My latest assignment has me working for Mr. Joe Plumeri, the chairman and CEO of the Willis Company. Have you ever heard of Willis? Neither had I, until this relationship began. Turns out Willis is a venerable British insurance company, now approximately 175 years old. Mr. Plumeri is an astute and charismatic businessman from the wilds of Trenton, New Jersey. He brought me over to London for three days to absorb what I could by attending a group of town hall meetings Joe would be conducting with Willis’ employees.

Day One passed like a whirlwind. Arriving around noon at the splendid Willis Building, located on Lime Street opposite the really ugly Lloyd’s of London building and near the wonderful Gherkin, I got a quick tour of the premises, including a visit to the rooftop and the splendid view it affords.  After that, I did my best to stay out of the way of the folks in the Communications Department, who had their hands full without babysitting a guest. Later, however, I got to sit in with two sessions with Joe, during which he explained that the company’s earnings were especially impressive given the hardships the difficult economic climate imposed. In the evening,  I had a great time. Josh King and Nick Balamaci and I went to dinner at La Pont de la Tour, a terrific restaurant located on Bankside just east of the Tower Bridge. They are a couple of smart and witty fellows, and we had a great time after dinner, crossing Tower Bridge and examining the husk of the venerable, amazing, now abandoned Willis Building on Trinity Square, before retiring to our rooms at Willis House.

The next day I attended two more town hall sessions. I suppose the experience must be something like Dead Heads used to be able to go through, when they could compare concerts, and savor how Jerry Garcia would play a solo during Sugar Magnolia at one show but save it for Truckin’ at another. Relieved of duty at around 3:30, I headed back to Bankside and the Tate Modern, which was having an exhibition called Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance and the Camera. There were at lot of incredible photos on display, including images by Walker Evans, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Garry Winogrand, Robert Frank and Weegie. But the exhibit was intellectually flabby. The cohering idea, as articulated by the curator, Sandra S. Phillips, in a filmed introduction, was that these were images taken by “the invasive eye,” but that seems to be a notion at once flabby and liquid. In what way is Abraham Zapruder‘s film of John F. Kennedy assassination invasive? How is a picture of a person riding a public subway invasive? Voyeurism seems obviously invasive, but when a nude person poses for the camera, as many, many subjects in this exhibition did, does their exhibitionism not change the level of voyeurism? A lot of questions seem to revolve around an idea of rights that the exhibition did not explore; for example, does not the notion of `invasive’ change when a person falls into the territory of news. A lot of the time I was thinking that it wasn’t the camera or the taking of the photograph that was invasive, but the construct of art, the freezing of the moment to invite interpretation, that was the invasive act. Plus the surveillance portion of the show was a drag and provoked no ideas of interest. Still, it was cool to see the pix. After that, I tramped back to Willis House, stopping off for a bite under an old covered mall called Leadenhall Market, dating from the mid-19th century, where a bar band was playing sixties songs and patrons were dancing in the street.  Hearing These Boots Were Made for Walking and especially Don’t You Just Know It put me in a particularly cheerful mood.

On Saturday I got up early and did the public tour of The Palace of Westminister, also known as Parliament. It was fabulous; if there was a downside, it was the crisp 75 minute tour did not permit lingering, and man, if anything deserved lingering, it was the incredible art that hangs in the joint. Most breathtaking were the two giant (45′ x 12′) frescoes in the Royal Gallery by Daniel Maclise, The Death of Nelson and The Meeting of Wellington and Blücher. The heroic paintings are just brilliant, but tragically, humidity from the Thames caused the colors to deteriorate, and now the pictures are almost monochrome. It was a great treat to stand on the backbench of the government’s side in Parliament. After that, I hiked down down Millbank for a about a mile to the Tate Britain, to see a merry exhibit called Rude Brittania, which showcased Britian’s splendid satirical and comic artists. I was delighted to see work by William Hogarth, the great Regency satirists Thomas Rowlandson and my main man James Gillray, the Victorian George Cruikshank, Ralph Steadman and the great Gerald Scarfe. I got a particular kick seeing the hilarious puppet of Margaret Thatcher that was used on Splitting Images. The exhibit was great fun, and after that I wandered around the rest of the museum for a while and absorbed a nice fat blast of culture. Then it was back to the airport and into the clutches of American Airlines, for a long, cramped, punishing eight hour flight home, whose tortures were relived only by a very pleasant chat with my seat mate, a young schoolteacher from Rockland, Illinois, named Sara, who was returning home from a month in Spain–a month that included the once-in-a-lifetime night she spent in Saville watching Las Rojas capture La Copa Mondial, and joining he celebration that followed. What a night that must have been!

Jane Fonda, 28 years old, in a photograph taken by Dennis Hopper, at Malibu in 1965. Thanks to Vanityfair.com.

