The Jackdaw

Tag: Tate Gallery

  • Charles Thomson: Lies, Damned Lies and Serota at the BBC

    Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, has used the platform of the BBC in a blatant attempt to deceive the nation. Either that or he is genuinely deluded himself. Both options render him unfit for major public office.

    He was confronted on Radio 4 programme The Reunion: Tate Modern on September 23rd by Sue MacGregor, regarding the Tate’s purchase in 2005 of its trustee Chris Ofili’s work The Upper Room. She observed with wry understatement, “The Charity Commission said you didn’t quite follow the rules here.”

    In 2006, as the BBC then reported, Charity Commission chief executive Andrew Hind said there were “serious shortcomings … In any charity we would be concerned that such basic matters were neglected, but in a charity of the size and stature of the Tate we are very disappointed.”

    The Guardian expounded, “The Tate has broken the law … By law, trustees cannot receive monetary benefit from their charity without express permission, usually from the commission. The Tate failed to seek permission … The Charity Commission’s full recommendations and criticisms, laid out in a lengthy document, also said the Tate failed to manage conflicts of interest … Failed to seek independent valuation of works by artist-trustees … Had no defined policy relating to purchases from artist-trustees … Had insufficiently clear acquisition policies … Kept insufficient records of trustee meetings.”

    The Daily Telegraph called this verdict “one of the most serious indictments of the running of one of the nation’s major cultural institutions in living memory”.

    “After an in-depth review lasting ten months by the Commission”, stated The Times, Serota “accepted the criticisms” and “was genuinely contrite”. The Evening Standard confirmed, “Sir Nicholas said today he accepted all the Charity Commission’s findings”.

    In stark contrast, his response to Sue Macgregor ten years later was an astonishing and shameless attempt to hoodwink the nation and evade blame with a trivialising revisionism that implied gross misconduct by the Charity Commission. To the supportive laughter of his entourage on the programme, Serota declared smoothly – as if it were established fact – the evasive nonsense, “The rules of course were invented after we had flouted them.”

    Serota has a history of obfuscation, whether lies, half-truths, delusions, evasions or omissions. In 2004, he applied for a grant from the Art Fund towards the purchase of The Upper Room. He signed a form saying that there had been no prior commitment to the purchase of the work (a condition of funding). Thanks to journalist Chris Hastings and the Freedom of Information Act, it was revealed that, eight months prior to the application, the Tate had paid a £250,000 deposit. Serota blamed it on “a failing in my head”.

    In 2005, I was quoted in The Observer: “Serota, as the director, chooses the trustees, and the trustees are then responsible for reappointing the director. The director then buys the trustees’ work.” In 2008, this was brought up in Varsity (the Cambridge Student Newspaper), where Serota defended himself with another flagrant falsehood: “I don’t have any part to play in their appointment.”

    The September 2005 Tate board minutes state: “The Director [Serota] reported that two strong candidates were to be interviewed for the position of Artist Trustee by a panel comprising himself, Paul Myners and the Independent Assessor.” In the May 2007 minutes, another trustee interview is on record with a panel of three trustees, the independent assessor and Serota.

    The Board of Trustees of the Tate Gallery Annual Accounts 2005-2006, 2006-2007, 2007-2008, and 2008-2009 all say in the section on trustees: “The key stages of the appointment are overseen by a panel, which will normally include the Director.”

    Also in Varsity, Serota said about the trustees, “Why would I want to win their support?” The simple answer to that is that he is their employee, as he explained in 1993 in the Independent on Sunday, when he hoped to be appointed for a second seven-year term as Tate Director: “Tate trustees fall in and out of love with their director and I’ll only discover whether they have fallen out of love with me in 1995 when they discuss my contract … The jury’s out.”

    On the Radio 4 programme, MacGregor confronted Serota about an event in October 2003 that became public the following year, namely “that Charles Saatchi offered you his entire collection … it was worth 200 million – for nothing.” Serota denied this: “I wish he had … he did have a great collection. Sadly he never did offer it to us.”

    This response is consistent with Serota’s version to the press in 2004, when he said that Saatchi’s offer was not for a gift but for a loan of work, which he (Serota) immediately rejected (none of which was mentioned to MacGregor).

