Royal Academy in jeopardy
John McEwen
n his introduction to the booklet adver- tising the Royal Academy Trust Appeal, Sir Hugh Casson writes that even more remarkable perhaps than the Academy's `invention has been its survival, riding for more than 200 years the switchback of taste and criticism, strong in its history, tradi- tions and its powers to stimulate and nourish the living arts. Today its reputation stands high all over the world.' Certainly it is impossible to imagine a sensible person in England who would welcome its disestab- lishment, and yet if the Appeal fails to raise £6 million within the next two or three years that is the dismal likelihood. The launch in April and its wake have so far realised the promise of £2.3 million; now the grind is on for the remaining £4 million.
The Academy has many virtues — it could not be more central; it has the best ex- hibition rooms in London; it houses one of our only three post-graduate art schools; it
has a fine library of art books; and so on but its greatest virtue is that it stands for the importance of art and artists. It is, and 1 long been, as Sir Hugh also writes, 'an !II' stitution dedicated solely to the promotion of the Fine Arts and guided, not bY! bureaucracy but by practising artists'. self-governing aspect of the AcademY llasg certain masculine and 18th-century swaggd to it, quite at odds with the feminine an therapeutic attitudes to art most cornri°11 advocated in England today. The statue % Sir Joshua in the forecourt of Burling° House proclaims the same, as does the on‘d ble commemoration of the artistic great all good on the building's façade. Sir Josholla is posed as a fighter, his brush a sword, e palette a shield, defying the enemy or, 01°1, pedantically, defying his invisible sitter t" withhold any secret from the all-seeing at tistic eye. The great and conscious achieve- 0lent of Reynolds was to raise the status of history artist in England; and the 200-year "istory and presence of the Academy (only centred on Burlington House, of course, for the last 100 years) is both the assertion and symbol of that status. 4 In England, where the puritanical ten- ncY is always to view art as a luxury and the conservative one to regard it as a subject ,..nr Profession fit only for women or wets or uoth, such visible status is particularly im- Ponant. Art as the grandest part of human ncleavour, artists as men of intellectual ac- ' ti°n, these are the principles embodied in the existence of the Academy. Shorn of the hA,„cadenlY, art in this country would largely „„'" a matter, of uninspiring expedients: edichle from the Art Council, education rorn the museums and stockbroking from the dealers. If the Academy embodies nobility, it also soneceeds, perhaps understandably, in con- ehlieting its business with a rare amount of -"artn. Despite the many and increasingly cost-effective uses to which the building has heen Put, it still retains the privacy and (naelY atmosphere of a club or house. The teak and marble of the Edwardian lava- oLies still seem to rise above the graffiti to whips
they are now constantly subjected. Ile back stairs are hung with the (often Phia , Y precocious) diploma works of
‘s, graduates, many of them (Etty, re illais, Brangwyn) subsequently of great nOwn as artists. Some of the most famous Academicians (Turner, Constable, the nence) may not have actually walked li Passages and rooms of Burlington pDr°11se, but as members of the club their resence is hardly less tangible. Constable's Leaping Horse' has pride of place in the r'crence room. One or two quiet corners a4,still to be found, very decidedly there is ithe feeling that the 100-odd staff are hor'ing for the privilege and not the pay — nuLne out by the evidence of an average an- ', Wage of £4,500. evertheless even with the goodwill of a ve"t-sacrificial staff, the drive and flair of a re? Public President, the taking over of the aildtattrant (now run at a handsome profit still I offering excellent value), the graktatic expansion of the exhibition pro- (from an average of four to twelve tner,,'n„ten years), the successful employ- of °I exhibition sponsors, the formation (30 the Friends of the Royal Academy intr,?°°, at an annual fee of £15.50 each), the on ii,"uction of a 20 per cent commission tnenr"intner Exhibition sales, the establish- °f fees for the 70 students of the off ools, and assorted enterprises both one- coniacind,_ long term, the best the Academy cc," .hope for in a bumper year was to dit.vr its costs. With average weekly expen- of u_re now running at £16,000 and £250,000 tiofepairs no longer deferable, drastic ac- was" had to be taken. Last time such a crisis Len rnet by selling one of the treasures, the nand°
Cartoon. A number of treasures
.1'_11 re notably the Michelangelo undo (now on permanent display) — but to buy time at such cost to the singularity of the Academy was quite rightly discounted as a solution. Having temporarily cleared the overdraft through revenue from the Great Japan exhibition and limited sales of investments, the Trust launched the Ap- peal. Its objectives are: to overcome the im- mediate cash crisis; to enable essential items of capital expenditure to be undertaken; to constitute an endowment for the future.
A private enterprise in which three people organise an exhibition programme that at- tracts an annual attendance of a million, in which one person, doubling her duties as the press officer, constitutes an efficient education department, obviously appeals to Mrs Thatcher. A government donation of £250,000 for repairs was immediately forth- coming and this week the Prime Minister gave a dinner for likely contributors at Downing Street. The price of an expensive masterpiece is all that is required to make the Academy safe and self-sufficient for the foreseeable future. It is a paltry sum to ask for the life of one of our greatest institu- tions. Anyone who may still doubt the
Academy's vitality need only check out the exhibitions currently on offer, 17th-century Neapolitan painting (till 12 December, reviewed 9 October) and Treasures of An- cient Nigeria (till 23 January 1983). Both bring to light relatively under-exposed sub- jects. The Nigerian exhibition, particularly, disturbs preconceptions: the most glaring being that Africa has no history, the second that what cultural refinement it has was stimulated by outside influences, the third that its indigenous art is all to do with savagery. Every one of these suppositions is confounded by the evidence on show at
Burlington House.
The most spontaneous and observant work on view (apart from some utensils and ornaments the 'treasures' consist entirely of sculpture) are some terracotta figures dating from the recently (1943) discovered Nok culture, 500 BC —200 AD. Its sophis- tication outdoes anything our islands have to offer from the comparable period. The middle sections of the excellently designed display are predominantly devoted to the ultimate delicacies in bronze and terracotta of Ife culture and the more famous, but scarcely more beautiful, bronzes of Benin. There is no evidence that any of these masterpieces owes its origin to outside influence. Finally, there is a room of assorted, and in some cases extraordinary, items from various cultures that have as yet been little researched. This again makes the point of how relatively unexplored the sub- ject still remains, its entire classification having taken place largely within the last 40 years. Little of the primitivism that has had such an enormous influence on 20th- century European art is here. On the con- trary, the striated 12th-15th century Ife heads, the late-16th-century Benin reliefs of scenes both detailed and complicated, the magnificent pair of mid-16th-century stand- ing leopards, would have graced any palace
in Europe.
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