David Levine, the peerless caricaturist, died yesterday at Columbia Presbyterian Hospital. Here’s Bruce Weber, writing in the Times:

David Levine, whose macro-headed, somberly expressive, astringently probing and hardly ever flattering caricatures of intellectuals and athletes, politicians and potentates were the visual trademark of The New York Review of Books for nearly half a century, died Tuesday in Manhattan. . . . Mr. Levine’s drawings never seemed whimsical, like those of Al Hirschfeld. They didn’t celebrate neurotic self-consciousness, like Jules Feiffer’s. He wasn’t attracted to the macabre, the way Edward Gorey was. His work didn’t possess the arch social consciousness of Edward Sorel’s. Nor was he interested, as Roz Chast is, in the humorous absurdity of quotidian modern life. But in both style and mood, Mr. Levine was as distinct an artist and commentator as any of his well-known contemporaries. His work was not only witty but serious, not only biting but deeply informed, and artful in a painterly sense as well as a literate one; he was, in fact, beyond his pen and ink drawings, an accomplished painter. Those qualities led many to suggest that he was the heir of the 19th-century masters of the illustration, Honoré Daumier and Thomas Nast.

Especially in his political work, his portraits betrayed the mind of an artist concerned, worriedly concerned, about the world in which he lived. Among his most famous images were those of President Lyndon B. Johnson pulling up his shirt to reveal that the scar from his gallbladder operation was in the precise shape of the boundaries of Vietnam, and of Henry Kissinger having sex on the couch with a female body whose head was in the shape of a globe, depicting, Mr. Levine explained later, what Mr. Kissinger had done to the world. He drew Richard M. Nixon, his favorite subject, 66 times. . . .With those images and others — Yasir Arafat and Ariel Sharon in a David-and-Goliath parable; or Alan Greenspan, with scales of justice, balancing people and dollar bills, hanging from his downturned lips; or Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. carrying a gavel the size of a sledgehammer — Mr. Levine’s drawings sent out angry distress signals that the world was too much a puppet in the hands of too few puppeteers. “I would say that political satire saved the nation from going to hell,” he said in an interview in 2008. . . . Even when he wasn’t out to make a political point, however, his portraits — often densely inked, heavy in shadows cast by outsize noses on enormous, eccentrically shaped heads, and replete with exaggeratedly bad haircuts, 5 o’clock shadows, ill-conceived mustaches and other grooming foibles — tended to make the famous seem peculiar-looking in order to take them down a peg. “They were extraordinary drawings with extraordinary perception,” Jules Feiffer said in a recent interview about the work of Mr. Levine, who was his friend. He added: “In the second half of the 20th century he was the most important political caricaturist. When he began, there was very little political caricature, very little literary caricature. He revived the art.”

I have always admired the sculptures of Augustus Saint Gaudens, and whether it was going to Rangers-Flyers games at Madison Square Garden where I saw Diana, or my interest in the Civil War which led me to Boston to see the monument to Robert Gould Shaw and the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, or my early public relations work for Cooper Union where I could see Saint Gaudens’s statue of Peter Cooper, or working at Playboy at Fifth and 56th, a mere block away from the great statue of William Tecumseh Sherman or at Spy at Union Square, a mere nine blocks from his statue of Admiral David Farragut in Madison Square, I feel I have always been surrounded by the work of Saint Gaudens. Today in Slate, Witold Rybczynski offers a slide show in praise of this magnificent American artist.

Ginny and I spent Sunday in Beacon at the Dia art gallery, looking at the gigantic installations of conceptual modern art. Neither of us much liked or understood what was going on with the piles of sand or stacks of carpets or big holes in the floor, although both of us, and Ginny especially, liked the Andy Warhol Shadows series of paintings (above left), and I liked how Fred Sandback changed space by essentially creating frames with tightly strung acrylic yarn (above right) . It’s funny to think that Warhol was creating these paintings at about the time Ginny and I and Ann Marie Donohue saw Warhol in person at an exhibit we were attending at the World Trade Center, where Ann Marie said “Look! Andy Wyeth!” God, what a clot of powerful memories! Later we went into town and had lunch at an upscale diner run by a Polish lady. Ginny was much taken with the cases and earrings in the glass blower’s shop, and I liked the big mural created in tribute to Pete Seeger‘s efforts on behalf of the Hudson River. Much more our speed. All in all, a nice afternoon.

As Clive Owen put it in the brilliant last line of Children of Men, “What a day!” It started (late) with a very fine lunch at Bar American (the old Judson Grill at Seventh and 52nd) with my old and dear friend from Spy days, John Connolly, now a contributor to Vanity Fair, and his old friend and my new fellow True/Slant blogger, the acclaimed TV newswoman Diane Dimond. We had a lot of fun, talking about the corrupt private investigator Anthony Pellicano, a man who once threatened my life without ever having had the benefit on laying eyes on me (John’s writing a book), the water boarding of Christopher Hitchens (the undisclosed but most relevant figures: 13, 16), the upcoming 40th anniversary of the Witness Protection Program, the secrets of Morning Joe, the peculiar mysteries of Eliot Spitzer‘s downfall, why Diane likes courtrooms (“this cauldron of human soup!”), why Gucci shoe repairmen are a vanishing breed, and lawn and gardening tips from the heart of New Mexico. Oh, I do miss the occasional lunch!