    Surprisingly, Serota’s reply was immediately contradicted on the programme by former Tate trustee, Michael Craig-Martin, who admitted there had in fact been an offer of work: “Unfortunately what was offered to the Tate was not the great collection with the great things in it, most of which were already gone by that time. They had been sold by that time.”

     

    As it happens, that is incorrect. At the time of the offer in 2003, Saatchi still had in his collection iconic Brit art works, including Damien Hirst’s shark, Tracey Emin’s bed, Rachel Whiteread’s plaster cast of a room, Mark Quinn’s head made from frozen blood, Sarah Lucas’s table with two fried eggs and a kebab, Marcus Harvey’s Myra Hindley painting with children’s hand prints, Ron Mueck’s sculpture of his dead father, the Chapman’s penis-nosed mannequins and Chris Ofili’s Virgin Mary painting with elephant dung.

    Serota continued about Saatchi: “Michael [Craig-Martin] and I with Janet De Botton spent a great deal of time in the late nineties trying to persuade him to give, not his collection, but maybe ten works from his collection as a founding collection for Tate Modern. But I’m afraid he didn’t feel for one reason or another able to do that.”

    This is obviously another failing in Serota’s head. In 2004, the Evening Standard reported that in 1998, “Saatchi offered 86 works by 57 British artists – including Langlands & Bell, Turner Prize winner Martin Creed and Glenn Brown” (as well as Richard Billingham, Richard Wilson and Chantal Joffé). A Tate spokeswoman confirmed the offer of 86 works, which were rejected as “The trustees felt on this occasion the works would be better suited in a collection elsewhere.”

    Regarding The Upper Room scandal, Christopher McCall QC wrote to the press in 2005 condemning “expediency … which has an appeal to an overbearing executive”. The Times said of the Tate: “If it had been a company, the verdict would have sent shareholders into a panic.” No doubt if it had been a government, resignations or sackings would have followed the public outcry. Surely we have the right to expect the same standards across the board in public life, including the arts.

    Serota has not displayed a level of behaviour and integrity to remain a figurehead and step into another prime position as Chairman of the Arts Council. His record is tarnished and far from admitting to his mistakes, he has the blinkered arrogance to pretend they never happened.

    We need leaders who do not have recurrent failings in their head.

    Charles Thomson
    The Jackdaw

  • Dick French: On The Town – September 2017

    I’ve just been to see an exhibition by an artist whose name for the moment escapes me. He is having an exhibition of his furniture-friendly Pop-Art style abstractions. They’re copies of book covers – title above, abstraction below. A few years ago there was someone, perhaps it was the same bloke, doing large pictures of penguin book covers. Scrape that barrel.

    The only unusual aspect is that the hard-edge compositional passages are superimposed on sloppy bits that he lets dribble at the lower edge. It’s a formula he could pursue for the rest of his life.

    Some would say “’Twas ever thus!” And thus ’twas, I suppose. But the art world has never been such a joke as it is at present. And it behoves us all to treat it accordingly. You can go along and have a laugh at White Cube Gallery in Mason’s Yard.

    “Sir!”, as Dr Johnson didn’t say, “The man who is tired of the 24 bus route is tired of life. From the bosky glades of Hampstead Heath it glides gently through Camden Town and down to the West End. At the bottom of Gower Street you can turn left for the British Museum or right to Bradley’s Spanish Bar and Soho. Further on past the guitar shops of Denmark Street, now destined for demolition by the megalomaniac town and railway planners. The 12 Bar Club is already closed down and before that went the wonderful Black Gardenia at the top of Dean Street – all victims of Crossrail. Stay on to Leicester Square and turn left for the Salisbury or a bit further for Trafalgar Square and the National Gallery. Thence to Whitehall where I often alight at the Cock and Bottle for a morning draught. Thus refreshed I might continue on foot along Millbank to the Tate Gallery.

    The other night I deviated from my usual habits and took a bus up to Islington to see the new exhibition by George Rowlett, who has been painting in Italy for a while, taking in the temples at Paestum along with a few land and seacapes. While waiting for Mrs Cravat in the Island Queen I noticed a tall earthenware jar by the window. Its neck was decorated with fairy lights. It reminded me of Samuel Beckett’s great novel The Unnameable, and although some call it The Unreadable I have always found it most absorbing. In it a creature lives in a jar by a restaurant, just a stump with its head poking out. There’s some sawdust in the bottom and from time to time it gets mucked out and spread on the roses. At Christmas they string fairy lights around the neck of the jar and place a tarpaulin over its head if it snows. As the menu dangles from the neck, to read it people must lean down towards the creature’s head.

