Pictures On My Wall

Find myself involved in friends’ domestic shenanigans. Feeling a bit shaken, I retreat to the Gallery during lunch in an attempt to calm the savage beast. The international galleries have never been as well hung as they are now. Pretty much everything you want to see is there. “Blue Poles”, of course, lifts the spirits no matter how many hundreds of times you have stood in front of it. The David Smith sculpture is there, Brancusi’s birds, Rothko, a bit of Agnes Martin. Not sure about having Leger’s sublime acrobats facing Anselm Keifer, but what can you do? I am not yet convinced by the recently acquired Kitaj biblical allegory painting, but I’m working on it. On the other hand, I would happily take home Leon Kossoff’s Christ Church, Spitalfields, painted from almost the exact spot at which we stood on the Hawksmoor pilgrimage leg of our visit to London in 1996. I still get the shivers thinking about it.