Afterwards, I headed up to the Museum of the City of New York on 103rd and Fifth to catch their new exhibition on the 400th anniversary of the arrival of the Dutch in New York. The exhibit does a nice job of reminding everyone that while the period of Dutch control was relatively brief–by the 1680s, possession had passed to the British–their influence was enduring. There’s the obvious heritage–names of locations like Bleecker, Bowery, Yonkers, Spyten Dyvel, Brooklyn, Bushwick, Harlem, venerable Dutch families like the Roosevelts–but there’s the more subtle legacy of tolerance. The outpost of New Amsterdam was a commercial trading center, and a person’s ability to produce something useful and profitable counted a lot more than his/her religion, race, national origin, and so on (not that these factors were irrelevant–this was the 17th century!) But this attitude of tolerance for diversity and free-thinking was unique in the colonies (so unlike those stiff-necked Puritans!), and that led directly to an appetite for democracy, as Russell Shorto showed in his brilliant Island at the Center of the World. It’s not at all a stretch to say that as New Yorkers, we are all Dutch. Pictured, a model of Henry Hudson‘s vessel, The Half Moon. (Also on view: an illuminating exhibit on the life and creations of legendary clothing designer Valentina, whose creations for Garbo, Dietrich, Hepburn, Oberon and others defined elegance and grace in the thirties and forties.)

Finally, my pal Ken Smith came to my magazine writing class at Marymount Manhattan and talked about magazine design and the sometimes close, sometimes haphazard collaboration between designers and editors that goes into magazine creation. The members of the class posed a lot of interesting questions that certainly never would have occurred to me to ask, and it was kind of refreshing to talk about the mistakes magazines have made that are the result almost never of bad intentions, but of good intentions poorly executed, poorly perceived, and ultimately incapable of being taken back. Everybody really seemed into the conversation. (Pictured left: Ken in repose; right, Action Art Director Ken.)

A couple of days later, Ken put his thoughts about the class, and about design, on his blog.

Caught on a rain-drenched Sunday with hours to kill between presentations at the Times, I visited the Met.

I didn’t mean to hit the Arms and Armor gallery, but suddenly there I was. I looked around in memory of my friend Bob Carroll. I like to think that some of his work is still on view.

A drenched Barnes & Noble at 46th and Fifth, from the safety of a southbound M4 bus; looking north from 42nd Street at a rain-swept Times Square.

My friend Pari Esfandiari sent me this link to a very cool photo with zoom capability. Just hold down the left button on the mouse and drag it to whatever area of the photo you wish to see more clearly. Amazingly, you can zoom right in on individual faces. What are you waiting for? Try it!

http://gigapan.org/viewGigapanFullscreen.php?auth=033ef14483ee8994966…

As luck would have it, my friend, college roommate and the best man at my wedding, Tim O’Toole, lives in London, and a more generous and better informed guide would be hard to imagine. On Sunday he and I visited the Tate Modern on the South Bank. Frankly, I was disappointed. I had heard that the museum, which is housed in the former Bankside Power Station, was quite an exciting scene, but perhaps because it was a rainy Sunday afternoon, the place was innundated with families with small children. I was underwhelmed by the art. There were a couple of Francis Bacon paintings that were interesting, but other Bacons have captivated me more.  A roomful of Soviet posters was impressive–I rather like those posters, kitschy though they may be.  Later we ate at a gastro pub, and Tim told me about his exciting life in London.

I am pretty thrilled to have won at auction on eBay copies of four prints by James Gillray, the great British satirical artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Gillray had a sharp pen and a merciless and brilliantly comic sensibility that must have reduced the targets of satire to tears and rage. One of the four prints is Sir Richard Worse-Than-Sly, exposing his wifes bottom; O Fye!, first published, March, 1782. It shows a naked Lady Worsley–who looks quite different in the military costume she wears in Sir Joshua Reynolds‘s portrait of her that hangs in Harewood House mansion in Yorkshire–stepping into a sunken bath while her husband helps one Captain Bisset to peep at her through a window.

Another print, “Bologna Sausages, or Oppositions Flux’d”, takes on the leader of the opposition, the formidible Charles Fox. First published during the Regency Crisis of 1788. it depicts the scene in Parliament, which was wracked by debate between the the advocates of the Prince of Wales‘ regency (including Fox, Edmund Burke and Richard Brinsley Sheridan), against the supporters of the mad (temporarily, as it turned out) King George III, chief among them William Pitt. Gillray depicts Pitt chasing Fox from the House of Commons with the threat “I’ll unwhig the gentleman.” This period of history–the era of George III, Pitt, Nelson, Napoleon, Austen–is one of my favorites, and Gillray’s trenchent illustrations make it especially vivid.