The Robertson revolution
Hilary Spurting
Bryan Robertson, who died two weeks ago on 18 November, did more than any other single person to transform the contemporary art scene in this country, and from the mid 1960s he used The Spectator as his public platform. He was the Diaghilev of postwar British art. He had all the gifts of the great impresario: phenomenal courage and energy, ruthless disregard of financial viability, a passionate faith in the present and a clear vision of the future. He also had a fastidiously disciplined and discriminating eye ('Nothing hut the best here!' boomed Bryan, imitating George VI, who had once been kept waiting for his lunch by Kenneth Clarke stopping on the stairs at Windsor to admire the Leonardos).
Bryan made things happen, he knew precisely what he wanted, above all he believed — and made other people believe too — that nothing was impossible. He saw painting and sculpture as basic human activities, 'like living and breathing', and he infected a whole generation of young practitioners with his own conviction. The greatest gift he gave them was the sense that they could operate on the same footing as artists of other times and places. 'This sense of confidence, at any rate at the beginning, was very necessary,' wrote Bridget Riley, describing in these pages the cultural stagnation and isolation in which she and her peers grew up in wartime Britain. All that began to change in 1952, when Bryan at 27 became director of the Whitechapel Gallery in London. 'The British contemporary art scene was marked by an infectious apathy and a vicious insularity. There was little information available and less wished for,' Riley wrote. 'What Bryan Robertson did at the Whitechapel was simply this: he made people aware of developments outside these islands, he provided a focus for British artists and he encouraged them to work in an international context.'
Within six months he had transformed a gallery that looked like a run-down East End soup kitchen with torn brown sacking on the walls, dirty windows and chocolatebrown pain twork (the place smelt of poverty') into the only space in London expressly designed to show modern art. He stripped the building, doubled the daylight,
whitewashed the interior and covered the walls in a triple skin of muslin. He kicked off a staggeringly ambitious exhibition programme with the first retrospective of work by J. W. M. Turner since that artist's death, consolidating a national and international reputation over the next 16 years with major shows of largely unknown British and American contemporaries. Jackson Pollock in 1956 inaugurated a series of American Abstract Expressionist shows which revolutionised ways of seeing on this side of the Atlantic. 60,000 people came in a single month to see Robert Rauschenberg in 1964. In between the gallery drew unheard-of crowds for young British artists, 'It was the Whitechapel that put me on the map,' said Anthony Caro, It was in those days more exciting than the Tate,' said David Hockney. Whitechapel reared a new breed of iconoclasts like Phillip King (now President of the Royal Academy, which can trace its current regeneration in large part to the Robertson revolution) as well as curators like the Tate's present director, Nicholas Scrota.
Bryan reshaped museum practice by giving major retrospectives to living artists, setting new standards of catalogue presentation and pioneering commercial sponsorship. But it wasn't only artists whose lives he changed. I was 24 years old in 1965, The Spectator's newly appointed Arts Editor (a grandiose title invented for me by the deputy editor to glorify a job traditionally done by the office dogsbody), and in urgent need of an an critic. Even more than that I needed an art education. Bryan provided both, packing me off with his other readers week by week from June 1965, to see the things that stirred and stretched his own visual imagination. His beady eye missed nothing from the great seasonal displays of New York and Paris (It resets one's standards for all other art,' he wrote of a show of screens from Japan at the Louvre) to a small batch of Riley's drawings in Cork Street ('Automatically the hand goes out to straighten a tie or pull up a sock, such is the graceful perfect severity of Miss Riley's working studies), or Caro's latest sculpture at Kasmin's gallery ('Bright blue, pared down to essential structure and so animated that it practically winks at you').
As an art critic, Bryan put forward in these columns the parts of his programme not already accomplished at the Whitechapel. He called for higher standards, better funding, greater accessibility and more public use of painters and sculptors. He urged collectors to come forward to buy contemporary art (I only hope Spectator readers took this advice seriously because, if so, some of them will now be sitting on a fortune). His proposals were often prophetic. He suggested demolishing the Tate Can ugly and difficult building') or, failing that, splitting it into two separate institutions, one for British art, the other for the nation's modern holdings (If a pub
lie museum is a stunning place to visit, and houses masterpieces impeccably hung, placed and lit, then everyone will go there'). He urged London to overhaul its standards of opera and ballet design ('Visually Covent Garden seems to have no sense of the 20th century, let alone 1965,' he wrote crossly, citing the model responsible for so much in his own career: 'Can nobody get the composer, the choreographer and the right artist together, as Diaghilev did?') Bryan (who was left-handed) never learned to use a keyboard or fully mastered joined-up writing, turning in copy that was always a hieroglyphic artwork in itself, set Out on a white page in sloping lines of black ink squiggles as clear and cranky, elegant and expressive as himself. The whole text was spliced and spatchcocked (like his conversation) with afterthoughts, codicils, wild diversions and extra goodies encapsulated in balloons crammed into the margins and between the lines. Often there were scratchy little diagrams with flags and arrows, looking, as he said himself, like the messages the pirates left for one another in Swallows and Amazons.
Getting copy out of him was not easy. I had other difficult contributors, but none to compare with Bryan, who never grasped that at or after the last minute wasn't the ideal time to start an article. Once he arrived in person the day after his deadline to tell me with a perfectly straight face that his copy had blown out of the taxi window on the way. He was a magisterial figure of immense style and distinction, nearly twice my age and size, carrying weight in every sense, but he made me so hopping mad that day that I shut him in my tiny office and refused to let him out until he had produced the piece for which the printer was bolding the Arts front page, He sat down meekly at my desk, while I telephoned an irate BBC producer to assure him untruthfully that Mr Robertson had just left to keep the crucial appointment for which he was already 30 minutes late.
Enthusiasm was at the root of a preposterously overcrowded schedule that was sometimes too much even for him. He treated his column in this paper as a convivial conversation with readers for whom he poured out his knowledge, insights and discoveries with unfailing generosity. It was characteristic that when he was asked to write about one of his oldest friends, the actress Irene Worth, who died earlier this year, he chose to celebrate her genius for friendship. 'I shall always miss that zest and eagerness —,' he wrote in his last letter to me from hospital, 'that ardour — for life, people, objects, food & drink, places „•' He was talking about Irene, but all his countless friends, admirers and readers of The Spectator could say the same for him.
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