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Posts tagged “Sir William Burrell

How the Metropolitan Museum of Art gets hold of the world’s most precious and vulnerable treasures

13 April 2014

An exhibition of stained glass that has been removed from “England’s historic Canterbury Cathedral” has arrived at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, after being shown at the Getty Museum in California. The show (“Radiant Light: Stained Glass from Canterbury Cathedral at the Cloisters”) is comprised of six whole windows from the clerestory of the cathedral’s choir, east transepts, and Trinity Chapel. These single monumental seated figures anticipate in their grandeur and gravity the prophets depicted by Michelangelo on the Sistine Chapel ceiling. They are the only surviving parts of an original cycle of eighty-six ancestors of Christ, once one of the most comprehensive stained-glass cycles known in art history. (See Figs. 1 – 5.)

The Met boasts that this exhibition of “Masterpieces of Romanesque art…represents the first time they have left the cathedral precincts since their creation in 1178-80”. Who, then, gave permission for the loan of such fragile, precious and architecturally integral material?

The New York Times says of the exhibition that it “Seemed to have been beamed down from on high”, when it undoubtedly had been flown and vibrated down from on high in an aeroplane. The museum world repeatedly offers assurances that modern air transport is perfectly safe for moving treasures around, even though, as the world now well appreciates, aeroplanes do sometimes crash or disappear. Aside from in-flight hazards, works of art get taken by roads to and from airports where they disappear from curatorial view and supervision into high-security cargo depots, sometimes being injured by forklift trucks, and the like, in the process.

The bureaucrats of “Glasgow Life” who administer Glasgow’s museums recently argued (successfully) in Scotland’s Parliament that, as Sir William Burrell had permitted loans from his bequeathed collection within Britain, and as the most dangerous part of lending works is dismantling them in one place and reassembling them in another, overturning his prohibition on foreign travels would be no more dangerous than moving works within Britain. The bureaucrats were similarly successful in overturning Burrell’s prohibition on lending certain categories of fragile works at all, within or outside Britain, such as glass, tapestries and pastels, by arguing that advances in modern packaging skills meant that even the most fragile work could now safely be moved subject to prior conservation examinations.

With the Burrell Collection we know precisely who will carry responsibility for any future travel injuries or losses but with the Canterbury treasures, who at the Cathedral (or in the Church) would take responsibility were these windows to be harmed or lost during their trans-Atlantic travels?

Were these windows insured for their travels, and, if so, what price was put on them?

Has the Church received any payment for this loan, and, if so, how much?

Were the six windows which travelled from London to California and from California to New York flown in separate aeroplanes – as were the three (of ten) gilded panels from Ghiberti’s Florence Baptistery doors (dubbed “The Gates of Paradise” by Michelangelo) when they were sent from Florence to Atlanta; from Atlanta to Chicago; from Chicago to the Metropolitan Museum, New York; from New York to Seattle; and, finally, from Seattle back to Florence? (See Figs. 6 and 7.)

The Metropolitan Museum seems to be a common destination point on many of the most ambitious and hazardous inter-continental tours of art (it will receive the current Tate show of Matisse’s monumental, previously too-fragile to loan, cut-out paper works). In the case of the Burrell Collection even before the Scottish Parliament had heard all the evidence arrangements for an international tour of works were in motion. On 10 September 2013, Joan McAlpine, SNP, the Chair (“Convener”) of the scrutinising Parliamentary committee, disclosed in The Scotsman that “Sir Angus Grossart was giving some hints [the day before, during evidence to the committee’s first session] of the kind of people he’s been speaking to in terms of a world tour…I know they’re talking to the Met in New York, and from the point of view of the people at Glasgow Life, that’s an opportunity to enhance the reputation of the collection, the city and Scotland.”

Crucially, Grossart’s moves were not being made under the aegis of the Burrell Trustees, who are charged with protecting the collection according to the terms of Burrell’s fabulously generous bequest (the 8,000 bequeathed works still constitute the largest gift ever made to a city), but by “Glasgow Renaissance”, an interceding body set up by Glasgow Life expressly to “oversee the Burrell Collection’s immediate future”, advise on the refurbishment of the leaking building which has suffered decades of neglect, and to facilitate the fund-raising, profile-heightening international tour of key works. Sir Angus Grossart, a member of Glasgow Life’s board of directors is the appointed chair of Burrell Renaissance.

