Taking down Grenfell Tower

Plus: Alan Lynch, Zen master

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Will Wiles weighs up the plans to demolish Grenfell Tower

This decision has caused a good deal of controversy, as might be expected. Grenfell United, a community organisation representing the victims and survivors of the fire, called the announcement in February 'disgraceful and unforgivable '. It feels that the tower should be preserved out of respect for the dead, and that its removal would be an act of erasure or forgetting, akin to an official cover-up. Others are pained by the continuing presence of the tower and regard its removal a necessary step in letting the community recover from the disaster. 'It is clear from conversations it remains a sacred site,' Angela Rayner wrote in the announcement. 'It is also clear that there is not a consensus about what should happen to it.'

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Jonathan Griffin on the far out paintings of Alan Lynch

The most famous and influential gallery ever to do business in Los Angeles was Ferus, which, in the 1950s and '60s, launched the careers of many important artists. There is a widely reproduced promotional photograph from the period that shows seven of them – all white, all men – pressed together like a jolly conga line. Nearly all are now well known (Ed Moses, John Altoon, Craig Kauffman, Ed Kienholz, Robert Irwin, Billy Al Bengston) but one is not. Alan Lynch, who exhibited with Ferus for a short time, slipped into obscurity. Which is how he seemed to want it.

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Philippa Conlon on Ithell Colquhoun's travels around Ireland

It is no surprise that the Surrealist artist and writer Ithell Colquhoun (1906–88) was so intrigued by Glendalough, the monastic settlement in County Wicklow. The valley, with its round tower, holy well and other relics of a medieval cloistered piety, proved not only inspiring but also spiritually stimulating. In a poem of 1933, W.B. Yeats, who like Colquhoun was preoccupied by the occult and involved with the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, described how the 'stream and sun' there made him feel 'self-born, born anew'. In her travelogue The Crying of the Wind: Ireland (first published in 1955 and now reissued by Pushkin Press ), Colquhoun adds to the catalogue of those who felt Glendalough to be otherworldly. She recalls Art O'Murnaghan's vision of 'phantasmal forms' around the upper lake and, as if to corroborate the artist's experience, is quick to relay her own peculiar sightings: 'I do not disbelieve him,' she writes, 'I have myself seen' similar 'entities' in Cornwall. Her sense of the macabre is elastic enough to accommodate the mundane. She claims that these ghostly forms are 'palpable' and drift towards the water like 'airborne tarpaulin'. Others, she notes, are the 'size of a haystack', with 'filaments' like 'the guy-ropes of a tent'.

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Charles Darwent on Amédée Ozenfant, the purist of the Purists

Charles Darwent on Amédée Ozenfant, the purest of the Purists

In 1925, the year this magazine first appeared, Amédée Ozenfant painted a picture called Le Pot blanc. Like other of Ozenfant's pictures of that year – Vase, say, or Three Vases – it was not a memorable work. It is unlikely that you will have seen it, or be able to call it to mind. Le Pot blanc was given to Strasbourg's Musée d'art moderne 60 years ago. It has spent the last 40 of those years in storage. To the victor, the spoils. Also painted in 1925 were Picasso's Three Dancers and Kandinsky's Trois éléments, both of which you will have seen, if only in reproduction. The Picasso is in Tate Modern; Kandinsky's painting, like Ozenfant's, is in Strasbourg, where, unlike Le Pot blanc, it is always on show. Yet when these works were painted, their makers were as famous as each other. The century of Apollo's existence has treated them very differently. As the art historian John Golding was to write, 'Perhaps no other artist of comparable stature has undergone such an almost total eclipse as Ozenfant.'

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Emma Crichton-Miller on ceramics that celebrate historical events

In December 2008 a tin-glazed earthenware armorial dish, elaborately moulded and painted in blue, orange, yellow and manganese, came up for sale at Bonhams London. Made in c. 1649–51 and signed with the initials REN, the dish came from the Pickle-herring Quay pottery, pioneers in English delftware, established in Southwark by Christian Wilhelm in around 1618. The dish commemorates the union of the Markham and Faringe families. Bought by the Milwaukee Art Museum for £54,000, it is one of very few surviving early commemorative wares, dating to the fraught political moment after the execution of Charles I, when the Puritans were stamping out such ostentation. Related commemorative delftware includes a Pickleherring dish in the V&A depicting Charles I, dated 1653, four years after his death. It seems people were prepared to celebrate their good fortune – and expose their Royalist sympathies – through their choice of ceramics, even at this critical time.

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In the current issue…

Monica Bohm-Duchen considers the phenomenon of the 'Jewish country house'

While the title of the volume could be criticised for implying that the concept of the 'Jewish Country House' is a monolithic and immutable one, this is immediately subverted by the image on the front cover, taken at the relatively little-known Villa 'La Montesca' in Umbria, built for the Franchetti brothers in the 1880s, full of suggestive shadows and spatial ambiguities. Inside, Hélène Binet's full-page photographs are complemented by an interesting and diverse selection of relevant historical images, usually much smaller, many of them accompanied by illuminating extended captions.

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Taking down Grenfell Tower

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