Arts
The Burrell solution
John McEwen
In 1963 the annual report of the Standing Commissions on Museums and Art Galleries described the Burrell Collec- tion as the United Kingdom museum most urgently in need of a new building. The Earl of Rosse, in his preface as Chairman, did not mince his words:
'This is a national scandal. It is the most severe lapse that we have discovered in the course of our investigations. Here we have this magnificent collection which has been languishing in packing cases for the past 20 years without anyone having the backbone to do something about it . . . we feel that all concerned — by that we mean Glasgow Corporation and the Burrell Trustees — must put their heads together and get down to sorting out a solution right away.'
Well, strange to relate, they did put their heads together and did sort out a solution, and the result is that this week the Queen opens The Burrell Collection in Pollok Park, Glasgow — at £21 million and 137,241 sq ft the most expensive, extensive and important museum to have been built in these islands since those of South Ken- sington over a century ago.
The Burrell, as a building, is glassy, classy and discreet, turning what was once the Stirling Maxwell family's 'picnic field' into a corner of a New England campus. It might have been designed by a Finn, but is in fact the creation of an English architect, Barry Gasson, now 42, who, as one of a team of university tutors at Cambridge, won the open competition for the assign- ment in 1972 from a field of 242 entrants. It appears that this unknown partnership car- ried off the prize in the face of Denys Lasdun and the like because, instead of a building plonked in the middle of the meadow, they proposed one of minimal scenic disruption tucked against a wood at its west corner. Incorporation of the wood's spring bluebells, autumn bracken, mature horse chestnuts and sycamores, as a natural counterpart and backdrop to the man-made delights of the collection, being very much the point of their design. Accor- dingly, a wall of glass has been erected where the wood's fence once must have been, conferring a natural intimacy with the outside world that appropriately har- monises with the Late Gothic (that time when artists seem most spellbound by flowers and trees) heart of the collection. The building's undistinguished outside ap- pearance, like a clutter of greenhouses, its distracting use inside of ginger pine roof- beams with featured nuts and bolts, are outweighed by this successful creation of an atmosphere, a character of its own. It is both an airy and dark museum, an open and secretive one, its intimacy enforced by an attention to detail that included a search for the quarry of old Hornby Castle in Yorkshire, so that the sandstone parts of the building might identically match the Castle's mediaeval gateways, now incor- porated as the entrance arch and the portal to the hall or 'courtyard' beyond.
Pollok Park is to Glasgow what Ken- wood is to London, Pollok House being an equivalent of the Iveagh Bequest with now (a ten-minute stroll away between fields of Highland cattle) the Burrell Collection as the (mini) V & A of the North. The Bur- rell's major point of excellence is its variety, happily one which, nevertheless, does not include the Spanish 17th-century pictures or 18th-century decorative arts to be seen at Pollok House. Its chief strength is its holding of late mediaeval art from Nor- thern Europe. This includes arches and win- dows (built into the walls by Gasson), sculpture, ivories and enamels, needlework, stained glass and tapestries. Only the V & A here can better this, and two aspects — the stained glass and tapestries (150 of them) — rank among the best two or three collective examples in the world.
But if Late Gothic pieces form the crown- ing glory of the collection, they only add up to a portion of its 8,000 whole, which in- cludes Chinese ceramics and bronzes of a quality surpassed by only three or four other British collections; Persian, Indian and Caucasian carpets and rugs on a par with only the V & A in Britain; a French and Dutch 19th-century picture collection of major museum status (particularly strong in Degas); an Ancient Civilisation collection of a standard previously unknown in Scotland; as well as a fine early Rembrandt self-portrait, two Memlings, a Cranach, a Chardin etc; Rodin bronzes; Phil May's sketchbook; English 17th- and 18th-century silver; Dutch glass; and the Warwick Vase (a £250,000 post-Burrell ad- dition). Strolling round (only 40 per cent is viewable at any one time) it was the tapestries, the small stained-glass pieces, the Chinese porcelain and Manet's 'Ham', which most caught this browser's eye.
But who was Burrell? The question in- evitably comes; and indeed there is nothing much to be made of him. He was a speculative shipbuilder — building in slumps and selling in booms — who made his ultimate packet out of the first world war and devoted his time thereafter to ac- quiring objects in much the same way as he had previously done ships. If shipbuilding on the Clyde is dead, then the Burrell Col- lection is its memorial. As a man he sounds something of a Getty, saving pennies on journeys, living the last years of his life (he died in 1958 aged 96) in a state of frugality bordering on destitution, driving the hardest bargains to the end. Nevertheless, between 1911 and 1957 his outlay on new acquisitions averaged £20,000 p.a. This may seem a lot, but he was in competition with the likes of William Randolph Hearst and had to buy with flair and cunning — one of his more pleasing coups being the purchase at bargain prices of several items that had once belonged to Hearst. Like these Americans, Burrell is of interest large- ly because of his collecting, as much in life as in death. It is fitting therefore that he should be commemorated by an American- style museum and that, instead of a por- trait, he is memorialised inside it by reconstructions of three gauntly mediaevalised rooms from his now derelict castle in Berwickshire.
The Burrell Collection (published by Col- lins in association with Glasgow Museums and Art Galleries, and costing only £4.95 thanks to the generosity of the Clydesdale Bank), introduced by John Julius Norwich with his usual florabundance and with useful essays by Dr Richard Marks, the Keeper, and his team, acts as a useful guide. The Burrell has a restaurant, children's 'schoolroom', library, lecture theatre etc, all neatly accommodated. It is air- conditioned, admission free, open (10-5, Sundays 2-5) every day except Christmas Day and New Year's Day, and lies three miles from the centre of Glasgow.
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