ARTS
Closed for business
Desmond Shawe-Taylor on running a public gallery when all its pictures are gone here does the priest go when the church is chiuso per restauro? What do curators do when their gallery is closed for refurbishment? As the Lottery, the Venice in Peril of British culture, begins its benign building boom more and more people must be asking these questions. Thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund and many more supporters beside, Dulwich Picture Gallery is receiving its first refurbishment since it was reopened after the war having caught a glancing blow from a doodlebug. The Gallery has therefore had to close from January of this year until May 2000. So what does a public gallery do when the public can't get in?
Of course we can all keep ourselves busy: there were plenty of things which never did depend upon the doors being open and plenty of things which need to be planned for when they open again. In many ways there is more to do, especially to do with the building work. Discreetly inserting the hardware of modern conservation technol- ogy — light control, air-conditioning and security — into the fabric of a Regency building is rather like fitting a De Dion Bouton with air-bags and heated rear wind- screen. Of course it is possible but it is more of a challenge than it seems on paper. However, there are rewards as well as risks in 'opening up' an old building: there is the chance to see the roof timbers in exactly the configuration recorded in the work-in-progress drawings of Soane's work- shop; to find the exact red of the original Gallery from paint scrapes; to uncover the original form of the arches used by Soane of the east façade of his Gallery and cov- ered by later building.
The Gallery's education department is justly celebrated for having transformed the way we think about the way children think about Old Master painting. The new building will create education spaces for the first time, up until now it has been in effect a school without class- rooms — or at least with one open-plan and over-decorated classroom. Closure has hardly dented education activity as laminated reproductions of Gainsborough and Watteau are taken on the road, into hospitals, hospices, community centres, drug rehabilitation clinics and prisons.
What of the real paintings? Against all the odds they are having a miraculous year, with more people enjoying them than ever before. Indeed the statistics are so remarkable that they are almost embarrassing: if the rest of the closed period continues on track half a mil- lion people will have seen the paintings, more than usually visit the Gallery in a decade. We have become a cricket club without a ground, sending squads around the world. The Test side is touring Japan; the 'A' team has toured Spain; both will unite to form a super-squad for exhibitions in the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, and at the J.B. Speed Museum in Louisville, Kentucky.
Some youth teams are out there: a small group of Dutch landscapes is on show at the Holburne Museum in Bath; individual works have been or are on loan in various places throughout the world including the Van Dyck exhibition just opened at the Royal Academy. From 15 September a superb group of works will be on show at the headquarters of the National Westmin- ster Bank at Lothbury in the City of Lon- don. Altogether there has been no similar disruption to our collection since they went down a slate mine in Wales in 1939. Come The Nurture of Jupiter' by Nicolas Poussin, now in Kumamoto, Japan to think of it, why weren't they touring America earning money for the war effort?
There is a thriving global economy in the enjoyment (as opposed to the purchase) of works of art. The demand has broken down some of the conventional barriers affecting the way museums work, some would say the new deregulated economy operates on the margins of respectability. This is an oppor- tunity for institutions with great paintings but little money to work with institutions reciprocally endowed. But when to lend and when to rent? The unwritten principle is that paintings must be lent gratis to scholar- ly exhibitions, however many you may be generous enough to provide. Charging a hire fee is only acceptable if a collection is lent en masse. As a very approximate rule of thumb, the going rate appears to be an annual rental fee of between half and one per cent of the total value of the paintings. With masterpieces it mounts up. Museums are not the only players, indeed the most popular venues in our tours so far have been the headquarters of the Banco Bilbao Vizcaya in Madrid (over 60,000 visi- tors in six weeks) and two Japanese depart- ment stores (both with over 30,000 in five weeks). Shop designers say that you should always display something of obvious cost and quality even if you have no expectation of selling it, just in order to raise the tone; a Canaletto is one way of doing this. The National Westminster is the first English firm to use their commercial space in this way and paintings from the Dulwich collec- tion is their first Old Master exhibition, though they have already made a huge suc- cess of their contemporary art programme at their Lothbury Gallery. Altogether there is a lot of interest in Old Masters nowadays. There is the demand to attract corpo- rate sponsors and bring in the paying crowds so as to cover the astronomic costs involved in mounting these exhibitions and leave something over for us. You might expect the Spanish to wish temporarily to repatriate Murillo's 'Flower Girl', or the Americans to flock to an Old Master collec- tion which has served as model for so many of their own, but the Japanese? Their appreciation of European art is as impressive as standard attempts to explain it are absurd. Apparently the Japanese only like big names• Admittedly we sent some Rembrandts and Poussins, but if Carlo Dolci, Herman Saftleven and Philips Wouwerman are household names in Japan then I really am impressed. I have even heard Japanese crowds accused of 'trooping reverently' past Western paintings, thereby betraying their pitiful lack of that British university educa- tion which would have taught them so many clever ways of sneering at them. Japanese society has high cultural standards, a thought which occurred to me on Tokyo station in the Mozart Cafe -- Viennese cakes, his music, fin-de-siecle decor when trying to imagine an equivalent at Waterloo. It is also true that painting trav- els well: the stranger the culture the more inducement there is to work at the visual language, which is the right place to start. Of course this language is not common but It is obviously communicable. The Japanese look for quality in painting; we won't admit that it exists. If we do believe that one painting is better than another, the idea is so embarrassing to us that we have found no means of discussing how it might be recognised. There might seem little to look forward to when we reopen — back to British indif- ference and south London obscurity. At least we will have the paintings back for ourselves: we will move back to the style to which we have become accustomed when wafting through one of the world's most beautiful galleries counts as work. If we have done something while we were closed, perhaps all those priests arc on strenuous missionary duty?
Desmond Shawe-Taylor is the director of Dulwich Picture Gallery
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