    Edward Burra was a great fan of Beckett and he thought it would be rather nice to live in a jar with just his eyes poking out. He did a number of pictures on this theme. Being so disabled it was a bit like describing his own condition, although he always managed to get around.

    An interesting feature of George Rowlett’s paintings is that they often contain fragments of the scene which inspired them. Flies, gnats, twigs, and in one of his recent pieces what looks like the tailfin of a sardine is poking out of a rape field. It’s a bit like Goya writing “Yo Lo Vi”. I saw this. I was there. Perhaps it’s just another way of trapping the moment. I always wonder about the insects etc. which must have been stuck in Van Gogh’s paintings. He always complained about them. Someone must have picked them out.

    Rowlett’s painting of the Temple of Neptune at Paestum is a dynamic piece (see illustration). A gigantic dark-haired figure seems to be bursting through the front columns (this is more noticeable in the reproduction than in the actual painting). Such things happen when  improvising so loosely and do not detract from the grandeur of the painting. My favourite piece in the show is, oddly, not included in the catalogue: Rape Field near Ripple, grey sky in May. Over a sumptuously slathered on butter and lemon rape field, a wide violet band containing flecks of viridian streaks along under a lowering sky. In the background of Lady’s Smock Lupin and Poppy Heads he seems to have slathered on a totally new colour. Pinky violet, peachy cream. Farrow and Ball would go crazy. Keep it a secret George!

    To Chichester with Dirty Harry to see the John Minton show at Pallant House. The air at Chichester is really most refreshing. You feel so close to the sea. The train takes ages and by the time we arrived my throat was as dry as a nun’s gusset. Fortunately just over the level crossing is an excellent pub. On the way back to the station the barman let us watch a stage of the Tour de France on an enormous screen.

    At Pallant House as well as the Minton show there is a small gallery of William Coldstream’s paintings. I never realised before how bad he was. The effort he puts in! All those measurements, angles and so forth to achieve such meagre results is astonishing. A kind of constipated sobriety in sharp contrast to Minton’s neo-romantic exuberance. Francis Bacon was always rather dismissive of Minton’s obsession with fellating sailors and body builders: “Why can’t he take it up the bum like everyone else so he can really enjoy it?”

    Poor old Minton, a star in the ’40s he rapidly became vieux chapeau as the neo-romantics were swamped by hard-core American influences. His early drawings and paintings were haunting and mysterious, rather like improvised Samuel Palmers. They had an intensity which is hard to sustain for more than a few years. I can think of a number of artists who have had the same problem of youthful ingenuity followed by floundering attempts to come to terms with Modernismo. And the pressure to do so is enormous.

    Minton resorted to curious stylistic habits; for instance, portraying heads as horizontal rugby balls with sharp ends – the bigger they got the worse they became.

    He did however retain the ability to paint in a straightforward manner and after his early romantic pieces his portraits are some of his best work.

    Minton was renowned for his massive mood swings and was often described as mercurial. He was a great friend and admirer of an artistic duo called ‘the two Roberts’, Colquhoun and MacBryde, who wore kilts for God’s sake. They took advantage of his wealth and generosity but looked down on him as a ‘mere’ illustrator. They were much admired in their day but are now almost forgotten. Bacon and Freud are the only artists of this period to survive the American invasion.

    Minton became so sozzled that he gave up his teaching post at the Royal College. It must be the first and only time an art school teacher has done that.

    Pictures I thought worth looking at were The Desolate Stage of 1939, The Road to Valencia of 1949 and English Landscape of 43. There’s an amusing section called ‘Exotic Fruits’ of half-naked black men picking bananas.

    News from the Grotto… The sage is confined to headquarters for the duration of the Appleby Horse Fair. Pikeys arrive from far and wide seeking ‘business opportunities’; some in the manner of Augustus John, and others with lorries towing large chrome-plated caravans. It’s best to be at home.

    Dick French
    The Jackdaw Sep/Oct 2017