Crazy Courtauld Stairs

We met our London friend Gregory this afternoon at the Courtauld Institute of Art in central London.  The elegant building has been nicely renovated from the ground floor up, but the old staircase to the basement clearly survives. I used it in search of the coat lockers and toilets.   We saw a striking exhibition of works by Georgiana Houghton (1814-1884). She was a Spiritualist medium who claimed to be guided by spirits from the past and higher realms and thereby produced a number of abstract watercolors,  half a century before  Picasso and his contemporaries embarked on what we consider modern art.

Before that Marylee and I visited the National Portrait Gallery, for an excellent show entitled Russia and the Arts, with vivid portraits of a range of artists and other cultural figures from 1867 to 1914; they're from the collection of Pavel Tretyakov, a leading patron of the arts in Russia and lent by the Tretyakov Gallery which he established.