18 NOVEMBER 2000, Page 75

`Art is

messy .

So why get rid of a purpose-built art school? Andrew Lambirth investigates Suffolk is, of course, Constable country. He, however, didn't have to go to art school there; he went to the Royal Acade- my Schools in London. For those who do study art today in Suffolk — and who knows what young Constables may yet rise from the valley of the Stour — a clarion call has just been sounded.

On 26 October, the internationally renowned artist Maggi Hambling — one of Suffolk's most famous daughters — after days of soul-searching, felt compelled to decline an honorary degree from Suffolk College, which is part of the University of East Anglia. Her reason for so doing was not bohemian bloody-mindedness but con- cern for the future of Ipswich Art School, where she herself studied in the early 1960s. This courageous gesture was made in front of almost 1,000 guests at Suffolk College's annual graduation ceremony, in the presence of the highest officials of the University, and it was greeted with a roar of support from the audience.

Hambling's protest is against the closure of the purpose-built art school in Ipswich High Street, and the relegation of the art department to two carpeted rooms else- where which look suspiciously like offices. The original art school building is now apparently on the market, and the students are expected to study and learn the great arts of painting and sculpture in a couple of constraining and uncongenial rooms. For Hambling, and for all who care about the future of art education in Britain, this is an outrage.

`Art is messy, art is experimental, art is pushing the boundaries,' she said in a sub- sequent interview published in the East Anglian Daily Times. 'I have to say, as I looked around these two rooms, I was deeply shocked. There was even carpet on the floor. Carpet! Can you believe that? I expected to see plaster splattered every- where; paint splashed about. But it was so neat, so pristine. You can't create art in there.'

Hambling attributes much of her own success as an artist to the years she spent at the beginning of her career at Ipswich. 'I am convinced that my Oscar Wilde statue, the public work that was unveiled at St Martin-in-the-Fields, opposite Charing Cross, last year, started its life inside me at Ipswich Art School. The same goes for my portraits that hang in the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate. Their origins, the techniques I used to paint them, all stem from my time at Ipswich Art School.' And, as she said in her speech of refusal, the art school was 'not only made for the making of art, it was a beacon of light in the dark- ening world of Ipswich culture'.

The crisis of conscience which led Ham- bling to reject the honorary Doctorate of Letters (LittD) was no easy passage of arms. Suffolk is important to her (she spends as much time as she can there, working in a studio on the edge of a stretch of water-meadows), and she felt honoured when first offered this accolade. She still has family in the county and her father Harry was a genuinely original painter of the Suffolk scene. She would also like one day, if the art school is reinstated, to be able to accept the degree, should it still be on offer. As she says quite frankly, 'Suffolk remains my sanity in the heady London art world.'

As Hambling pointed out in her speech, art schools were given a hard time in the 1980s because 'a certain prime minister, whose name escapes me at the moment but whom I remember refusing to paint, tried her best to exterminate fine art in art schools. She thought only commercial art was a good idea, little realising that com- mercial art for the most part follows and copies the original output of fine artists.'

Art schools up and down the country are still very much in danger. There is the ever- present threat of cuts in funding and resources, but to relinquish a purpose-built art school because it (theoretically) costs too much to run, when there are always students who need it, is nothing short of criminal. Artists are essential to the good health of our society. As Ezra Pound pre- sciently remarked, 'Artists are the anten- nae of the race.' The liberal education that art schools can offer is more than useful to a broad cross-section of society. The vital force must be carried on. Of that I am con- vinced.

When Craigie Aitchison RA, one of Britain's premier artists, who himself stud- ied at the Slade School of Art, heard of the stand Maggi Hambling had made, he sim- ply said, 'She's right, isn't she?' Suffolk College pay heed: Hambling has already contributed to a reopening of the Art School. I, for one, will be happy to join her.