Art
The Municipal Scene By HUGH GRAHAM The title alone is a give-away. Picasso's name presumably figures only for its public appeal; the youngest exhibitor is in fact Paul Jenkins (aged thirty), whose painting Phenomena Sound- ing Zone most emphatically belongs to the post- Picasso era of modern art. Then Primitives can only have been chosen because they alliterate so appealingly with Picasso. It is many years since any serious art-histo-ian would think of lumping together all the painters represented in Room 1 as 'primitives.' That term, applied to painting, now means the untutored and na7f, e.11• Bombois, Vivin, Grandma Moses. The two small panels by Simone Martini with which the exhibition opens are among the most sophisti- cated pictures on view. What the title might just conceivably mean is that the exhibition covers the entire evolution of European painting from the fourteenth century to the present day. But Of course it doesn't. Even if sufficient representa- tive examples were available, Burlington House Would not be large enough to hold them.
The subtitle is scarcely more appropriate: 'An exhibition from municipal and University Col- lections in Great Britain.' University Collections' means above all Oxford and Cambridge, yet Oxford has contributed only two pictures, neither of them particularly important, and Cambridge none at all. 'Municipal' may be terminologically exact: the galleries of Cardiff and Edinburgh, Which have lent nothing, are in fact national and not municipal. But if, as Sir Charles Wheeler writes in his preface to the catalogue, 'the scope of the exhibition is to show the high quality of What the public galleries outside London can offer,' then their omission is disastrously mis- leading, It is quite impossible to gauge the wealth of British galleries outside London without taking Cardiff and Edinburgh into account.
Yet there is one serious lesson to be learned from this delightful random anthology, and the name Picasso is really the key to it. From all the collections at their disposal, the organisers have succeeded in finding only one oil, The Flower Seller, dated 1901, from Glasgow, a watercolour of around 1903 and a drawing of 1922, both from Manchester. All three were acquired by gift or bequest. Only one gallery, Glasgow, contributes a truly serious group of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French paint- ings; here too they were given or bequeathed by private collectors. With pathetically few excep- tions, such as Derain's Barges on the Thames acquired by the City of Leeds in 1937, the pur- chases made by British galleries seem to have been, until quite recently, mean, timid and pro- vincial. Not only Impressionist and post- Impressionist painting, but Mannerist and Baroque, were neglected during all those years when they were sufficiently cheap for British galleries to compete with American in their acquisition.
Today, the situation is vastly improved. Where little money is available, purchases are enter- prising (e.g the Lanyon, Butler and Kokoschka all bought by the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery at Bedford since 1958, the Peasant Family by Amorosi recently bought by Durham University, the Andrea di Bartollo predella panel and the German expressionist paintings bought for Leicester), and where funds are comparatively plentiful, purchases are often spectacular: for example Rubens's majestic Holy Family, ac- quired for Liverpool in 1960, Van Eyck's Ecce Homo, bought for the Barber Institute in Bir- mingham in 1954, Gainsborough's full-length portrait of Lord Vernon, bought for Southamp- ton in 1957. Even so, the majority of first-class acquisitions turn out to have been made either by gift or bequest from private individuals, by subscription from local industry or assistance from such bodies as the National Art Collections Fund, the Gulbenkian Foundation and the Con- temporary Art Society, or, in the case of the Courbet and Seurat recently bought by Liverpool and the Degas bought by Birmingham, by taking advantage of generous terms offered by the vendor. In fact, it is only by a combination of hard work and good fortune that our provincial museum directors manage to keep their museums alive.
The general quality of this exhibition is re- markably high. Unless you read the catalogue, with its information as to how and when the items were acquired, you might assume that all is well with our provincial museums. What it really proves, however, is that their survival as living organisms is highly precarious. At present, with a little outside help, they can just scrape by. But while works of art continue to rocket in value and the private benefactor becomes rarer and rarer, the whole business of financing them must be drastically and generously re- organised. Otherwise, however able the men who run them, our provincial museums will return to their one-time torpor.
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