Tag: Selby Whittingham

Selby Whittingham

“I’m just a slave / only a slave to you, temptation”. So sang Bing Crosby in 1933 in a song, Temptation, repeated by many famous singers since and, in 1970, in a German TV act of Sid Millward & The Nitwits. That shows (it was recorded) Sid presiding over players prey to temptations which are low rather than romantic, ones of vanity, exhibitionism and revenge. “The only way to get rid of temptation is to yield to it” (Wilde). So the Wallace Collection has demonstrated and probably will demonstrate further after its successful attempt to remove the prohibition on lending its works which I and others have deplored (November/December issue). “We will start slowly and see how things go,” says Chairman Horta-Osorío ominously.

Temptation and the Wallace go together in the pictures which give it its unique character, those of the French 18th century. By contrast the Director, Xavier Bray, has complained that “working at the Wallace is quite a monastic existence because people know they will never get anything out of you.” The temptation has been for the director to supplant the owner, giving him the latter’s powers and excuses for trips abroad to arrange exchanges, which create further temptations. He confessed to the Daily Telegraph in June 2018 that “as soon as you open it up you will get a barrage of requests and we might not be able to deal with it and we will haemorrhage art. We would have to have very strict conditions, saying a work could only travel once every ten years or something.” But what Bray thinks or whatever self-imposed rules are made, subsequent administrations will regard these as of as little consequence as he does those of Lady Wallace, and they will not even need to go to the Charity Commission.  If a donor’s conditions are to be changed, they should be replaced by new ones set by the courts, and not simply swept away by the secretive proceedings of the Commission, requests by Neil Jeffares and myself  for information on the decision of which have gone unanswered.

Nearly 30 years ago I considered the issue in relation to the Turner Bequest in The Fallacy of Mediocrity. I proposed that a new Act should vest the bequest in a separate trust and that that this should enshrine a clarification and modification of Turner’s prohibition on lending, viz. “The 98 finished oils … should be exhibited constantly together, except that (i) any may be loaned for public exhibition for a period not exceeding 6 months (ii) such loans should be made with regard to the objective of all the finished oils being on view together for most of the time.”  I proposed this clause (which could be improved) hesitantly as any change to a donor’s restrictions is always seized on as a precedent for making further ones. Thus some have said that the disregard of Lady Wallace’s request that the collection should be moved to a new building is a precedent for disregarding the other conditions. Suzanne Higgott in her biography of Sir Richard Wallace, however, has shown that he wished the collection to remain at Hertford House, the only snag, which the government later resolved, being that it was not held freehold. Then people say that Sir Richard, like Turner, lent some of the works, so he could not disapprove of lending. But that presupposes that the museum will lend on grounds that the donor would choose and not for the feeble reasons that are now not uncommon.

True, some grounds for lending are plausible.  It will allow, said the January-February issue, the Wallace Rubens landscape to be hung beside the National Gallery one for comparison, as the National has long wanted.  However it would already have been possible for both to be displayed together in the Wallace’s basement exhibition rooms. The peace in which I enjoyed the Wallace one a year ago will be broken by exhibition hoopla. The change stems partly from the wish to attract more visitors, however uninterested, and so cause overcrowding. I recently attended a large party in the Great Gallery at which hardly any of the guests bestowed a glance on its masterpieces.  There is of course a benefit in bringing together works by an artist from different collections in a temporary exhibition. In the case of Turner, though, there is an existing congregation of his works which the Tate perversely is set on dispersing. Many of the monographic exhibitions devoted to currently popular artists such as Turner and Monet are driven by the desire to maximise revenue and visitor numbers.

Many people are either unconcerned about whether conditions are adhered to or are actively hostile to donors, thinking that they have no moral right to impose their ideas on later generations. Yet maintenance of the donor’s ideas contributes to something now popular, diversity.  By contrast museums everywhere that are free to do as they like come to look more and more similar as curators the world round follow trends like sheep. In November I organised an event contrasting the tastes of two of Turner’s more discerning later patrons, which were distinctly different though they were fishing in the same pool.

