Thursday, October 9/2008

Rainy, and a stay in day.  Still plenty to read, though.  I get about half way through Beaverbrook: A Shattered Legacy.  It goes nicely with our trip to the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, covering, as it does, the dispute over ownership of many of the best paintings, a dispute between the gallery and Sir Maxwell Aiken, Beaverbrook's grandson.  I moved to Fredericton shortly after Beaverbrook's death, and during the time of much of the manoeuvering and controversy, but have little memory of it.  Probably, with adolescent egotism, I was simply too absorbed by my own little student world.

Our trip to the gallery is a pleasure.  Kieran, who's lately taken quite an interest in art, has been wanting to go, in part to see the Turner and the Freud at the heart of the dispute (because of their financial rather than their intrinsic value).  There's the hugh Dali, Santiago El Grande, in a space not quite large enough to do it justice, and a crucifixion by Tristram Paul Hillier that fascinated me as a student, set as it is in the fifties, with fifties costume and tools much in evidence, rather in the manner of Stanley Spencer.  It too has disputed ownership.  There has been a recent court hearing, we're told, with Judge Bayda now preparing his judgement.