In January 2013 it was reported (Herald Scotland) that the first, six months-long stop of the tour would be at the British Museum, whose director, Neil MacGregor, had been co-opted by Glasgow Life to serve on Burrell Renaissance (– as had been his fellow Glaswegian, Lord Kerr, the deputy chairman of Scottish Power). Grossart claimed in evidence given to the Scottish Parliament’s Burrell committee that no conflict of interest existed because no other venue in London had been thought appropriate to receive Burrell works – which is to say, not the Victoria and Albert Museum; not the Royal Academy; nor even the Hayward Gallery where an exhibition “Treasures from the Burrell Collection” was mounted in 1975.

When we appeared for ArtWatch UK as one of only two opposing witnesses before the Scottish Parliamentary committee (the other being Jeremy Warren of the Wallace Collection), we pointed out that the Metropolitan Museum’s present director, Thomas Campbell, had said of a major exhibition he had organised, “No one but the Met could have pulled off the exhibition of Renaissance tapestries we had a few years ago…We bribed and cajoled and twisted the arms of institutions around the world – well, we didn’t bribe of course – but politically it was very complicated negotiating the loan of these objects, which came from the British Royal Collection, the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Vatican and were just all absolute masterpieces.” (“Museum: Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Danny Danziger, 2007, p.40.)

It will now be greatly less complicated for Burrell’s fragile glass, tapestries, lace and pastels to be sent to the Metropolitan Museum – or anywhere else. Where Jeremy Warren of the Wallace Collection had testified “It is disingenuous to suggest that when one moves a 500-year-old tapestry from one country to another – perhaps taking it across the Atlantic – one is not shortening its life”, Councillor Archie Graham, Glasgow Council’s deputy Leader and the chairperson of Glasgow Life, thrilled at the prospect of “unlock[ing] the potential of this outstanding collection” and of being able thereby to “realise the full benefits of his gift.” We were not surprised to read Jackie Wullschlager’s report in the Financial Times (“Scottish independence”, 5/6 April 2014) that within months of overturning Burrell’s terms of bequest, a themed exhibition of works from within the collection (“Bellini to Boudin: Five Centuries of Painting in the Burrell Collection”) should open with all of Degas’s “glorious, delicate, light-sensitive” pastels shown in their entirety for the first time in a gallery in which water was dripping from the still unfixed roof “the day before” the show opened – that is to say, opened while on the watch of co-opted art world big-wig guarantors, the likes of Sir Angus Grossart and Mr Neil MacGregor. We did not, however, expect, when opposing the attempt to harvest the benefits of a collection bequeathed to the city of Glasgow, so soon to see the Church of England recklessly playing the same value-harvesting game with an irreplaceable part of the fabric of a cathedral and of our national heritage.

Michael Daley

Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com

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Above, Figs. 1-5: Windows removed from Canterbury Cathedral that depict the Ancestors of Christ and are presently on show at the Metropolitan Museum, New York, after an earlier exhibition at the Getty Museum, California. The Ancestors shown here are, successively from the top, Lamech (detail), Jareth, Lamech, Noah and Abraham.
Above, Figs. 6 and 7: Top, one of Lorenzo Ghiberti’s monumental gilded bronze doors (“The Gates of Paradise”) for the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence during restoration. Above, one of the three (of ten) panels that were unveiled in Florence in 1452 and were sent on tour to Atlanta, Chicago, New York and Seattle in the United States during 2007 and 2008. This panel is Ghiberti’s famous perspectival tour de force depiction of Jacob and Esau. It was said that the purpose of the exhibition was as a way of saying thank you to the young Americans who helped in Florence after the damaging floods of 1966, and, as “a way of allowing a wider audience to view the impressive abilities of the Italian restorers who have returned Ghiberti’s masterpiece to its original [sic] splendor through more than twenty-five years of painstaking and careful work.”


NEW YEAR REPORT

6 January 2014

Assaults on History: Dishing Donors; a Vatican Wobble; and, Reigniting an Old Battle of Hearts, Minds, Interests and Evidence

We had a good and eventful campaigning year in 2013. At home, ArtWatch was invited to speak in the Scottish Parliament for the interests of art and against a municipal arts bureaucracy seeking to overturn a prodigiously generous benefactor’s wishes and instructions in order, effectively, to reward its own negligence with an extension of powers and a major capital project (without clear costing). Our views on this proposal were carried in the October Museums Journal, the December Apollo (see Burrell pdf) and in the Sunday Times (Scotland). We found ourselves in the midst of a high-level museum world schism.

MacGregor versus Penny

Speaking for the overturning of Sir William Burrell’s terms of bequest was the Glaswegian director of the British Museum and former director of the National Gallery, Neil MacGregor. Mr MacGregor had agreed (presumably with the blessing of his trustees) to be co-opted as an adviser and declared partisan onto a Glasgow Life body – “Burrell Renaissance”. In support of Glasgow Life’s ambitions, MacGregor expressed with characteristic (lawerish) eloquence impatience with the length of time in which The Living might find themselves governed by the Wishes of the Dead. The present director of the National Gallery, Nicholas Penny (a scholar, rather than a populariser of others’ scholarship) spoke no less eloquently in opposition: “What is very often forgotten in discussions of this kind is the moral advantage and tangible benefit of a declared preference for honouring the wishes of the donor. Real concern for the future is always more persuasive in those who have a genuine feeling for the past.”

