Enterprise patience and persistence
John Spurting visits the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, now in its 25th year
The argument that history is not made by single individuals is easily disproved by the history of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. In the 1970s Bretton Hall College, near Wakefield, occupying the buildings and part of the landscaped grounds of the 18th-century Bretton Hall estate, was an institution devoted to art education. Leading one of its postgraduate courses was a young man called Peter Murray, who was 'always interested in alternative spaces for the arts' and enthused by the various openair sculpture projects at museums in Belgium, Holland, Japan and the USA, which had themselves been influenced by the success of open-air exhibitions in Britain, beginning with Battersea Park in 1948. Murray suggested to the Principal of Bretton Hall College that something of the sort might be tried there. Yorkshire was, after all, the birthplace of Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth (she was born and brought up in Wakefield) and therefore, in a sense, the birthplace of modern British sculpture. 'Many of us,' Hepworth wrote in 1966 to the editor of the Yorkshire Post, 'are working very hard to try to establish a really good Sculpture Park in England' and she wrote again in the same vein to the paper's art critic in 1975, just before her death. Murray, meanwhile, was thinking of the way children's interest in living nature was awakened by nature trails. Might they not respond to sculpture in the same way? So the Yorkshire Sculpture Park was born in 1977, with a staff of one: 'me and a duster', as Murray puts it, though there was a tractor involved, too.
Many of us have good ideas. Very few have the enterprise, patience and persistence to carry them through into reality. 'Initially,' says Murray tactfully, 'we tried to get the politics right.' By which he means not party politics, but the more subtle politics of getting the right people on side — the cherubim and seraphim of the worlds of art, education and local government — as trustees, allies, well-wishers, fundraisers. The result, 25 years on, is an establishment with a staff of 80, an international reputation for its record of important exhibitions, and 200,000 visitors a year. Indeed, islanded by this phenomenon — the Sculpture Park has recently acquired much of the original 18th-century estate in addition to the 200 acres it started with — the college itself, now an outstation of Leeds University called University College Bretton Hall, begins to look like a country within a country; Andorra, say, or San Marino.
Last week the Sculpture Park celebrated the opening of its new visitors' centre, designed by the architects Fielden Clegg Bradley. Set among trees near the top of a south-facing ridge, the Centre's wedgeshaped restaurant looks down over the rough ground of the Old Deer Park, dotted with oak trees, sheep and Henry Moores, and across the opposite ridge to Barnsley on the horizon. There are three small indoor galleries, a lecture theatre, coffee bar and various other facilities opening off a long central corridor, which leads past tall windows — giving an unexpected view, as if one were in an aquarium, straight into the surrounding woodland — to a terrace above the formal garden of the original estate. At the other end of the corridor, the entrance to the visitors' centre is paved with the 'Walk of Art', a pardonable pun for the sculptor Gordon Young's clever way of raising money for the Sculpture Park: a metal pathway stencilled with the name of anyone prepared to stump up £45.
There are further developments to come. This year the Arts Council will move its sculpture collection into the buildings at the top of the newly acquired area of land on the opposite slope, and the large gallery there will reopen next year. After that, there are plans to build an underground gallery linked to the visitors' centre and for the small oblong chapel in the Old Deer Park to be brought into use.
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park has always concentrated more on temporary exhibitions and the occasional commission than acquisitions. It does, however, own some works, while others are on long loan. Hepworth's group of sculptures, 'The Family of Man', occupies a slope above the college buildings, while two particularly fine architectural pieces by Anthony Caro, the large 'Cathedral City' and the enormous 'Promenade' are beside the lake at the bottom of the hill. The current outdoor exhibitions are of bronze male figures by Elisabeth Frink and granite carvings by Ronald Rae. Rae's sculptures, mostly of animals and carved entirely by hand, without the aid of power tools, have been on show until recently in London's Regent's Park. Inspired partly by prehistoric cave-paintings — 'the wellspring of all art and I am part of that unbroken chain. — Rae sometimes presses too hard for pathos or charm and finishes just short of sentimentality, but at his best he is both witty and monumental and in any event a most refreshing individualist and craftsman in an international art world increasingly short of both.
Stefan Gee's small retrospective inside the Pavilion Gallery is almost redeemed by one work, a computer animation of a nuclear submarine floating through an underwater blue twilight towards and away from the viewer. But the rest of the show is so absurdly unbalanced between the minimalism of its exhibits and the pretentiousness of their labels that one wonders, as so often with exhibitions of this sort, whether the joke is on him or us. Here is one label: 'Lure, 1991, brass (falconry bells). Falconry bells made from brass taken from a decommissioned Soviet submarine.' And another: 'Gold Button, 1996, 22 ct. gold. Cast of a tunic button given to the artist by a fireman stationed at Chernobyl.' The labels would perhaps be better without the exhibits or vice versa.
But it takes all sorts to fill a space as grand and open-ended as Peter Murray's idea turned 550 acres, and perhaps what draws attention to the absurd bombast of one particular exhibition is the complete absence of it in the way the Yorkshire Sculpture Park has been created and developed.
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