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Campbell’s Soup I: Tomato, by Andy Warhol (1968)

Elaine in high excitement because her verdict on Warhol’s Tomato soup image appears in today’s Times 2, page 5.  “For me as an adolescent,” her entry admitted, “buying a can of this favourite soup was like buying the key to another glamorous world which I knew existed elsewhere and which I desperately wanted to be part of.”  She concluded: “Warhol understood human nature and its pitfalls.”

 confess I never very much liked tomato soup, Campbell’s or anyone else’s.  They tasted clonal.  But there was something about the very clonal quality of Warhol’s work that tickled my fancy, in the same way that the current clonal pink figures (mainly self portraits) painted by Yue Minjun do.  But they both also speak to an underlying malaise, to a deep unease, to the diseases of consumerist cultures and, ultimately, to existential angst. 

Oddly, I hadn’t realised until I Googled Yue Minjun that he had done at least one version of Francis Bacon’s papal imagery, which I have long seen as some of the most profound art of the last century.  Yue Minjun riffs on Bacon, but – to me eye at least – doesn’t take things much further forward than a cartoonist might, let alone quantum jumping the deep meaning of the imagery as Bacon did when he riffed off Velazquez.

Yue Minjun goes papal

Last week, Elaine and I went to the Bacon exhibition at the Tate Britain.  Three highlights, for me, were the painting of Pope Innocent X which the artist apparently disowned for many years (shown below), the small triptych of Bacon, head and shoulders, as you left the gallery, and the atelier area brimming over with his sources, sketches and refuse. 

A lot of Bacon’s work has the rancid flavour of old bacon rind and once again had the same sort of effect on my aesthetic sensibilities as lemon juice does on live oysters.  Still, underneath it all is something that I suspect will help Bacon’s work and reputation live for another 500 years.  Velazquez, after all, painted his Innocent in 1650, some 400 years before Bacon followed not so gayly in his wake.

Bacon study after Velazquez’s portrait of Pope Innocent X (1953)

Elaine, Sam and I trolled along to a private view this evening at Francis Kyle’s gallery in Maddox Street, a long-standing haunt – to see the latest Ramsay Gibb exhibition.  Some stunning paintings, including a fair few beautiful, unsettling images of Arctic ice.  Of the more local paintings, the one I liked best was of an ancient British hill fort in the Malvern Hills.  Talked to the artist on the way out, partly to say thank you for the two canvases we have had for quite a few years, one of them showing the burial mounds at Sutton Hoo, and partly to see whether there is anything we can do to help him give a wider airing to what is happening in the Arctic, where the long-sought North-West Passage is rapidly becoming an unexpected reality. 

  This evening we watched one of the most beautifully shot films I have seen in a very long time, Mongol.   The Genghis Khan story.  Or a version of it.  Must read up on him, particularly since his genetic legacy in European – and then presumably wider – populations was inordinately large.  The framing and the colours were out of this world.  Can’t wait to see the next two films in the sequence.

Yves Rossy finally made it across the Channel.  Elaine was beside herself – loves people who do this sort of thing.  Makes me feel a bit better about Volans.  I have been saying recently that I oscillate between moments of sheer elation about lifting off with something new, then moments of total vertigo about launching forth on uncertain winds at the age of 59.  But I feel Rossy providing an additional bit of lift under my wings.

Replica bazooka might work just as well

Quite day, starting off with a session with Charmian (Love) at Accenture, then on to Generation Investment Management for lunch at The Fishmonger with David Blood, Colin Le Duc, Peter Knight and Lila Preston, then back to Volans, and then by train to Cambridge for the twentieth anniversary for the Cambridge Programme for Industry, held in King’s College.  Lovely to see people like Tim O’Riordan and Polly Courtice, but my bat’s ears meant that I couldn’t hear people over the sound of the band – and took off home relatively early.  Very much enjoyed reading James Benn’s WWII novel Billy Boyle as I went.  Felt 120 by the time I got home, around 23.30, but finished off the book before falling asleep.

Was once again amazed to see Cambridge cyclists at night with no lights.  There ought to be a law.  People from Volans saw a great deal of blood in the street near the office earlier in the week: it turned out to be from a female cyclist who had been knocked off her bike and killed by a bus.  The number of altercations I have had with buses in that stretch of road, from Tottenham Court Road through to Holborn, is legion.  It is as if bus drivers pass through some sort of personality warp there, ignoring cycle ways and cyclists.  Have often meant to fit a bazooka to my handlebars, but somehow haven’t yet got around to it. 

And, in intemperate old age, I found myself wondering whether , instead of dancing the night away in King’s College, we oughtn’t to have a more open discussion about the industries and technologies we would happily bazooka – or dynamite – to ensure a more sustainable world?