Parliamentary Concerns

The matter will come before the Scottish Parliament this month. Intriguingly, one of the members of the parliamentary committee that scrutinised the Burrell Lending request from Glasgow Life, Gordon MacDonald, SNP MSP, told yesterday’s Sunday Times (Scotland) that: “I too was concerned at the cost of £45m bearing in mind that Kelvingrove refurbishment cost £29m and they raised £2.5m from sponsorship and donations. The major work at the Burrell is a complete new roof and removal of lecture theatre to create new gallery space. Both of which will be costly, but £45m?”

Fresh Crimes Against Art and History

Internationally, two recent horrifically destructive mural restorations (the first in Spain and another in China, see Figs. 1 to 4) had reminded many of the great Sistine Chapel cleaning controversies of the 1980s and early 1990s (see “Restoration tragedies”). In January 2013 we were drawn back into that monumental Sistine Chapel restoration controversy (which had triggered ArtWatch’s founding in 1992) by an official acknowledgement that Michelangelo’s stripped-down ceiling frescoes were prey to failures of environmental regulation that were being exacerbated by swelling visitor numbers. We had warned against such failures twenty years earlier: “Artificially induced changes in moisture, heat and patterns of air convection can themselves do gross damage…The most obvious risk is that external air-borne pollutants will be pulled in.” (“The Physical Condition of the Sistine Ceiling”, Chapter IV, p.122, Art Restoration ~ The Culture, the Business and the Scandal, London, 1993.)

An Old Crime Implodes

At the beginning of last year, Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums, insisted that whatever the problems, visitor numbers could not be restricted: “We have entered the era of large-scale tourism, and millions want to enjoy our historical culture. Limiting numbers is unthinkable.” Today, the unthinkable may be on the cards. Paolucci acknowledges in this month’s Art Newspaper that the huge increases in visitor numbers (5,459,000 last year from 4m the year before) constitute his biggest practical problem:

“…The sheer numbers can be damaging, especially in the Sistine Chapel, which everyone wants to see. At the height of the season it gets 20,000 to 25,000 people a day, all breathing out carbon dioxide and vapour and bringing in dust. We are employing Carrier, a top US firm [who donated and installed the presently failing system] to work out a method of dealing with humidity; otherwise we will have to limit numbers… (Emphasis added.)

On January 2nd Paolucci expressed further concerns in a Vatican museums press release: “I’m asking myself what will happen during the coming Easter holidays and the great canonization of Popes John XXIII and John Paul II. This will bring to Rome an immense mass of Catholics from every part of the world. Such extraordinary numbers oblige one to make some fundamental and priority considerations. The objective must be from now on to observe constant maintenance and preventive conservation of the Heritage. To do so we must provide ever more important resources.” At the same time, Paolucci promised that, after 3 years of work, all will be ready in May for the “improved air conditioning, reduction of pollutants and humidity control of the temperature.”

Antonio Paolucci, a distinguished Renaissance art scholar (and student of Roberto Longhi), might be thought to be in an impossible position as director of the Vatican’s museums. Presently, Michelangelo’s frescoes are being devoured by pollution and condensation that are the inescapable by-products of permitting the Sistine Chapel to serve as a tourism cash cow. At the time of the last restoration of the ceiling, the Vatican’s finances were a source of scandal (one of its bankers had been found hanged on a bridge in London). On December 7/8 last year the Financial Times reported “The Vatican bank was established to serve the work of the Catholic Church around the world. It has now become synonymous with financial scandal. An 11-month FT investigation reveals the extent of mismanagement at the Euros 5bn-asset bank and the murkiness of its operations that finally led regulators, international agencies, big banks and even Pope Francis himself to take action.” (Rachel Sanderson, “The Scandal at God’s Bank”.) In this climate, is cutting back visitors really an option? For that matter, is the new air-conditioning system promised for May capable of coping with yet further increases of visitors of the kind indicated by Paolucci?

In the absence of dramatic reductions of visitor numbers (which must presently be netting in excess of £75m p.a.) it is hard to see how any amount of conservation tinkering might resolve the present crisis. It would never be logistically possible to seal every visitor inside a “moon-suit” that would prevent the destructive cycles of evaporation and condensation that were already known in 1993 to be creating continuous migrations of salts and vapour within the frescoes. (At that date it was established that some 425 kilos of water were being pumped into the chapel’s microclimate by the daily total of 17,000 visitors. On today’s visits that volume of water must reach 600 kilos per day.)