One of them, Elhanan Bicknell, was said in the Dictionary of National Biography to have contemplated giving his collection to the National Gallery.  Probably Bicknell decided against that after seeing how ill those of Vernon and Turner fared. Lee Rosenbaum in her Culturegrrl blog has regretted that the bequest of Jayne Wrightsman to the Metropolitan Museum of Art has come with a prohibition on lending.  At least, she says, there is no provision that the works have to remain in their own exclusive rooms as in the cases of some earlier bequests. While the curators “probably must honour the rash promises made to donors that were made by previous directors,” in future gifts conditional on such exclusivity, which “cause the flow and logic of its galleries to be disrupted”, should be refused. That seems wise.  However much worse disruptions are instanced by her in the chaotic new extension to MOMA. And the Wallace had no compunction in quite illegitimately disrupting the flow of its galleries by the insertion of rooms devoted to the works of Freud and Hirst.

The Burlington Magazine in its November editorial, “Lifting the dead hand”, predictably supported the Wallace decision with the tired old arguments against the tyranny of donors which I answered at length in The Fallacy but which the art establishment has never answered. The point that time has not changed the validity of the preservation of collections intact, even if it has put in question other provisions and other property questions, is never met. The Burlington sanctimoniously states that “it is reasonable to expect a museum to honour the wishes of a donor”, while in fact it believes that it is always legitimate to override them. It does so on the basis of precedent; very often a donor’s conditions have been overturned. But there is no case law precedent for that, only the sloppy way in which the issue has been treated in Britain. One reason for that is that the current owners, the museums, are in a much stronger position than those who might challenge them, standing in the courts for the heirs of donors being restricted.

In the 19th century England was known as the “Land without Music”. Equally with regard to its museums it might be called the “Land without Law”. And also without taste, a sense of history or of responsibility. What museums were once about was first and foremost conservation and secondarily about the quiet appreciation of art, and not primarily about outreach, education, theorising, propagandising, these last being left to the avant garde, to where they belong, outside the museums and especially outside ones such as the Wallace whose character depends on preserving their integrity. 

Selby Whittingham

When Napoleon removed Europe’s art treasures to France on the grounds that their rightful place was not with “slaves” but “in the bosom of a free people”, some might cynically think that this was not just a piece of enlightenment, but that it was very convenient that the new home for them happened to be Paris.  Likewise, when curators advocate the removal of restrictions imposed by donors by an enlightened wish to benefit people living today, the cynic will ask if that is the only motive or if a greater one is to satisfy the curiosity, restlessness and ambition of the curator.

These thoughts are prompted by the decision to allow the Wallace Collection to lend works from its collection, when since 1900 it was held that this was forbidden by the conditions of Lady Wallace’s bequest, a view apparently of  those who had known Sir Richard and Lady Wallace intimately. Other house museums inspired by the Wallace have had similar restrictions, which some, such as the Frick Collection, still honour.

Such observations were made by the lawyer Sir John Lewis, chairman of the trustees 1997-2004, in a letter in The Times on 5 October. He concluded, “Is this not a clear breach of trust …?” However trust had already been breached a decade ago, on which I wrote in this journal (no. 89, Jan/Feb 2010). The exhibition of works by Freud and Hirst in the main first floor galleries, quite apart from seriously disrupting the permanent collection, was clearly in breach of Lady Wallace’s provision for “a special museum to contain the said collection which shall be kept together, unmixed with other objects of art.”  The jesuitical excuse, accepted then by Lewis, was that the loans and Wallace pictures were in separate rooms and so there was no mixing.  There quickly followed a Watteau exhibition on the first floor with Wallace and borrowed pictures in the same room. The latter may have been of interest to Watteau specialists, but are in such wretched condition as to diminish rather than enhance general appreciation of the artist.

