Stop being so tight-fisted
Martin Gayford has some advice for the new directors of our museums
Many years ago, some people I know took a long walk in Suffolk to the site of Sutton Hoo. At the end of their journey they hoped to find the celebrated Dark Age treasure once buried in that spot. Instead, they met a local who tersely informed them that what they sought was in the British Museum. But these days, of course, if they made the same journey, it would not be in vain. Instead of nothing at all, they would now find a visitor centre, plus some of the actual objects from the site and replicas of others. This archaeological repatriation from Bloomsbury to East Anglia has been, I hear, a great success.
There is a moral to the story. It is that these are changing times for museums. Once all that was of value or beauty was sucked into some vast porticoed receptacle in the capital city. Nowadays, just occasionally, items escape and return whence they had come. And, more and more, the possessions of the British Museum, the National Gallery, the V&A and the Tate wander the world in order to appear in the huge number of exhibitions that are an ever more frequent feature of the art-world calendar.
This is a period of a different kind of change at the great museums of London. Within 12 months just about all of them are going to acquire a new director. The big exception is the Tate empire where things look fairly settled (although eventually, I suppose, a successor to Lars Nittve as director of Tate Modern will be appointed). Otherwise, as has been widely publicised, Neil MacGregor will shift from the National Gallery to the BM, Charles Saumarez Smith will pop round the corner from the National Portrait Gallery to take over from him (and someone, as yet unknown, will succeed at the NPG). At the V&A, you will remember, a new director moved in last year.
What should all these new drivers do with the grand and — except for Tate Modern — venerable vehicles when they get their hands on the controls? Here are a few modest pieces of advice.
First of all, be less selfish and kinder to each other. The director who has the longest-standing and most widely publicised call on his generosity will be, of course, Neil MacGregor. It comes, as everyone knows, from Athens. Of course, the Greeks lost a lot of points by treating those poor plane-spotting anoraks so badly. But, still, they will continue to ask for their marbles back — and they've got a reasonable case.
It is true that the question of ownership — lucidly set out by William St Clair in his book Lord Elgin and The Marbles -is utterly ambiguous. But sculptures created for a specific building, which still exists, ought to be shown as close to their original location as possible. If bits of the Sutton Hoo treasure can go back to Suffolk, then some at least of the Parthenon Marbles can go back to the Acropolis.
I suspect that Neil MacGregor is farsighted enough to recognise the inevitable, and has the diplomatic skills to do the necessary deals. The obvious answer is the creation of a British Museum, Athens — which would allow the Trustees to retain ownership — showing a selection of the sculptures (with generous reciprocal loans from the Greek collections). No doubt a grateful EU would fund the building, which would probably turn out, like most major projects these days, to be designed by Sir Norman Foster.
But the marbles are only one example in which our museums could lighten up and stop being so tight-fisted. Their collections, as I was remarking earlier in the year, represent a patchwork of ancestral territories that run higgledy-piggledy over art history. Thus Tate Britain has the national collection of British painting from 1500 to the present, but not the sculpture from the 16th to the 19th centuries — that belongs to the V&A (which also has some of the paintings). And not the works on paper either, which belong to the BM, except some, which are in the V&A.
This generates a lot of tiresome negotiation. 'We are thinking of having an exhibition of X,' announces one institution. 'Can we borrow your Xs?' 0h,' replies institution two, 'we were thinking of having a show of X ourselves.' How soon?'Well, not within the next 20 years, but we are thinking about it.' (This is a real and recent example.) According to rumour, some years ago it was mooted to have a major exhibition of tapestry in London (an excellent idea, by the way). But the V&A, on hearing about it, stamped its collective foot. If any such show took place, it would have to be staged in South Ken, and no V&A tapestries would be lent to anybody else's party. Consequently, since the V&A has most of the best tapestries in the country, there was not — and still has not been — any tapestry exhibition.
This brings me on to another point: get rid of all that clutter, and tidy things up. There is simply too much stuff on show in some London museums and not enough space. There are distant galleries of the BM and V&A which resemble — pleasantly, I admit — an Edwardian junk-shop (which in a very superior sort of way, they are). Few if any visitors penetrate the further recesses of the South Kensington complex, where one imagines a murder victim might lie among the cases of European porcelain undiscovered for days.
Meanwhile, although in London we get plenty of exhibitions, we don't get as many or as varied a supply as we might. When was the last time that we had a really big show of, say, Roman, Greek, Egyptian or Islamic art (of the kind that are a regular occurrence in Paris, Venice and America)? The answer is not in living memory. And the reason is that the BM has nowhere to put them. Its main temporary exhibition space is small, and the new one, in a sort of pill-box hat on top of the Reading Room — where the Cleopatra exhibition took place — is utterly useless.
What is needed are proper, spacious, new galleries which can take the sort of big shows that appear at the Met and the Grand Palais. The same sort of thing is required at the V&A, where larger shows overflow into a dismal area featuring a lot of ancient overhead heating pipes.
The National Gallery has valiantly made the best of the rather nasty, not particularly large exhibition galleries housed in an underground bunker beneath the Sainsbury Wing but really needs something bigger and better. I suspect that Mr Saumarez Smith will be casting an eye at the pleasant rooms containing the rather dreary Reserve Collection (whose main merit is that it has not yet fallen into the hands of the Conservation Department and been overcleaned).
But all of this will require money. It is probably a waste of time to suggest that the Treasury should be less mean and philistine than it has traditionally been, But perhaps while lain Duncan Smith and his colleagues are thinking the unthinkable they might consider adequate funding for our great national museums. I fear, though, that would be just too radical.
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