2002 hubris

In early 2002, within the UK national museum community, an amount of distinct Schadenfreude could be detected over the ailments being endured by the British Museum (budget deficit, shorter opening hours, staff cuts et al).

Finally faced with the legacy of pompous inefficiency in its management, and burdened with the costs of its grandiose millennium schemes, the British Museum had finally found itself facing the sort of financial hardships most other London museums had had to grapple with twenty years earlier. And like a would-be beneficiary of the Distressed Gentlefolk’s Association it was feebly looking round for someone to help it retain the style to which it had become accustomed. The Schadenfreude amongst museum colleagues was occasioned not by lack of empathy with the BM’s plight – financial stringency was by now commonplace amongst museums – but by its argument that it had been especially harshly treated by circumstances and so deserved special treatment. It’s not fair, went the BM song. Welcome to the party, pal, came back the chorus from others.

The British Museum had been an organisational basket-case for decades, a fact masked by its wealth and worldwide reputation. Some seven years earlier, it had commissioned a management report which it hoped would present a strong case for additional government funding (always the BM’s preferred solution to its ills). Instead, the Edwards Report had presented the BM with a catalogue of its inefficiencies, overstaffing, and financial waste, together with a raft of proposals for the better management of the museum and major cost savings. Astonishingly the BM had published the report anyway, in 1996, and were apparently taken aback to find that it had had exactly the reverse effect to the one they hoped for. The report was swiftly withdrawn.

That was the only rapid action that had happened. Even the placid Chris Smith, then Secretary of State for Culture, eventually became so fed up with the obvious inaction of the BM’s management that he parachuted in Suzanna Taverne to be Managing Director of the BM alongside Robert Anderson the, erm, Director of the BM. Two top dogs (with very different views of what was required) was hardly a recipe for harmony, coherence and focus. Taverne was no soft touch, but had anything but an easy time, her ambition eventually to be put in sole charge being firmly squashed by the museum’s Trustees. Neil MacGregor from the National Gallery was chosen instead as successor to Anderson.

So what did the museum put its current misfortunes down to? Anything but its own ineptitude, that’s for sure. But from outside the Bloomsbury comfort zone the signs had been there to read for some time. The new Great Court was carrying huge ongoing costs with it, £4.5 million a year. The BM complained that it had had to absorb virtually this entire sum, omitting to point out that it was a condition of Lottery project funding that capital projects should impose no added burden on the taxpayer. Presumably the BM had happily agreed to this condition to get the Lottery money in the first place.

Fewer people than expected had visited the museum following the Great Court’s opening. The BM’s risk analysis did not seem to have included the possibility that their new “public space for London” might not attract the necessary additional 1.5 million visitors with their cash. Or that anything like September 11 might happen to reduce the numbers of overseas tourists, even though the lesson from the Gulf War was still fresh.

Or... that it might have based its attendance forecasts on inaccurate data. After years of proclaiming yet more record-breaking attendances – “6.7 million in 1996” – the museum had had to admit that when it installed a proper counting system it found it had been over-counting previously by about 20%. Oops. As noone else in the museum business had believed its previous claims, this didn’t come as a surprise, except of course to the BM.

Nor did the BM appear to have wondered if universal free admission to national museums, for which it had lobbied so hard, might add to its direct competition. Instead it felt it had lost out because DCMS was now compensating the charging museums which had gone free. Even Suzanna Taverne repeated the mantra: “We were penalised twice. First, we lost the revenue we would have earned by charging. Now, to add insult to injury, we are missing out on a pay-off which could be worth some £8 million to us which the DCMS is giving to museums that used to charge. That’s a real double whammy.”

Well, no it wasn't, actually. First, the BM benefited from now being able to reclaim VAT. Second, the £8 million pay-off was never on offer. And third, the BM had chosen (because it could afford to, as well as on principle) not to introduce charges. Up till then the BM had been spared having to consider charging. It’s a very well-endowed museum, with property, bequests, and wealthy donors. Instead of using this money wisely, it had used it to paper over the systemic problems that the Edwards Report revealed. Now those problems had finally got too big, with annual running costs having soared from £65 million in 1998 to over £100 million.

Other museums without the same financial safety net had had to get to grips with similar issues long before. Costs were cut, staff numbers were reduced, activity was scaled down, better systems were put in place, sources of revenue were explored and yes, admission charges were introduced. A wholly unsympathetic government ear was turned to the arguments for increased grant, and various hapless museum directors were labelled as Thatcherite stooges as a result. The British Museum’s stance while this was happening was patronising and critical. When it finally found itself also in need, it should have just bitten the bullet, got its house in order and stopped moaning. It may be a special museum, but there was no case for special pleading.

