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That Sinking Feeling Professor Edward Chaney sets out the case against the sale of works from Southampton’s art collection in order to raise money for a Titanic Heritage Centre I was left-wing when I was little but graduated to conservatism soon after returning from Italy with my family. This was largely the result of sending my children to east Oxford state schools, where I discovered that Norman Tebbit had not been exaggerating in his critique of lowest-common-denominator, anti-competitionist egalitarianism. I have lived in the historic centre of Southampton for the past twelve years and am now newly disappointed to find a party that calls itself Conservative espousing equivalently short-term cultural politics. On July 15th I attended a full council meeting in order to hear the debate on the proposal to sell ‘art works’ from Southampton City Art Gallery in order to fund a Titanic Museum. (There was at this stage no mention of enhancing the collections, which seems to have been added to placate officialdom and in response to an apparently unanticipated level of opposition). A Lib Dem motion that the proposal to dispose of works of art ‘is a betrayal of public trust, damaging to the reputation of our museums, and should not be implemented’ was defeated on strict party lines. Though all three political parties agreed on the necessity of creating a ‘Heritage Centre’ or ‘Sea City Museum’ devoted to the sinking of the Titanic and featuring ‘a climb-aboard replica of the doomed liner’ they could not agree on how to fund it. The Conservatives concluded that the only way of raising the £5,000,000 required (to match the Heritage Lottery Fund grant) was by selling works of art from the permanent collection of the City Art Gallery and won the vote on that basis. (I wonder if the HLF have been informed that their grant depends on selling heritage assets?) Councillor Hannides then instructed his recently restructured ‘Arts and Heritage Service’ to advise him on what should be sold, a process that was already well underway before the debate. He is no doubt disappointed that despite costly administrative and legal work over many months, only a Munnings, worth less than a million, and one of two Rodins, worth little more, have emerged as ‘suitable’ items for disposal. We are told in the Daily Echo of July 30th that Councillor Hannides will travel to London today to present the proposal to the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) which is the most powerful arts body in the UK ‘[and] has already given in principal [sic] support’. Since the MLA’s Chief Executive, Roy Clare, is currently on leave, what I suspect is in any case likely to be a negative response will not be immediately forthcoming. The City Art Gallery is one of the most distinguished collections in the country and, where 20th-century British art is concerned, arguably the best outside London and thus one of the best in the world. What it lacks is sufficient support from the council and citizens of Southampton, more space, more effective marketing and a nominated director, all of which would enable it to flourish as, for example, Chichester’s extended Pallant House, Bexhill’s de la Warr Pavilion or Eastbourne’s newly-rebuilt Towner Gallery. Southampton’s Gallery has been very fortunate in its curators to date but despite being the City’s principal cultural asset by far, the council cannot, apparently, bring itself to appoint someone who can call him or herself ‘director’ and be identified exclusively with its wellbeing and future; someone granted a little time, for example, in order to fund-raise. However bureaucratically convenient, the recent restructuring beneath an overarching ‘Arts and Heritage Manager’ of Gallery, Archives, ‘Heritage Team’ and ‘Archaeology Unit’ as ‘The Arts and Heritage Team’ makes this even less feasible. Connected with the Gallery’s consequent lack of status where the city and the external world are concerned is the lack of any sort of committee or board of governors which a collection of this quality should have. This makes it all the more vulnerable to on-the-hoof policies such as the present one, dreamed up by a temporary regime to solve a temporary and indeed self-inflicted problem; for surely the Titanic should be commemorated (if the city councillors continue to insist that Southampton be identified with a sunken ship) by an improved Maritime Museum or other facility on Town Quay, perhaps in partnership with Business Southampton, rather than a costly new museum on the wrong side of town. In times of austerity one should surely begin by improving one’s existing assets and when one is on the brink of the worst recession since the 1930s it is folly to begin building a new museum, even if it solves the problem of what to do with a former Magistrate’s Court (assuming the granting of listed building consent). How the plan fits, not least financially, with the demands of the new ‘Cultural Quarter’ is far from clear. Above all, it is folly to further reduce Southampton’s already low status as a potential ‘City of Culture’ by selling works of art entrusted to its care or acquired with legacies left by the present councillors’ more enlightened predecessors. Whether or not Southampton needs a new Titanic Museum, it should not, under any circumstances, sacrifice its artistic legacy in order to pay for it. Before any further action is taken there should be a referendum on this as surely as there should be on the equivalently un-consulted decision to fluoridise the water supply. It is to be hoped that our two Labour MPs will prove sounder on this issue of cultural collectivism (or would-be populism) than they have so far proved on (lowest-common-denominator) mass medication. (As we go to press one of these has come out against selling what, referring to the c.1937 Munnings, he calls ‘a Victorian picture’). Many thousands of pounds worth of public money has already been spent on lawyer’s fees and in-house staff-time in determining which works might be eligible for disposal. Even a cursory glance at the issues involved shows that the works worth selling, i.e. of any serious monetary value, tend to be hedged about with conditions, legal and otherwise, which render them difficult to sell. Finally, the whole process puts the Gallery at risk of unpalatable penalties, including the loss of its hard-earned ‘designated status’ from the MLA. I believe it is very likely that such difficulties, as well as the incipient decline of the art market and the restrictions as to whom the gallery is able to offer the works, will in the end prevent the council from carrying out their plans, but meanwhile untold harm will have been done to the Gallery’s reputation. The Daily Telegraph of July 6th has already published a piece by Rupert Christiansen including the following: ìAs part of an effort to raise £15 million for a new museum devoted to the Titanic, Southampton City Council has decided to trawl through the 3,500 works of art owned by its outstandingly good Art Gallery and send a selection of them off to the open market.î On August 9th the Sunday Times’s Culture magazine published a piece by Richard Brooks beginning: ìFor sale, two valuable Rodin sculptures and Alfred Munnings’s famous painting After the Race, which have been identified by Southampton city council as possibles to flog, to raise money for a new £15m maritime museum...î He concludes: ìdo we actually need a new maritime museum?î If the council insists on going ahead, the City Art Gallery will suffer serious long-term practical consequences from reputational damage of a more explicit kind, for the likes of Richard Dorment and Brian Sewell are poised to attack and I have reason to believe that the directors of the National Gallery and the British Museum and the Secretary of the Royal Academy have sound things to say on the matter. More than most, the Gallery has always depended upon bequests and donations and the inevitably negative national publicity is bound to put off potential donors and grant-awarding bodies from ever considering the gallery again as a secure beneficiary. Southampton has a particularly distinguished tradition in this respect, beginning with Councillor Robert Chipperfield, upon whose bequest the building and its contents, as well as the Southampton School of Art (now Solent University) are largely based. Chipperfield’s 1911 will stipulated that pictures could only be acquired after consultation with the Director of the National Gallery, a requirement which stood the collection in particularly good stead after the 29-year-old Kenneth Clark obtained that post. Next, encouraged by Chipperfield’s example, came Birmingham-born benefactor (also a Councillor), Frederick William Smith. Encouraged by the sense of permanence bestowed on it by Berry Webber’s distinguished building, from the late 1940s Arthur Jeffress loaned and sold pictures cheaply to the Gallery, which then inherited almost a hundred works of art after his suicide in 1961. Meanwhile, an eccentric vet turned collector, David Brown, had also been receiving helpful advice from Southampton’s greatest curator, Maurice Palmer. Giving up veterinary science, Brown took an art history degree and became a senior curator at the Tate Gallery. As the bequests’ consultancy role had passed from the Director of the National Gallery to the Director of the Tate and thence down to curatorial level, he took on the latter role with enthusiasm, encouraging in particular with the enlargement of the modern British art collection. At his death in 2002, Brown left 220 wonderful works of mainly British art to the City Art Gallery. Though there was no specific threat at the time, Brown was worldly enough to anticipate such possibilities, arranging that the National Art Collections Fund (now the Art Fund) should administer his bequest and that no work left by him should be alienated from public ownership. His views on the matter were clearly expressed in his will: ìI find it distressing and dishonourable that public galleries and other bodies are bequeathed or given works for their collection which are accepted and later sold to raise money. I own a Sickert which in view of its particular appropriateness I have considered bequeathing to the gallery. If the proposed policy is pursued beyond the point it has been taken so far, I would be far less likely to do so.î The David Browns of the future, with far more significant collections, would inevitably draw similar conclusions, thereby rendering the short-term gain of less than two million trivial by comparison with the loss of many more millions worth of tax-deductible art which might otherwise have been donated. If one were able to estimate Chipperfield’s legacy today it would surely top a hundred million in today’s values. Once sold, however, the works of art acquired with his bequest will be forever lost to Southampton, no longer be part of its cultural memory and cease to accrue any other benefit to the city. The Munnings that has been proposed for sale (the gallery’s only picture by this still very sought-after artist) was bought on the advice of Kenneth Clark and like both Rodins, funded by Chipperfield’s Bequest. Given this Bequest’s exclusively artistic remit, none of it should be used to fund a museum commemorating a ship that sank a year after Chipperfield’s death. Though 20th-century British and therefore in principle part of the ‘core collection’, one is filled with gloom at the fashionable argument that Munnings was never avant-garde and so does not fit with the ‘challenging’ profile which has developed in recent decades. Alas, even Stephen Foster, director of the Hansard Gallery, who is otherwise opposed to the sell-off, is quoted as saying: ìIt is hard to disagree with the works they have chosen to sell.