The usual justifications are trotted out.

1. The donor (or, in this case, her husband) lent (or sold) works, so she/he would not oppose that now. But one might as well say that, because an artist has altered his paintings, others may do so after his death. To the curator this analogy may seem false, but he is not a collector but a scatterer. To the collector his collection is his work of art, which is why he may wish that it be kept together unchanged in perpetuity.

2. Who wants a fossilised “capsule for eternity”, asks art lawyer Ludovic de Walden in The Times? Many do. Period rooms are preserved at the V&A and Met and whole houses such as Osborne House. Remaining unchanged is key.

3. Great works of art do not belong to individuals but to the world. This communist attitude to property is not shared by all.

4. Art should be circulated round the world so that as many people as possible can see it. But if an object in Museum A is moved to Museum B, it will not be seen by visitors to Museum A. In the case of the Wallace nearly one-third of visitors come from abroad. Many of those and also from the UK will only ever pay one visit, so may never see the lent works, which are likely to be among the most important in the museum (as in the case of the Sheepshanks and Ionides bequests at the V&A as I write).

5. Lady Wallace’s wording was imprecise. But, in the case of J. M. W. Turner’s bequest it was rightly observed that, if ever conditions were worded so as to prevent escape from them impossible, his were.  But they are totally ignored. And so is the case with other gifts of collections which I discussed in an article commissioned by the late Professor Norman Palmer QC in 1995. Bendor Grosvenor, unconcerned about the rights of the donor, argues that an independent Scotland would have a right to part of the Turner Bequest; that only 25% of the pictures are now on display and that Edinburgh suffers from a dearth of Turners which should be remedied.

Since 1995 Sir William Burrell’s prohibition on lending abroad has been overturned by the Scottish Parliament, as Turner’s has been by the UK one.  It was admitted that if the proponents of the change chose instead to apply to the courts, they would probably lose. In fact the English courts have never tried such issues. In the Wallace case the application was made to the Charity Commission, which offers a cheap alternative to the courts, and so provides peanut justice, deliberating in secrecy without the donor’s interests represented.

The Wallace press release refers to the 2017 Mendoza Review of Museums in England, made in response to a Culture White Paper in 2016. Its recommendations highlight “growing and diversifying audiences” and “dynamic collections curation and management”, aims of successive governments which are manna to activist and ambitious curators, some more interested in sociology than in art and their collections (as at Manchester). Populism and penury (caused by reductions in public grants to museums) help prompt acceptance of these aims.

The National Gallery’s quincentenary Raphael exhibition  promises as usual “works never seen in the UK before or never seen outside where they reside now”.  “Unfortunately,”  it is added, these cannot include the huge Vatican frescoes.  However frescoes are sometimes moved, and so is stained glass. This is patently contrary to the intention of their creators and funders. However we are told that the Raphael frescoes “will be presented in other innovative ways” through new imaging technology. Is that not the true modern way forward? In general leave works where they are for those motivated to go to see them on their own initiatives rather than prompted by the loan exhibition publicity blitz and the bogus “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity “ending very soon”.

While the Charity Commission in these matters is something of a joke, the Department of Digital, its ministers and shadowing committee are complete jokes. None of them have an understanding of museums or realise – what is at the heart of the matter – that an essential attraction of museums is that they are all different, and that individuality (which is at the base of fine art) is to be cherished and not legislated away.

What about the museum trustees? Financiers and professional art historians replace the great and good of yesteryear. If one of the current trustees is a lawyer, Jennifer Eady QC, her field has been employment law. In her statement of qualifications to be a trustee she has said that the Wallace is her “local” museum and that she has “a particular interest in the educational and outreach work of the collection”. No doubt other locals will welcome constant changes in the display and exciting masterpieces borrowed from around the world, but to others this may be poor compensation for the absence of works they had come to see.