The Chihuly chandelier

I was in Toronto in the late 1990's scouting the Royal Ontario Museum as a venue for the Grand Design exhibition, when I got a call from Gail Lord, a museum consultant whom I had known for some time, inviting me to visit their office. Along I went, and it soon became clear what was being sought. The new Museum of Glass was being developed at that time, with Gail's involvement, and they were looking to send some of the museum's collection, mainly works by Dale Chihuly, on tour. Would the V&A be interested? I looked through the slides and was bowled over by the sheer bravura of Chihuly's work in glass. It was unlike anything I had seen before - using centuries-old techniques but creating installations and pieces that were completely, dramatically modern.

As it happened, the timing for an exhibition would not fit with our schedule, so that went nowhere. I mentioned Chihuly to the glass curators and was intrigued to find that the V&A actually had a couple of smallish pieces by him. There didn't seem much interest in acquiring anything else. However, not long afterwards, the V&A was having one of its periodic debates with itself about how it could be seen as a thoroughly modern institution, not an old-fashioned attic. And as usual the conversation turned on branding, or at least promotion. I said at a meeting that a large part of the perception of the V&A as old-fashioned derived from first impressions - the immediate effect when a visitor walked in through the front door. It just was old-fashioned, in almost every respect. And writing a memo to director Alan Borg later, I said that a big installation piece by Dale Chihuly in the V&A's main entrance hall could very easily transform that perception and link the old to the present day.

Nothing appeared to happen, I heard nothing back, but then the word started going round that the V&A was going to commission a chandelier piece from Dale Chihuly for its main entrance. People from Chihuly Studio visited. Sketches appeared. A huge team arrived to assemble the piece on site from vast numbers of boxes of glass. The huge chandelier was created. Dale himself arrived, and although the work was done, plainly wasn't very pleased with it. It turned out that (rightly) he felt it was still too small for the space. So, months later the team came back again and almost doubled the size of the chandelier, and it was finally done in 2001.

Dale himself was/is a marvellous one-off. Built a bit like the late Eduardo Paolozzi, a patch over an eye lost in a glass-blowing accident, shoes covered with splatters of paint and hair going every which way, he was a benevolent tyrant, running his studio much as I suppose a Renaissance master's studio must have been run. His team were superb, dedicated, imaginative, charming.

I still have a couple of catalogues given to me by Dale, but so far I still haven't ever been able to afford one of his pieces! So the books will have to do. I'm happy to have played a part in getting a big piece of his into the V&A.

Also at the National Gallery...

A curator colleague who started work well before me had an introductory session on his first day with the rather patrician Deputy Director. "I see your name is Michael" said the DD, "and we already have one Michael on the staff. It will be so confusing - would you mind if we called you John?"

Fortunately, his original identity remained intact, and confusion seemed to be avoided, even though later yet another Michael joined.

Hockney - The Artist's Eye

The theme of David Hockney's Artist's Eye exhibition in 1981 was in large part to do with how our perception of any image and its value is altered by the stages of reproduction through which it passes. So a postcard of an Old Master is perceived differently from the original (for Hockney with just as much integrity and intrinsic worth) because of the change in material and scale, and because of the knowledge that it is anything but unique and inaccessible to us - we can own it, hold it in our hand, throw it away. He was exploring how modifications like photocopying and photography allowed new layers of perception to be overlaid on an original work and create new forms.

The poster for the exhibition, therefore, contained much of this multi-layered perspective. The image is a photographed re-staging of an original Hockney painting Looking At Pictures On A Screen, in which Hockney himself replaces the original figure of Henry Geldzahler. The posters of the original paintings from the National Gallery - which then appeared in the exhibition - hang on the screen, and close-ups of Hockney's original painted versions of them run along the bottom of the poster. And of course the whole thing was then produced as a four-colour litho print run. Of which I have a copy inscribed and signed by Hockney, which changes the value yet again.

It is one of life's great pleasures to work with someone with this sort of mind.

Taste of Italy

When I worked as Head of Design at the National Gallery in London in the 1980s we staged a small exhibition comparing two works by Canaletto and Guardi, both views of the Piazza San Marco in Venice. As usual I arranged for large sign-written boards to be produced to promote this exhibition, which were made up in sections and then mounted on the front facade of the gallery. On the day of the exhibition itself I was called out to see the boards being put in place, only to realise that the signwriters had missed out a crucial "A" between two sections, and the National Gallery was now proudly advertising the PIZZA San Marco to the tourists in Trafalgar Square. Ah, what memories...