î But the argument for de-accessioning due to non-conformity with the gallery’s ‘contemporary’ profile might equally well be an argument for not doing so. Fashions change and one day, when the Offili’s elephant turds, Whiteread’s plaster mattresses and Damian and Tracey’s tiresome essays in self-promotion are long-forgotten – and there are signs that this is happening already – the superb technical skills and artistic vision of this more authentically eccentric President of the Royal Academy may be appreciated again and the City Art Gallery be all the more admired for reflecting, through the integrity of an historic collection, a more complete story of art. In 17th-century Britain, Gothic art and architecture was despised by belatedly sophisticated Palladians until it became fashionable again in the later 18th. Sickert has been less fashionable than he is today. Thanks partly to the Bloomsburies, disparagement of anything associated with their parents’ generation (and that wasn’t French), Victorian pictures were marginalized to basements or discarded entirely. For the following half century one could buy masterpieces by the Pre-Raphaelites and their followers for next to nothing. Now Lloyd Webber and others pay millions for pictures by Waterhouse, whose Lady of Shallott is the best-selling postcard in both Tates just as Southampton’s Tissot of The Last Evening is one of Southampton’s most popular pictures. The Daily Echo recently published an article entitled ‘Why we should be first city of culture’ but at the same time prides itself (‘Show us your Monet’) on having persuaded the council to sell its works of art, arguing, for example that: ìOnly 200 of the vast 3,500 collection can be shown in the gallery at any one time and some works have scarcely seen the light of day in years.î But those items which have scarcely ìseen the light of day in yearsî are not those likely to be fingered for sale as they would not fetch the £5,000,000 required to attract matching funding for the Titanic Museum. And if the person who wrote this was even a thrice-a-year visitor to the gallery s/he would know that despite ever-diminishing resources the excellent curator, Tim Craven, manages to rotate the collection so that the 200 plus pictures shown at any give time are regularly replaced by another 200 until more than 2000 of the total collection is on regularly refreshed public view in each five-year cycle. Works of art are, moreover, regularly loaned to other museums and galleries, usually to prestigious exhibitions, though where merited, occasionally on longer-term loans to permanent collections. Pace Councillor Hannides’ statement in the Echo, Craven brought the Munnings back to the Gallery from Essex soon after he became curator and has since hung it twice (in 2003 and 2006). Both Rodins have been shown in most years of the past decade. Meanwhile, the curators continue to organize their own internationally prestigious exhibitions (often in collaboration with local academics such as myself) which place works of art from the permanent collection alongside loans from other museums and galleries to provide enlarged aesthetic and historical context. Finally, although overworked, in my experience the curators have always been willing to conduct interested parties around the basement picture stores at short notice. The works of art are researched both individually and as part of an historic collection which is itself part of the national collection that is still in the process of being recorded by the Public Catalogue Foundation, whose Chairman, Dr Fred Hohler, is another influential figure who is opposed to the sale. Chief among those from whom one should have expected opposition to this philistine scheme is the MLA and its Chief Executive, Roy Clare CBE, former director of the National Maritime Museum and thus the former boss of Southampton’s new ‘Arts and Heritage Manager’ (who was then his ‘SeaSpace Project Leader’). Though the council’s claims of having received ìin principal [sic] supportî from the MLA for their proposal are somewhat disingenuous, what is clear is that the MLA did not warn or discourage the Council from proposing to sell works of art in order to invest in something other than its own collection. As well as contradicting the spirit, if not the letter of Chipperfield’s bequest, the proposal to sell such works in order to fund a Titanic Heritage Sea Centre Museum clearly contradicts the Museum Association’s published guidelines (which has been referenced in the MLA’s email response to my enquiries) and undermines the criteria required to fulfil the MLA’s own conditions when it granted the City Art Gallery’s designated status. The section in the Museum Association’s guidelines headed ‘Safeguard the long-term public interest in the collections’ states that: All those who work for or govern museums should ensure that they ìRefuse to undertake disposal principally for financial reasons, except in exceptional circumstances as defined in 6.14. Financially-motivated disposal risks damaging public confidence in museums and the principle that collections should not normally be regarded as financially-negotiable assets.î Section 6.14 reminds the reader that disposal should only be undertaken ìin exceptional circumstances and when it can be demonstrated that it will significantly improve the long-term benefit derived from the remaining collection: it is not to generate short-term revenue [etc].