Scottish dynamism
Felicity Owen
It takes dynamic leadership and a favourable political climate to transform a small, long-established art institution into an international force, yet this has been accomplished by Sir Timothy Clifford and his able team at the National Gallery of Scotland. The £30 million Playfair Project, with the Weston Link between the neo-classical temples on the Mound, meant that the Royal Scottish Academy building could be incorporated, adding world-class exhibition space and educational facilities. This has to be the directorgeneral’s crowning achievement; he retires early in 2006 after some 20 years at the helm, leaving the two partner galleries to continue their development. Meanwhile, Dr Gordon Rintoul at the National Museums of Scotland has an ambitious plan to modernise the much-loved Royal Museum, which adjoins the new Museum of Scotland, their combined collections resembling those of a mini V & A with a high natural-history content.
As heirs to the Scottish Enlightenment, the people of Edinburgh enjoy their ele gant small capital unspoilt by wars or mass tourism. With a population of under 500,000 to support their heritage, they rely on cultural excellence to attract outside visitors, the Edinburgh Festival period being critical. Since coming into office in 1999, the Scottish Executive has shown its appreciation with capital grants, including £7.7 million for the freehold of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and £2.5 million to add to the £11.6 million raised to retain Titian’s ‘Venus Anadyomene’, previously on loan with other masterpieces from the Sutherland Collection.
The National Galleries will share an acquisition grant of an annual £1.2 million, ring-fenced, for the next three years, and, while Clifford is no doubt looking forward to playing his final winning card, this highlights the SNGMA’s dilemma over the exorbitant cost and size of modern works. It is highly rated by collectors, and bequests and clever buying have won it recognition for Dada and Surrealist art shown in the Dean Gallery, while the dealer Anthony d’Offay has recently lent selections from his exceptional collection of late 20th-century art. The Scottish Executive has no power to provide the tax breaks that encourage philanthropic giving, but ideally this collection, which includes works by Jasper Johns, Gerhard Richter, Ed Reschka and Andy Warhol, poorly represented in Tate Modern, would be located in a new building which will give this gallery international status. Meanwhile, outside and unmissable is landscape sculptor Charles Jencks’s rhythmic ‘Landform’, costing £380,000, which won the Gallery the £100,000 Gulbenkian Museum Prize for 2004.
Scottish art, historic and modern, is well represented in all three National Galleries and there is a welcome £14 million plan, subject to a Heritage Lottery Fund grant, to open up the top-lit rooms of the handsome Scottish National Portrait Gallery and restore the interior to its Victorian glory.
There is good news, too, from the Museums of Scotland, where the Festival exhibition will be centred on ‘Nicholas and Alexandra’ at the personal behest of President Putin. Blank walls at the entrance to the new museum building, with its pseudo-baronial tower, encourage people to gravitate to the Royal Museum, drawn by a buzz from families having tea by the fishpond in this delightful Crystal Palace-like structure. Under a seven-year £45.6 million project dependent on £18 million from the HLF, themed galleries and displays will be updated. The first, with a £600,000 ReDiscover grant from the Wolfson Foundation, will provide exhibits which focus on innovation in science and industry (‘Dolly the Sheep’ qualifies). Meanwhile, the associated Museum of Flight has taken off with the acquisition of a redundant Concorde that is now on show at the East Fortune RAF wartime airfield. And the National War Museum in Edinburgh Castle contributes about 480,000 to annual attendance at the National Museums group, taking it to just above the National Galleries’ 29 million; both are rising.
Glasgow, Scotland’s great city with a tradition of investment in the arts on the back of the once powerful industrial and shipbuilding empires, reinvented itself after their decline, becoming European City of Culture in 1990. Following a period of misdirection at the museums, Glasgow City Council took back the reins of power in 1998 and appointed Bridget McConnell, wife of the First Minister, as director of cultural and leisure services, with Mark O’Neill chief executive of museums and art galleries. The flagship, Kelvingrove, then closed for overdue refurbishment at the cost of £27.5 million, with £12.8 million from the HLF, £6.33 from the council and £5 million to be raised locally by appeal.
To convince the seriously overburdened ratepayers who, unlike those in Edinburgh, pay the running costs of their 16 cultural establishments — estimated at £12 million per annum — the administration has been checked for best value, and Kelvingrove, which reopens in July 2006, expects 1 million of the 3 million annual visitors. Thirtysix new posts have been created in education to encourage local support, and the ground floor will feature some of the finest paintings of a collection, equally strong in the early Dutch and Italian masters, which includes the strongest representation of the Barbizon School and Impressionists in Scotland. The stuffed animals, the people’s choice here as in Edinburgh’s Royal Museum, will be back.
Glasgow’s mixed riverside development on the Clyde centres on a £50 million Transport Museum, which will open in 2009. This is designed by Zaha Hadid and made possible by £16.6 million from the HLF. Given the enjoyable Burrell Collection and Glasgow University’s Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, the city already has much to offer: Whistler’s work features strongly, while Charles Rennie Mackintosh, another transatlantic attraction, is uniquely shown here. Currently, his tearoom interiors are at the McLellan Galleries which, costing some £500,000 annually, will sadly close when exhibits move to Kelvingrove. Graduates from his architectural masterpiece, the Glasgow School of Art, will feature among new works at the pleasant Gallery of Modern Art.
2006 will be a year of uncertainty: the capital faces life after Clifford, whose money-raising ability is uncanny, while Glasgow anticipates a renewed Kelvingrove. Aware of increased costs, the City Council will ask the Scottish Executive for partnership funding, while Jack McConnell, who has been so supportive of the prestigious Nationals, is confronted by demands nationwide. Under James Boyle, the former chairman of the Scottish Arts Council, he has set up a cultural commission to consider ‘the cultural rights of the Scottish citizen’ and ways to encourage creative talents. The report, due in June, is keenly awaited.
There is a certain dynamic north of the Border, the great cities leading the way. The arts are making a growing contribution to education, regeneration and tourism that is essential to a healthy economy.
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