It is overdue to call time on copycat curators and philistine politicians and to leave each museum to its proper destiny. Is this too much to hope when the tomtits of the art world only ever have one song?

And I said to him, “Dicky-bird, why do you sit
Singing ‘Willow, titwillow, titwillow?’
“Is it weakness of intellect, birdie?” I cried
“Or a rather tough worm in your little inside?”
With a shake of his poor little head he replied,
“Oh, Willow, titwillow, titwillow!”

Selby Whittingham

A survey by the Office for National Statistics in May revealed that the British are changing their spending habits. Instead of filling our homes to the rafters with consumer durables and not-so-durables, we’re spending our spare cash on ‘experiences’, including recreation and, yes, culture. “People are interested in servicing a lifestyle rather than buying stuff,” one trend forecaster commented in The Guardian, while a senior executive from IKEA predicted gloomily: “In the west, we have probably hit peak stuff”.

Does this mean fewer family trips to the mall and more museum visits? The contemporary museum sector certainly hopes so, and to bring the hope closer to reality it is doing it best to make the two experiences as similar as possible. This is an ambition not confined to Britain. Is it any coincidence that Rome’s two contemporary art museums, MACRO and MAXXI, have names like megastores? It wouldn’t surprise me if the Pompidou called its next outlet Géant Casino.

The mallification of the contemporary art experience is international, but here in Britain, where entry is free, we lead the world. Last year Tate Modern logged 5.7 million visitors (don’t you love the precision of the decimal point?) and this year, with the added attraction and capacity of Herzog & de Meuron’s new Switch house extension, it’s hoping to swell attendance figures to over 6 million.

Architecturally, malls and contemporary art galleries have much in common: both incorporate awesomely large atria designed to instill a sense of limitless possibility, and both feature fancy escalators and rubbish cafés run by stressed and underpaid staff. Ah yes, you say, but here your parallel hits the buffers: people go to shopping malls to shop. Not strictly true, is my reply: visiting malls is a leisure activity. People go to malls to look at stuff and at each other, especially when travelling up and down the escalators, much as the ancient Greeks did in the agora, though without the escalators. Window-shopping is a group activity, a sociable way of servicing a lifestyle. As an experience, the ONS might well put it in the same category as visiting Tate Modern. 

In the run-up to the Switch House’s opening we were forewarned that much of its 60% of extra space would be devoted to social interaction. Museums used to be about conservation. Now, with a minor anagrammatic rearrangement, they’re about conversation. Like shopping malls, contemporary galleries are places to hang out in, with the shop window or exhibition displays serving as talking points. As Jacques Herzog explained to The Observer about the design of the Switch House, “the stairs are wider than we need them; we want to invite people to have a different kind of experience than to rush from one gallery to another”. 

All well and good, but you can’t get round a gallery this size without rushing, especially not if you linger on the stairs. I lost the ability to focus less than halfway through, and I call myself an art critic. The problem is not just one of scale; the trouble starts, ironically, with the gallery’s departure from the mall model. Art galleries, like shops, used to be full of covetable objects ordinary people could fantasise about owning – modest-sized works, originally made for private consumption, put on public display for the benefit of the general population. The Switch House galleries are mostly full of large-scale works created with public display in mind. Like public sculptures, they are made for rushing past. 

The mystery of this so-called gallery extension which has so far cost £58 million of public money is how relatively little art there is in it: only three of its ten floors are exhibition galleries, four if you count the Tanks. But this didn’t stop the panel assembled for the press launch – including poor little Sadiq, whistled up at short notice as a multicultural mascot – from harping on about how transformative it would all be. It’s unfortunate that the most conspicuous evidence of the economic transformation so far triggered by the old Tate Modern should be Richard Rogers’s Neo Bankside luxury apartments with their litter of posh nosh outlets underneath. Looking south from Switch House’s 10th floor viewing platform, it’s hard to imagine the Tate’s regenerative effect rippling out towards the North Downs without the swathes of intervening social housing being swept away and replaced with Tory nastytecture and overpriced cafés.

