TABLE TALK
Art for art's sake
DENIS BROGAN
In the past ten days or so we have had a great, deal of serio-comic politics. Mrs Barbara Castle has vigorously denounced, without naming it, a scandalous pamphlet attempting to justify interference with trade union liberties called (if my memory serves me rightly), In Place of Strife. Mr Chataway has apparently shown he can do more than run, and Mr Michael Davitt Foot has de- fended the miners of South Wales with his normal lively and passionate conviction.
However, I have been more entertained this week by the controversy over the fate of the Velazquez owned by the Earl of Radnor. The controversy, like the controversy over payment for entrance to art galleries, shows the English mind at its most muddled or, if the distinction can be made, at its most dis- honest. The suggestion that at this low ebb in the national fortunes we should pay £2,000,000 or so for this picture by Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velazquez is, of course, absurd. If it should be said we don't need to pay two million pounds, the Government can fix an arbitrary price, thus depriving Lord Radnor of more than the tax system would take in any case. I can only say that this is an odd line for a Conservative government.
Behind the real or artificial indignation cast at the Wildenstein firm for paying over two million pounds for this Velazquez lies a very curious English arrogance. There can be no question of buying back from wicked foreigners a treasure of English painting. Velazquez was not a native of Gibraltar. and even if he had been. Gibraltar was not liber- ated from Spanish tyranny till 1704 (Velaz- quez died in 1660). This Velazquez is in this country because Lord Radnor's ancestor bought it at a very reasonable price over a hundred years ago. Most people (myself included) didn't know' the painting was in the country. and had never heard of Lord Radnor. I had heard of the subject of the painting, Juan de Pareja, and of course I had heard of Diego Rodriguez de Silva y Velaz- quez, a painter I admire a great deal, but of whose works this country already owns, I am told, six excellent specimens.
Of course, the Velazquez is a very attrac- tive picture. Of course it would be very nice to have it in Britain (I say Britain. not Lon- don, which has too many of the art treasures of the country already). But only a govern- ment extremely devoted to the fine arts and with a great deal of money to spend would think of spending anything like two million pounds, or for that matter one million pounds, to add to our ample stocks of Velazquez.
Since, of course, London is a great, per- haps the great, art market, it is to the advant- . age of London art dealers and London connoisseurs and art critics, etc, etc, to have the picture in London: but I can see no reason why it should be in London, and if the owner is going to get more money from a foreigner for this picture than we can pro- vide individually or as a body politic, I am in favour of his getting it.
Is there any reason why there should not be a very' considerable movement of great works of art out of Europe as well as out of Britain? I, for example, greatly admired the art gallery in Melbourne, and I hope the government either of Victoria or of the Aus- tralian Commonwealth is adding consider- ably to its present inadequate endowment. The possession of this art gallery is one of the several ways in which Melbourne is more attractive than Sydney.
I have never felt indignation at the pur- chase of European works of art by rich Americans like Mr Paul Mellon. I am not as fond of horses as he is, but I see no reason why he should not spend his own money in buying pictures of horses. (Some of the best pictures of horses are in fact pictures painted by English artists.) I am delighted to remember that some of the very best galleries in the United States are in what we call, in a snooty way, pro- vincial cities. The admirable Nelson Gallery in Kansas City makes that otherwise rather dull town well worth a visit. It is one of the pleasing features of the United States that many not very large towns have veiy good galleries: for example, Toledo. Ohio. The fact that a great part of the Kansas City gallery is full of French treasures dons not seem to me a reason for indignation, and still less a reason for spending French public money in buying back the splendid collec- tion which Colonel Nelson had made for him.
The great American galleries—the Metro- politan; the Boston Art Gallery, and the National Gallery in Washington (still called, by old-fashioned Republicans, the Mellon Gallery)—are admirably organised. Indeed, the National Gallery in Washington seems to me the best organised picture gallery I have ever visited. But some of the very best pictures there were sold by the Hermitage to Mr Andrew Mellon. Perhaps this is dis- tressing to Russian painters—but Rem- brandt was not a Russian artist, and his pictures might as well be in Washington as in Leningrad.
On the other hand, I am very strongly opposed to the barbarous and philistine de- cision of Mr Heath's government to charge for entrance to the great national collections. If it is asserted that keeping up the national
collections costs money, it might be pointed out to our musical Prime Minister that the subsidies for music cost even more. I could do, for example, without any ballet company. but I don't expect my lack of taste to be made national policy. I am sorry that Mr Heath's lack of taste is being made a matter of national policy today. There is a side to this which seems to be very much ignored even by art dealers like Mr Leggatt. It is not only a question of letting students in with special tickets or schoolchildren on Sundays or other mitigations of the outrageous policy of charging 4s (twenty new pence) for entrance to the National Gallery in London. It is the very important point that on every day of the week we have been able to enter our galleries for even quite short visits with- out paying anything. This is the great super- iority of the National Gallery over the Louvre.
It is, for example. extremely fortunate that in my native city of Glasgow the great municipal art gallery is only about a quarter of a mile across the Park from the Univer- sity, and students of the University, long before it had an art department, could drop into that magnificent collection free and easily at any time it was open. It is true there were stories that the print room was largely used for amorous rendezvous, but of course I don't believe a word of this. Such a state of affairs in Scotland would be totally against the national tradition. Nevertheless, the proximity of the great gallery to the University (which has, of course, a distin- guished gallery of its own) was one of the assets of my native city. It was by frequently leaving his hospital that Dr Tom Honeyman, who became a distinguished doctor of medi- cine, became an even more distinguished art expert, picture dealer, and great gallery director. There must be many slightly bar- barous students of the University and per- haps citizens of my native city who gained from the ease with which you could go in and look at the Rembrandt and the alleged Giorgione which are two of the major trea- sures of my native city's great collection. I think it is a sign of barbarism and a sign of economic panic that Mr Heath's proposal to reduce our national and civic collections to the level of the Louvre or the Brera should provoke so little protest: and protest would surely come with the most effect from the Labour party. For the tax on entry to the important galleries is a tax on aesthetic education which, at 4s a visit, may cut down the aesthetic education of a large number of Labour voters.
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