With Guinness as one of the weekend sponsors, no doubt there will be plenty of liquid refreshment.For information, telephone: 01232 665577/666321.THE GUGGENHEIM, BILBAOThe cultural connoisseur should always be prepared to travel for their art, even on a Sunday. “The Guggenheim Museums and the Art of this Century”, an exhibition of more than 300 works of modern and contemporary art, begins the life of the startling new museum in Bilbao, Spain. This first show aims to embody the ethos of the museum collection as an encyclopedia of 20th-century European and American art. The pounds 45m building, designed by the American architect Frank Gehry, resembles a beached Noah’s Ark and contains 18 galleries on three levels. It has been proudly dubbed by King Juan Carlos as “the best building of the 20th century.” In a happy marriage between Spain’s fourth largest city and the famous Guggenheim Museum in New York, the building will be filled with art collected by the Guggenheim empire ranging from the Cubists and the Fauves to contemporary multi-media art In the first year alone, 600,000 visitors are expected. Casting a distinctive shadow over Barcelona, it is undoubtedly set to become Spain’s most important architectural landmark and a vital source of revenue to a faltering tourist industry.For information, telephone: 0034 4423 2799.THE LONDON FILM FESTIVALNothing beats settling down to a good film after a satiating Sunday lunch, and the 41st London Film Festival offers an abundance of films of every conceivable genre and nationality. A gem among the African Beats section is Idrissa Oudraogo’s latest offering, Kini and Adams (above), a tale of shared ambition set in contemporary South Africa, starring Vusi Kunene and David Mohloki.
Among the films hand-picked by the Evening Standard is The Winter Guest, Alan Rickman’s much-anticipated directorial debut set on the chilly shores of a Scottish coastal town, starring Emma Thompson. As well as the largest ever range of gala screenings, this year’s festival also sees many industry-focused events including feisty discussions on the state of cinema. Cool Britannia investigates the recent renaissance in British film-making, while Women, Power and Stardom, hosted by Women in Film and Television, looks at the challenges for women working in a male-dominated studio system. You can also enjoy a bit of mutual back- slapping at the Closing Night Gala on 23 November as 45 Fellowships for the BFI are handed out for contributions to film and television culture.For information call the festival hotline on 0171 420 1122.. E L T Mesens was a plump, spruce surrealist from Belgium with a capacity for bouncing back that did not desert him even when the last five years of his life were rendered desolate by the death of his wife and sparring-partner Sybil. Visiting him one morning in a London nursing- home a year or so before his own death at 68, I found him in a buoyant mood induced by a pass just made at him by a male nurse. In fact, he got out of bed to prove to me that the nurse was no fool by dropping his silk pyjama trousers to expose a pair of well-preserved white buttocks.
The bounciness became even more sad in proportion to how much drink had gone into generating it that day. I often dined with him at the excellent restaurant of the Hotel Canterbury in Brussels. By the time we finished the main course he was usually engaged in conversation with some nouveau- riche couple or family at one of the adjacent tables; by the time coffee arrived, he was likely to be seated at their table, swanking at length about the sizeable fortune he had amassed through dealing in modern art.
So this distinguished member of the surrealist movement, that movement dedicated to subverting bourgeois and petit-bourgeois values, spent many of his evenings in the evening of his life trying to impress adherents to those values who probably didn’t believe him anyway.Mesens had always sought in one way or another to impress, but within limits imposed by surrealist principles. He had been one of the key organisers of London’s great International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, along with Herbert Read and Roland Penrose. In the course of time Read and Penrose both let the side down by accepting knighthoods; while it is safe to assume that Mesens would never have been offered an honour, it is even more certain that he would have turned any such offer down.
During an exhibition at the Tate in 1969, there was a visit from a Belgian prince and his beautiful Italian wife, accompanied by Princess Margaret and Tony Snowdon. Those designated to take the royal party round were Jennie Lee, the Minister for the Arts, Arnold Goodman, the Chairman of the Arts Council, myself as curator of the exhibition, and Mesens, who had given indispensable help in realising it. Mesens declined: he was a republican.The exhibition in question was the first museum retrospective in Britain of Magritte. Mesens’s participation had been essential because he knew more than almost anyone about the artist and because he owned easily the biggest and finest collection anywhere, private or public, of the artist’s work.
In fact, Mesens’s entire career was dominated by his multi-faceted relationship with Magritte, while Magritte’s career was deeply dependant on Mesens’s promotion of his art.Their friendship began in Brussels in1920, when Magritte was a 21-year- old art student and Mesens a 16-year-old music student, both sons of small businessmen. Soon Mesens gave up music and started exercising a modest talent as a poet and critic and collagist and an exceptional talent as an editor and exhibition curator and art dealer. (Dealing in art, especially from home, was never considered within the movement to be an unworthy occupation for a surrealist; it was how both Breton and Eluard survived.)Magritte and Mesens’s first collaboration was in publishing two short- lived but interesting Dada reviews, but from 1927 on Mesens was involved in marketing his friend’s work – initially as manager of one of the two galleries with which Magritte had a contract – and this, of course, ensured a fiercely ambivalent relationship. It lasted till death parted them and included a lot of infighting, conducted in public, which Mesens often cheekily managed to project as a struggle between Magritte’s materialism and his own integrity as his friend’s surrealist conscience.