Bilbao has a lot to answer for. If the Basque government hadn’t hit the community jackpot with Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum none of this would have happened. As it is, any city council in need of an economic boost reaches for the starchitects. The only city manfully resisting the tide seems to be Helsinki, still refusing to give the go-ahead to its Guggenheim outlet more than a year after the Paris-based architects Moreau Kusunoki won the competition to design it. 

Bilbao claims to have recouped the Guggenheim’s construction costs within three years of opening. Even allowing for some prestidigitous book-balancing on Bilbao’s part, there’s precious hope of Tate Modern repeating this feat, with a £30 million funding hole that still needs filling. On the eve of the Switch House’s opening, Serota as good as admitted to The Art Newspaper that if the Tate didn’t seize the opportunity of “unwrapping the building” to hook some late donations it would be this year, next year, sometime, never before the debt was paid. Slim chance of our new tightwad PM delivering on Osborne’s previous promise of an extra £6.8 million of annual funding – and extra funding will be needed, not just to service the debt.

As with any expanded operation, the elephant in the gallery extension is the payroll. Billionaire donors who will happily part with capital to get their names on a museum building don’t give a stuff about the extra numbers of staff needed to keep it open. They leave such practicalities to museum administrators and the public bodies that fund them. If it came to keeping museum staff in jobs and pensions, your average billionaire would hand straight over to Dominic Chapell. 

In America, where more than $5 billion has been spent on museum expansion in the past nine years, administrators are getting wise. The Met, which reported a $10 million deficit this year, has mothballed plans for a David Chipperfield-designed modern and contemporary wing and, along with MoMA and the Brooklyn Museum, has announced plans to cut staff. The Met’s 2,300 staff – who, unlike museum staff in Britain, are properly paid – cost $200 million in salaries and benefits in 2013. MoMA, which spent $87 million on its 800 employees in the same year, has scaled back plans for a new extension. 

Double your gallery space and you double your warding costs, at least in theory. One reason, I suspect, why Tate Modern’s Switch House galleries are almost entirely given over to large sculptural installations is that they require less security – the worst you can do is steal a Carl André brick. Meanwhile the more vulnerable paintings and nickable sculptures have been squeezed into a few crowded galleries in the old Boiler House to save on warders. 

The dawn of the artist’s statement was bad enough; the arrival of the statement building has made things worse. Combine the two, and you get a tower of babble. Is the new Tate Modern worth the £260 million investment? If it ever has to charge for entry, we’ll find out.

Selby Whittingham

“Rhodes will likely fall,” gloomily writes Professor Nigel Biggar (UnHerd, July) after a decision by Oriel College, of which he was once chaplain, in favour of that. Another Rhodes watcher, Lars Larundson, says that the vote was taken amid thunder, lightning and torrential rain, perhaps an indication of internal dissension as much as of Rhodesian displeasure (The Critic, 25 June). Now a final decision has been postponed until January. In 2016 the college had backtracked after protests from alumni. At that time I wrote a piece for The Jackdaw (No.126). I will not repeat what I said then, except to stress that the statue of a donor such as Rhodes, and part of a building erected with his money, is in a quite different category from that of, say, Colston at Bristol. It is pointed out anew that the statue is part of the whole scheme of the facade, and that other statues on it could be condemned for being tarred with the same racist brush. Indeed those of James I and Charles I outside the 17th hall might not escape anti-slavery rage.

Readers of defences of Rhodes by Biggar complain that he does not give the whole story. But he says that the attacks on Rhodes do not either and he is trying to provide balance. One would hope that a university would have the same aim and not cowardly cave in to a pressure group such as Black Lives Matter, some of whose supporters have said that they are not interested in the facts or in statues. While the dons might reasonably sympathise with their complaints of present-day injustices, there are also the interests of the host people in their history and culture which deserve protection. The protesters will of course respond that White Britons are not the ones who have been seriously disadvantaged. As happens in this and other political disputes, all passion is on the side of the revolutionaries, while the conservatives mount a wan defence.

