AND ANOTHER THING
There's a lot to be said for art galleries, and a lot to be said against them
PAUL JOHNSON
England no longer, alas, has a journal of record, and anyone who wants to see what such an institution should be like could do worse than read the Art Newspaper, a month- ly of Italian origin whose international edi- tion here is edited by Anna Somers Cocks. It covers the world of art collecting, connois- seurship and museums fully and objectively, and is beautifully printed in a traditional text format which still finds a place for needful illustrations. The paper has been dealing at length with the crisis at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, one of the world's greatest public collections, where the director has sacked two senior curators and 16 other staff in order to drive through a 'strategic plan' to make the museum more popular. The direc- tor, Malcolm Rogers, is reckoned an out- standing success, at least statistically. He has extended the admission hours, reopened the main doors (earlier closed to save money), achieved record annual attendances of 1.7 million, raised the budget 50 per cent to more than $100 million and the endowment from $200 million to $350 million, pushed membership over the 100,000 mark, and embarked on a vast new expansion plan, the buildings to be designed by — wait for it — Norman Foster. However, I have heard the same sort of figures quoted about Nicholas Serota, boss of the Tate empire. But, as I cannot make even a brief visit to the Tate without emerging shaken and disgusted, I have to assume that such 'success stories' are merely outstanding examples of Kingsley Asnis's maxim, 'more will mean worse'. I should add that the last time I visited the Boston Fine Arts I found that many fine paintings had been cellared to make way for endless displays of Monet's wallpaper. When I complained I was told, 'The people like Monet.'
I suspect that the public museum, now about two centuries old (there are some ear- lier examples), is an institution which has had its day. Lumping together in huge, echo- ing, crowded rooms hundreds of works of art created for a variety of quite different places, functions and admirers is, when you think of it calmly, an odd thing to do. Its purpose is Bonapartist, overwhelming display to under- line power. Bonaparte looted Europe to cen- tralise its art treasures in Paris and confirm the city's rank as capital of world civilisation. In the end the civilised world, represented by the Duke of Wellington and Canova, forced the French to disgorge, but then promptly imitated the Bonapartist model everywhere. National art collections are still engined by the crudest kind of chauvinism (as municipal ones are by surly, parish-pump pride), as well as by money snobbery — the new rich morally launder their profits. by donations, thus buying their tickets to polite society.
Yes: but how else are the poor and not- so-poor to enjoy great art? I reply that to visit a collection crowded with first-class works of art produces a horrible form of aesthetic indigestion. I find that I cannot really enjoy more than half a dozen at a time. Often I pop into the National Gallery just to examine one object. I welcome the special exhibitions, such as the Van Dyck at the Royal Academy, because they gouge rare works out of grudging private collec- tions, teach one things and, most of all, because they nowadays produce fine works of scholarship in the form of catalogues. A one-man show is a legitimate form of dis- play (I hold them myself from time to time), but it is also a grotesque distortion of the natural relationship between the artist and the connoisseur. The last big Reynolds show at the RA finally killed my respect for that uneven painter, so unfit to fill huge rooms. The Rembrandt assembly of self- portraits has, for me at any rate, under- mined his moral authority by revealing the magnitude of his self-obsession.
There is no doubt, of course, that close contact with a major work of art is a unique source of knowledge. But few enjoy it in practice. The most fortunate are the restor- ers, who live with great paintings and open them up, like a surgeon, for weeks at a time; which helps to explain why they tend to know more about them than any other cat- egory, including specialist art historians. Dealers come next, then gallery people. All these types can get close to works of art, take them out of their frames, look at their backs and bottoms, shine powerful lights on them, take X-rays, treat them with cavalier familiarity, touching, stroking, caressing. In such ways I have learned a lot about paint- ings and drawings I own myself.
But this kind of knowledge is denied to those who visit public galleries. In the old days, owners of private collections could be generous. When Constable stayed with Sir George Beaumont, he was allowed to lug the prize Claude and Rubens's magnificent 'Château de Steen' — both now among the greatest treasures of the National Gallery, of which Beaumont was a founder — into his bedroom, so that he could study them first thing in the morning. I can't see any owner permitting that nowadays, and in public collections it is becoming increasing- ly difficult to look closely at the objects on display. The last time I was in the New York Frick, I was warned by a guard that I was getting too close to the pictures, though I was by no means within touching distance. A mass of rules now governs the lighting of valuable works, with the net result that wattage is being lowered all the time. Exhibitions of old master drawings and watercolours have to be scrutinised in semi-darkness, and recently I came to the conclusion that it was hardly worth the effort of going to see them. Most good gal- leries are now far too crowded, with 'lectur- ers' bawling away to gawping noodles, regi- ments of resentful schoolchildren scuffling with each other while exasperated teachers push them into line, and guards looking for opportunities to exert brief authority. It all destroys the concentration. At big, hyped- up shows the crush is so great that you have to wriggle your way towards the more pop- ular exhibits, and are shoved and buffeted in turn, as at a Brueghel kermis. Why is it that art attracts so many wide, overweight women, and odoriferous, armpitty men?
That is why I continue to build up my col- lection of art books. The quality of colour reproductions is rising all the time and is sometimes better than the originals, which have been ruined by a combination of exces- sive cleaning and bad lighting, And by poring over different colour photos of the same painting you can correct distortions. I can now compare, inch by inch, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel before and after its drastic restoration — a real eye-opener. The chance to make minute inspections of complicated paintings is extremely valuable, especially if you can at the same time check them with related works, or follow a sudden whim and make a connection of your own. You can look at works which are not on display and never will be if a particular curator has his way. You have all the reference books imme- diately to hand and can summon up the guidance of a particular expert at a second's notice. Thus ensconced in my art library, I pass fruitful hours away from the dictator- ship of fashion, the tyranny of the Serotas, and the hassle of the art mob, quietly learn- ing in calm and solitude. Try it.
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