î Though there are rumours of a move to liberalize deaccessioning (just as the Americans seem to be tightening up their rules (viz Christiansen’s Daily Telegraph article), this is not apparent in the MLA’s own ‘Acquisitions and Disposal Policy’ (published April 4th 2008 and replacing that published in the ‘Accreditation Standard’ of 2004). Though somewhat complex in its new pick-and-match format it includes the following: ìThe museum will not undertake disposal motivated principally by financial reasons. The decision to dispose of material from the collections will be taken by the governing body only after full consideration of the reasons for disposal. External expert advice will be obtained and the views of stakeholders such as donors, researchers, local and source communities and other served by the museum will also be sought. Any monies received by the museum governing body from the disposal of items will be applied for the benefit of the collections.î This normally means the purchase of further acquisitions... ìOnce a decision to dispose of material in the collection has been taken, priority will be given to retaining it within the public domain. It will therefore be offered in the first instance, by gift or sale, directly to other Accredited Museums likely to be interested in its acquisition [etc. etc.].î Given how admirably conservative the MLA Policy is (here at least) on both the principles and practise of sale, it is hard to believe that Councillors actually read it before they embarked on this course but no less hard to believe that the MLA fully understood the Council’s intentions (as set out in their town hall debate) when, presumably after consultation with the Arts and Heritage Manager, it allowed this proposal to proceed to the extent of agreeing a broadly supportive statement to be included under Roy Clare’s name. One wonders also under what terms Bonham’s has calculated the valuations and whether they realise that the Council is not supposed to consign the works they have valued to auction, given the MLA’s guidelines on first-offers having to be made to accredited museums (which would be another cause of lower sale prices). The Museums Association would, no doubt, also have something to say on the matter. Since Bury Metropolitan Borough Council sold their Lowry they have been barred from MA membership. MLA de-accreditation would have even more serious consequences. In the words of the City Art Gallery’s own May 2009 ‘Collection Management Plan’: the unethical disposal of items from the City Art Gallery may lead to the de-accreditation of the Gallery by the MLA. Such a course of action would have a long-term negative effect on the public perception of Southampton City Art Gallery, its reputation as a centre of excellence within the visual arts and the ability to attract grants and sponsorship. The same issue of the Daily Echo that flaunts its support for the sale of works rightly deplores the news that the council ìis recruiting an £85,000 spin doctor in a bid to improve its imageî. This, we are told, ìwill push up the communications wage bill to £745,000 a year.î In the long term, the city’s image or ‘brand’ (as the council ‘job ad’ calls it) will depend on its cultural prestige which, above all, depends on the investment it has made in life-enhancing visual arts, architecture, music and literature. ìWe’re looking for someone who will define our brand and build relationships with the media, harness the power of the web and be proactive when it comes to spreading the wordî, says the ad. But what exactly is the ‘word’ that this costly personage will be spreading? The art, archaeology, music and (despite some of the appalling buildings still being erected), architecture of Southampton should ultimately be the only ‘word’. Though built in Belfast, which is already creating a £90,000,000 million Titanic Signature Project, and based in Liverpool, which also commemorates the ship, of course the Titanic and those who died in her have a place in the history of Southampton, just as the Spitfire does, but whether its fate constitutes ‘heritage’ or not, it should not be confused with those arts that could conceivably earn Southampton recognition as a ‘city of culture’. If Southampton really cannot afford a new Titanic Museum without depleting the City Art Gallery’s historic collection then it should abandon the idea as a matter of urgency. The current, self-imposed crisis could, however, be turned to advantage if the Gallery’s status as the jewel in city’s otherwise somewhat tarnished cultural crown became more widely recognized as a result. For it might yet be accorded a far higher and more independent ‘profile’ than it has been granted so far, the kind of profile it was creating for itself half a century ago when Quentin Bell celebrated it in an article in The Listener and accorded Maurice Palmer the status he deserved but was never actually granted: ìThe City Fathers have treated their gallery with the inconsistent benevolence of fond but capricious parents, and have allowed their Director [sic] to use the money, or at least a good deal of it, as he thinks fit.î Southampton has a collection which has been formed by a coherent policy. If they really want Southampton to flourish culturally as well as economically – and in the longer term, the two can hardly be separated – today’s City Fathers should treat the Gallery as an asset to be enhanced rather than stripped. They could begin by rewarding Tim Craven with the title of Director as a sign that they take him, the gallery and its future more seriously than a car boot sale. | ||||
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