Remedies that are proposed are mostly impractical or bad. Museums are already overfull.  Unless the statue is Grade I* it will be relegated to stores which are overflowing. At the National Gallery the statue of Wilkie, placed there as a memorial after his death, long ago was removed and migrated to a Tate store. At the Tate a bust of Ruskin in the Duveen Turner wing vanished from sight. So far the portrait of Sir Charles Clore in the Clore wing has remained in situ, but for how long? What about the huge Picton monument in St Paul’s Cathedral? Is that a public space? It is governed by the cathedral chapter not the City of London and such monuments belong to the deceased’s family. Maybe the V&A would gladly house it, but how much space does it have to show church monuments if there is a spate of purges? As for replacing statues of bigwigs by those of saints, what would happen to the even vaster papal ones in St Peter’s Rome?

Then there is the suggestion that statues of British “worthies” should be replaced by those of worthier people of the past or today. But where are the worthy sculptors? Granted that some Victorian busts and statues are mediocre, they are not kitsch as so many contemporary ones are. Another idea is for changing figures as on the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square. That on the whole is not an encouraging precedent – look at the latest effort. Some argue that individuals should cease to be honoured. But where would art be without exceptional – not necessarily exceptionally good – individuals?  Or indeed advances in other professions too.

Thanks to their inventions, creativity and enterprise such people have enabled Europe to take a lead over past civilisations such as those of the Middle East, India and China.  As always in history, this led to colonialism and sometimes slavery. “We have the Maxim gun, and they have not”.  If the position had been reversed, it would have been the Europeans who would have been exploited. Indeed the Arabs and Turks were encroaching on Europe late on. No doubt some would argue that they behaved better than the Crusaders, but the latter were trying to reverse previous conquests. It is not very helpful to go so far back in history. Not that one need to. Zimbabwe is not a great improvement on Rhodes’ Rhodesia and in material ways a decline on later British colonial rule, though it is true that it gives greater status to blacks and the partly illusory benefits of sovereign independence.

Like prejudice in general racial prejudice is ubiquitous and goes back to an animal instinct teaching fear and caution when encountering the unknown or alien or generalising from one or two bad experiences. A Greek friend tells me that she encountered notices in Kensington saying “No Greeks” as well as “No Irish, No Blacks”, which seems a bit hard when Greece was on the British side in World War II. Humans are programmed to generalise, often on very little experience, whereas people should be treated as individuals. Unfortunately some utopians are opposed to individuality. Thus Neil MacGregor proposes a monument to the poor in Glasgow, saying “of course this could only be abstract”.  Maybe abstraction sometimes has a place (such as for the Cenotaph), but in this case would not the pathos of a figurative work be far more moving?

However, conservatives cannot just rely on such arguments.  Revolutions occur for a reason. Longstanding frustration with oppression or inferior status will boil over, as we have seen in the case of Ireland. The source of the present Black Lives Matter campaign, apart from the usual imitation of all things American, is the failure of Britain to appreciate that it was not enough to give large populations of Caribbeans and Asians a home. They had to be given both respect and opportunities. Governments were too slow to realise this and have reaped the consequences. It is true that much has been done by them in recent decades to rectify this. But revolutions often occur after reform and liberalisation are belatedly embarked on. What is needed now is a recognition that harmony not statuecide (which will only provoke, and has provoked, a violent reaction from militant conservatives) should be the aim, and to that end rational and informed discussion is needed, above all in a university city such as Oxford.  Black Lives Matter, in its extreme form, is part of the current illiberal puritanism which wants, not merely to restrain, but in a search for Utopia to stamp out evils that are currently topical such as racism, sexism, homophobia and smoking. It fails to recognise that all human beings are imperfect and that they and their predicament cannot simply be reduced to Black and White.