Dear Readers,
This week, the in-house journal of the British left suggested that The Fence might be planting the seeds of intellectual renewal in this country and beyond. A very nice and very inaccurate thing to say, but still thrilling at the same time. So, if you enjoy the newsletter, you might like to subscribe to the magazine so we can keep paying our writers fairly and publishing stuff that makes people laugh.
This week, we’re back sleuthing through the internet to find out the backstory behind The Grand Budapest Hotel. But first, as the galleries reopened this week, a look at some hidden gems.
Sale and No Return
In 2019, it was revealed that Picasso’s Child with a Dove, which had long loaned to the National Gallery, had been sold to the Qatar Museums Authority by Professor Susan Michie, an active member of the Communist Party. It was the most famous example of Picasso’s work in a UK collection, but is one of the many modernist masterpieces that have left these shores.
Matisse’s Red Studio, which is one of the most influential artworks of all time, used to be behind the bar of the Gargoyle Club at 70 Dean Street. It was offered to the Tate for £400 by its cash-strapped owner, Stephen Tennant, but was then bought by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, where it hangs today. In the same museum is one of Picasso’s most important works, Girl with a Mandolin, which used to be in the collection of Roland Penrose and hung in his Sussex farmhouse.
The narrative goes that impressionist and modernist art was loathed by a snobbish and reactionary British public, especially compared to the broad-minded tastes of German, French and American collectors. Yet research by Madeline Korn suggests that 130 separate paintings by Picasso were acquired by British collectors by 1940 (with 120 Matisse acquisitions in the same period).
Britain’s galleries enjoy holdings of Old Masters that are the envy of the world. Yet the modernist collections are weak in parts, and are comparatively low on German expressionism, surrealism, futurism, and with poor holdings of major artists like Klee and Kandinsky. By comparison, the Guggenheim in New York had so many Kandinskys that they could sell 50 of his paintings through Sotheby's in 1964.
But had the collections of Roland Penrose and Douglas Cooper remained intact, then Britain would be able to boast one of the largest and most important collections of the two significant artists of the 20th century. Instead, they were dispersed. Given the extraordinary energy that museums expend on documenting royal and aristocratic collections, might it be time to look at the ‘hidden history’ of modernist collections? Allow us to suggest a starting point.
William Rees-Jeffreys was an engineer from Paddington. After the coming of the motor car, he devoted his life to road safety (for comparison, there were two million cars on the road in 1930, but 7,000 fatalities; while in 2014 there were 34 million cars on the road but only 1,700 fatalities). He took on Churchill in the 1920s, accusing him of spouting ‘political dope’, as his mission was to rid the grid of hidden corners and blind turns, so to reduce the terrible number of motor fatalities. In between building the modern motorway system and saving literally thousands of lives, he also collected works by Braque, Matisse (including this famous portrait of Derain), which were all sold at auction at his death in 1954. We look forward to whichever publication delivers the long-read on his life, and no, we won’t be charging a commission.
Noam Chomsky Emailed Us
In the main feature for Issue 7, we asked a series of journalists and experts (including the world’s leading public intellectual) to comment on the political energies of the British mediascape. And as we discussed last fortnight, it is very interesting to hear of stories being spiked by major broadsheets as rumours swirl through Westminster.
Impeccable Service
In Off the Fence 17, we took a look at the backstory behind that cinematic datum to Anglo-American relations, Notting Hill, and suggested that the posh bookish charming fictional character William Thacker was based on posh real-life book publisher William Sieghart, who dated Uma Thurman in the 1990s (and is also very good friends with Richard Curtis). Well we’re back with another – though really, these film directors give us little choice.
The Grand Budapest Hotel, Wes Anderson’s ‘fight-fascism-with-hot-pink-confectionary’ picaresque comedy was released in 2014 and featured maybe the great ensemble cast of recent years. Set in the fictional country of Zubrowka during an indeterminate inter-war period, we follow M. Gustave (Ralph Fiennes), a seductive hotel concierge, on his quest for fortune as he romances rich old women and hankers after prized artworks.
In this interview, Anderson relays how he and long-time collaborator Hugo Guinness came up with the film as a portrait of a mutual friend of theirs. And the director offers more detail in this long conversation with Matt Zoller Seitz, which we will take the liberty of quoting at length:
MZS: ‘Our friend’ being the guy you modeled Gustave on?
WA: Yes.
MZS: So you met this man through Hugo Guinness?
WA: I met him through Hugo, yes.
MZS: Can you tell me about him?
WA: We’ve never said his name.
MZS: Why not?
WA: I just feel like it’s better not to. He’s an old friend, a very old friend of Hugo’s, and now he’s been friends with me for at least fifteen years. He’s not a hotel concierge, but he would be—and he would be the first to claim this—one of the great hotel concierges on the planet, if he so chose.
MZS: Why would he be one of the greats?