James Lee Byars piece

James Lee Byars, an American conceptual installation and performance artist, visited the National Gallery in my time there, quite what for I can't remember. He presented Alistair Smith, one of the curators, with a piece of his art, and Alistair promptly handed it on to me. The work was (is) unsigned, and consisted of a large sheet of black tissue paper folded several times down to around A5 size. I think it was a "sketch" for a larger installation. Its title, or perhaps the event for which the actual work was planned, is Four Continent Documenta (maybe done for the Documenta VII in Kassel in 1982). For the last twenty years it's been sitting in an envelope in a file at home. To frame the thing somehow seems all wrong; I know it's there, which is about all a piece of conceptual art really needs.

RB Kitaj - RIP

I met RB Kitaj in 1979 and 1980 when he worked on an exhibition in the Artist's Eye series at the National Gallery. He was immensely charismatic without ever being loud - you were just aware of his great force of character and thoughtfulness. What I found extraordinary about Kitaj was the depth of his knowledge and the spread of his reading. I visited his studio on one occasion and was surprised to find it piled with books. His view of the world appeared to be one of constant and complex cross-reference, and certainly the exhibition we worked on (me as designer) was one in which Kitaj laid out the works according to a language of relationships that I suspect would have been imperceptible except to a handful of extremely acute scholars. I don't know if he was married to Sandra Fisher at that time, but she too was charming. She said she wanted to do my portrait in pastels, as my colouring reminded her of the walls of Jerusalem. Sadly, as with so many things in life, I never followed this up, and Sandra died tragically early in 1994.

I have a memory of everyone calling him Kitaj, except for the the Gallery's director Michael Levey, who called him Ron. Somehow it didn't seem quite right.

Ways of Seeing and Kitaj

I re-read John Berger's book Ways of Seeing on the plane back from London recently. It lacked the extraordinary power I remember from the original television series, and as a book felt rather small and cheaply produced. Most photos are in black and white and on fairly ordinary paper. However, I enjoyed once more his thesis that the Leonardo Cartoon in the National Gallery took on a whole different meaning once an American collector had tried to buy it for a record price. It became famous for its price tag and, Berger argues, looked at and treated in a new way. On a different scale, something similar happened at the V&A while I was there. In those days London Underground published a series of destination posters, promoting places to visit by Tube. To the consternation of the V&A's sculpture department, one of these posters appeared featuring a Young Slave by Michelangelo at the V&A. The image was a charcoal sketch of the work by - I think - artist RB Kitaj, and focussed on a detail of the figure's torso. It looked marvellous, significant and bigger than life-size, and it was also delightful that London Underground were promoting the V&A.

The only problem, hence the consternation, was that visitors were turning up to see this great statue, couldn't find it, and noone at the information desk knew anything about it. In fact the work was not, as it appeared from the poster, a huge prominent statue but a small blackened wax model, perhaps 15 cm high, and it was displayed in a badly-lit case with dozens of other wax models, all looking a bit like an Anthony Gormley assemblage. Kitaj had not chosen one of the museum's featured pieces but had plucked one from all-but obscurity and made it a star. He had danced with the wallflower. Somehow the V&A had now to give it the treatment. There was a hurried discussion, and the wax Slave was quickly given a case of its own, still badly lit, but at least easier to find and look at. In its new case it then took on the attributes of a signature object, one worthy of special attention. Later, it was one of the works included in an exhibition of pieces from the V&A's collection that toured North America. Like Leonardo's cartoon it took on new significance, not this time because of a price tag but because someone with an eye plucked it from the heap, and opened other eyes as well. The piece, by the way, is great. You can see the sculptor's thumbprints on it. Had I ever noticed it before Kitaj? No.

Pic courtesy of V&A

Maggi Hambling

Picking through a recently published history of the National Gallery by Jonathan Conlin, I noticed he had listed Jock McFadyen as the gallery's first artist-in-residence. In fact that honour went to Maggi Hambling, an inspired choice for this novel position. Gruff, impatient and straight-talking in the polite and slightly fey world of curatorial delicatesse, a furious smoker in a non-smoking environment, outrageous, fedora-wearing and paint-covered, Maggi at first seemed like a being from another planet when she first arrived at the gallery. Used to painting in natural light, she was of course allocated a studio space almost entirely without daylight, and instead lit mainly with spotlights. After some expletives, Maggi went on to do a series of atmospheric sketches and portrait paintings making use of the strong shadows and highlights thrown by the spots. I have a charcoal sketch from 1980 for a painting she called Mac with Shadows, which the gallery now owns. I remember wandering into her studio once and finding her with her trousers round her ankles having a pee in the sink, the loos being too far away. I of course was covered with confusion. Maggi was hooting with laughter. She was marvellous with the public, and established the role of artist-in-residence as firmly as if it had been running for a decade.