four rooms, and contains paintings, and sculptures and their associated maquettes. I didn't go so much for the wooden and stone sculptures, though it wasn't that I thought they were wrong-headed or fraudulent, just that I didn't quite share her taste in shapes, but I really liked the delicate nylon and metal constructions in the last room, and many of the paintings, enjoying her use of colour and texture. When I was a teenager in the seventies, reading romantic novels by Mary Stewart, Beirut was portrayed as a cosmopolitan place of glamour and allure, then suddenly it was plunged in apparently endless civil war. The thought of it gently haunted me, and still does. Coincidentally, Mary Stewart shares the year of her birth with Saloua Raouda Choucair.
After that I tried AxME by Ellen Gallagher, another artist I'd never heard of, but I didn't get it at all. Great sheets of cut out newspaper advertisements from the 1960s, decorated with stuck on yellow wigs, and repeated several times over in case you didn't get the idea the first time. And lots of other stuff. Maybe by then I was too tired, but I really couldn't be bothered. On the other hand, I went and sat in front of Rothko's Seagram murals for some time, and found them as endlessly absorbing and beautiful as ever.
The Gresham College free public lecture was great fun, delivered with charm and panache by the college principal, no less, Professor Roderick Floud. His topic was the making and running of great public gardens from 1660 to 1900, illustrated with four examples of gardens for which he had found extant archives. He covered the cost of making them, which was mainly the hard landscaping and not the plants, as it still is today, and tried to demonstrate how large that cost was, compared to other capital projects of the time, and translated into current day prices. Then he did the same thing for running costs, with data on how large an employer the horticultural sector used to be. There was a queue when the doors opened at half past five, and by the time he started at six Barnards Inn Hall was almost full. Afterwards there were free drinks, and the opportunity to mingle for those who wanted to. It was all marvellously civilised.
I delivered the Primula japonica this afternoon, and was rewarded with my guided tour round the garden and a buddleia cutting. I combined the trip with a visit to the blacksmith at Wakes Colne, who is going to make me a garden sculpture modelled on a postcard of a 1920s silver nitrate print of a close-up photograph of a bean tendril. He didn't sound like a man who wanted a giant rusted iron bean tendril in his own flowerbeds, but he made a lovely job of the last thing he made for me, and I have confidence in his skill and his eye. It always seems more economical of time and petrol to combine journeys when possible, so this morning as I needed to visit Barclays on behalf of the beekeepers I used the Manningtree branch so that I could also use the Manningtree tip. The staff at Jaywick have started to recognise me, and while they haven't said anything so far I don't want to be drawn into an inquisition about whether all this material can really be from my own garden, or whether I must be a jobbing gardener bringing trade waste for disposal. I'm not, but I don't want to argue about it, so sharing my favours between tips seemed a prudent move.
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