WA: Everything that makes a good concierge, he knows how to do. He also—in the same vein—already knows all the concierges of all the hotels. He will sit and chat with somebody at the desk of a hotel for an hour and come out with all kinds of gossip. He’s been on the circuit for a long time. And there are lots of lines in the movie that come directly from him.
MZS: Can you give me an example?
WA: Well, like when Zero says, ‘She was eighty-four.’ And he says, ‘I’ve had older.’ That’s him. The ‘darlings’ come from him. Really, we just tried to write his voice.
Who in the world can this be? Anderson narrows the field in a further interview from 2014, saying that the mystery friend is ‘English and in his mid-50s’. An Englishman of a certain age who happens to be very old friends with Hugo Guinness and newish friends with Wes Anderson?
The only likely candidate it could be is Robin Hurlstone, who did some voice work in Fantastic Mr Fox and makes a two-second cameo in the film that he inspired.
An art dealer, Hurlstone is best known for his relationship with Joan Collins, who he courted for a decade, even as their friends remarked on their 25-year age gap.
In a 2013 book, Collins adds a fascinating detail which anticipates the plot of The Grand Budapest Hotel. ‘My friend, the cynical super-agent Sue Mengers… had adored Robin ever since she had stayed with us at Destino. He gave her a pedicure one day whilst advising her on art and antiques and they would often sit giggling and gossiping together. After we split they still saw each other. Each time I visited her, however, she nagged me about not giving Robin any money after we parted. When she died in 2011, she left Robin $100,000 and some antique French furniture.’
It seems that the essential literary source material for The Grand Budapest might not lie in the enormous oeuvre of Stefan Zweig, but between the glossy hardback covers of Joan Collins’ autobiography.
Taking Stock
At The Fence, we do the distribution in-house, which means that we receive, handle and ship all the orders, and that we know all the subscribers by name (yes, that’s all 481,000 of you). It also means that we have to deal with stockists. One of our earliest and loudest supporters was the indie store Magalleria. Situated in the chocolate box city of Bath, they’ve been shut for most of the pandemic, so if you’d like to buy Issue 7, or one of the back issues, or indeed another magazine, please visit their webshop. (One day we will write about an inside scoop upon magazine distribution – the comically haughty shopkeepers, the two-year-unpaid invoices, the ruined copies – but today is not that day.)
Grockle Love
TF regular Jade Angeles Fitton has written a book on the myths, relics and folklore of north Devon. Digging into the oral archives, she has found stories of old men fishing or ‘clatting’ eels with torn out umbrellas, and ‘pranging’ fish (literally, getting in the river with a rake and stabbing fish with it).
Our favourite story is about a local hunt who chased a stag off the moors and into a lace factory that was making lingerie for Marks & Spencer. The women who worked in the factory (who were notorious for fighting each other with broken bottles) downed tools and went on strike to protect the deer from the hunt. At the end of the day, they had to go home, so the huntmaster went into the factory and shot the stag.
It’s a portrait of the English countryside in all its violent eccentricity, and is accompanied with some beautiful illustrations. Something for the Country Life reader in your life?
Nothing Will Come of Nothing
Explosive talent Rebecca Watson’s neo-modernist, bleakly comic style is breaking her into the mainstream of publishing. We persuaded her to publish with us in our most recent issue. If you don’t subscribe (which you absolutely should), her story ‘The Nothing Game’ is now free to read.
In Case You Missed It
All the reasons Meg Ellison knew she was the only poor person in her tech start-up
What do you get an ogre for its birthday? The Guardian reckon ‘a total hiding’, so gave Scott Tobias’ space for this evisceration of Shrek on its 20th anniversary, prompting a befuddling degree of animated discussion...
…Not least this slightly unnecessary reply from Vanity Fair, which handily says all the same stuff while pretending to not be saying it.
For Undark, Eric Boodman has written the most lucid and squirmsome portrait of the humble whip spider you could ask ever for.
On the eve of her memoir’s publication, the New York Times has this striking interview with Sinead O’Connor, now Shuhada Sadaqat.
The New Yorker chronicles the crime spree of Arno Funke, the frustrated artist whose dreams of cartooning gave way to more expansive plans of bombings and bank robbery.
A record number of people in the UK were forced to rely on a food bank in the last year, and London’s biggest divorce case now hangs on the fate of a billionaire’s yacht.
And Finally
Allow us to direct your attention to Rate My Takeaway, in which a professional Yorkshireman by the name of Danny Malin visits takeaways throughout the north of England.
With 196,000 subscribers in a matter of weeks, this chatty host might well be about to be purloined by Keir Starmer for advice on how to rebuild the Labour Red Wall. For now, treat yourself to some of the most soothing of content, the most excellent of videos, a man in his mid-forties consuming a sandwich on a roundabout just outside of Sheffield in the soft, mizzling rain.
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If you’d like to get in touch with us, then you can do so by replying to this email. And if you don’t subscribe to the magazine, then there’s the link just below. In the meantime, we hope you’re enjoying this glorious early summer weather, and we look forward to joining you again in a fortnight,
All the best,
TF
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