MARCH/APRIL 2022
The egoism causing so many to amend their appearance by undergoing expensive cosmetic surgery also thrives in the art establishment, which can’t stop ‘beautifying’ the appearance of its major galleries. If only these regular facelifts provided any improvement to the experience of viewing pictures.
I am now old enough to remember our main London galleries being partially or wholly closed for long periods at least twice each during my lifetime. And rarely have I thought any of these alterations necessary or anything other than vanity projects dreamed up by ambitious directors desperate for a medal. By the way, why does painting and decorating at museums take so long? 20-storey tower blocks at Finsbury Park were finished recently from scratch in just over a year, yet it takes three years for the mere nose job of moving the National Portrait Gallery’s door from the front to the side. Being a perfectly agreeable nose in the first place this wasn’t even necessary. The NPG worked fine even when considering that the last rebuild made a hash of a place that had been better before that. The Burrell in Glasgow, re-opening March 29th, has been closed five years for a £68 million renovation. And the Tate in Liverpool recently announced a £25 million full facial transplant, “a major re-imagining”, also requiring long closure, and also completely unnecessary. Yet these same institutions are perennially claiming acute poverty. At the Gladstone Museum in Stoke irreplaceable curators are being laid off to save money due to council cuts. Where is the overall plan here?
The latest gallery to have been ‘re-imagined’ is the Courtauld, always a favourite of mine with its thrills spanning the history of western art. Whilst pretending to study in the Warburg Institute library in the 1970s, I couldn’t believe my luck having the Courtauld Collection on the top floor of the same Woburn Square building. After four bobsworth of cottage pie in the church crypt opposite, I’d spend the rest of my lunchtime (and more) upstairs looking at great pictures: Jane Avril, Cézanne’s pine overhang, that stunning Renoir, the bottle of Bass, the Daddis, Rubens’ dazzling sketches, young Georges’ powder puff, even that famous bandage. God how I loved that place. I felt so privileged to have all this special work, in my case only encountered before in books, available free. Then, when the collection moved to Somerset House, it fast acquired an admission charge deterrent to casual visiting. Even so, once or twice a year, usually for their superb small exhibitions, I could re-acquaint with the favoured few at the same time. This is the way art works. Like a drug, you become addicted to such intimate friendships. Not even the current crop of young curators seem able, for all their moral soap-boxing, to re-write this fundamental contract. The fact is that good art wins out anywhere.
So what of the new arrangement, with its inevitably hiked fee? The same pictures are still there … plus that amazing Campin which came later. But what do you get for a three-year closure and £57 million? Not much it would seem:
- The iron filigree of the Rowlandson staircase has been painted a racy blue.
- Some trendy lightwood parquet floors – how very ‘Contemporary Art’.
- The inevitable wokey captions about slavery – negative karma for donor
Gambier-Parry whose inheritance was dubiously acquired. - Gauguin, surprise surprise, is outed as a paedo.
- There’s a swish hardwood ticket counter … with the same lovely SW7 gels.
- All the rooms have been given coats of tasteful Dulux matt.
- Oligarch Blavatsky, never known to pass a launderette, has his name in lights.
- There is the welcome addition of a new gallery of works by Constable, Jones
(T) and Cotman among others, from its collection of 26,000 drawings. - A room on the top floor is given to minor modern and contemporary stuff,
all of it of a predictably fashionable persuasion … and not much cop. - In the alcove behind the stairwell has appeared a daub by Cecily Brown, which
is easily the biggest and worst picture in the place. Whose idea was that?
As far as I’m concerned the Courtauld wasted 57 million quid that would have been far better spent on those without clean water and nothing to eat. The previous arrangement suited well enough. Did anyone complain about it? In the end it doesn’t matter how many barrels of Botox you inject, galleries are only as good as their permanent collections – “the content of their character” as Dr King expressed it so simply. The highlights today are the same as they were 50 years ago in Bloomsbury. It shouldn’t matter if the floor is scuffed or the lift rattles, you just need to look. The rest is irrelevant window dressing designed to attract the richer tourists and sippers of peppermint tea.