No increase of expenditure could reverse the initial un-wisdom of stripping Michelangelo’s frescoes down to the bare plaster, thereby both bowdlerising his art and exposing its remains to environmental degradation. No expenditure could put back the glue painting with which Michelangelo had modified and intensified the sculptural presence of his figures and the unprecedented dramatically illuminated theatre which they occupied. Those characteristics had startled and awed his contemporaries. They were repeatedly recorded in copies made in Michelangelo’s own lifetime and for centuries afterwards (see, in particular the late 18th century copy opposite at Fig. 8).

The Vatican is presently attempting to rebuild the relationship between the Church and contemporary art that was sundered 200 years ago. It is a noble aim but it will remain a vain one until the corruption of art history that followed the restoration of Michelangelo’s ceiling is acknowledged and addessed. What Michelangelo achieved on the ceiling was unprecedented and precious: a profoundly spiritual fusion of the human and the divine that was rendered corporeal and situated in a palpable space contiguous with our own. Scholar supporters of the restoration claimed in defence of the emasculation of that original stupendous and unique achievement that we could now make “more sense” of Michelangelo; that we could now see a clearer link between his art and that of the inferiors who preceded and followed him. As long as the Church continues to endorse so unfounded, untenable an account, it will be in no moral position to forge any constructive relationship between itself and today’s artists.

If the cash flow is to be maintained and if Michelangelo is to be preserved, there would seem to be only one conceivable solution: as with other environmentally vulnerable archaeological/artistic sites, a full-size, absolutely faithful facsimile of the chapel will have to be built as a destination for the ever-swelling press of tourists. Creating an alternative “virtual” chapel might seem a shocking prospect and a colossal admission of failure but would it be more unpalatable than proceeding with the proposed plan described in our previous post to turn the remains of Michelangelo’s own frescoes into a “virtual” colourised caricature of themselves with 7,000 individually attuned colour-enhancing LED lights that would flood the ceiling with an artifical and chromatically falsifying light ten times more powerful than today’s? Building a facsimile to draw the tourists would mean that what survives of Michelangelo’s original work might then be left in peace, as it is, and once again in a congenial, stable climate.

Further and Fresh Doubts

On November 30th Peter Aspden, the Financial Times’s culture correspondent, declared that the restoration of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes (“the most important such project in recent history”) had been a “crushing disappointment”. Recalling that before restoration the frescoes had been “more real, more subtle, more moving”, Aspden noted that arguments in defence of the restoration “have been rebutted, with no little ferocity.” If Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes remain the worst case of injuries suffered in the great post-war restoration bonanza, they are not alone. Fortunately there are increasing signs of doubts about modern restoration procedures elsewhere. Consider this further critique of picture restorers that emerged from a most surprising quarter on December 17th:

“…The problem is, each generation of conservators has always thought that they, uniquely, had the definitive solution to fixing works of art. In the world of pictures, today’s conservators spend much of their time undoing the earlier, bad restoration of their predecessors. For example, the dreadful wax re-lining technique all the rage only a generation or so ago is now routinely removed, as over time the wax creates a dull, thick layer which affects the paint surface. Before that, there was a fashion for planing down pictures on panel, and laying them onto canvas, with all the attendant holes and large losses that entailed (see for example the poor Bridgewater Raphaels in the National Gallery of Scotland). More recently, conservators thought they had invented a synthetic varnish that didn’t go yellow with age. But now we are discovering that it just goes grey instead. So the pictures have to be cleaned all over again. It’s a fact that over the course of art history more damage has been done to pictures by those claiming to be ‘conserving’ them than anything else. We can only wonder which of today’s foolproof conservation techniques will have to be rectified by tomorrow’s restorers. Sometimes I think it’s all a giant, inter-generational job creation scheme by some shadowy, global conservator’s union.”

We had noted on 12 July last year that “There has never been a make-work project like art restoration”, and earlier, on 17 March 2011, that “Art conservation is now a substantial vested interest, a business with a shifting ideology that serves as self-promotion… Regardless of conservators’ good intentions, the fact remains that their treatments alter the material fabric and aesthetic appearance of works of art. Alterations are made on promises to prolong life, prevent deteriorations and recover original conditions, when history repeatedly shows contrary outcomes”. Although we greatly welcome the recent tacit endorsement, its source is perplexing. The author, Bendor Grosvenor, made these remarks on his (lively and informative) blog, Art History News.

Art Market restorations

Mr Grosvenor, a modern historian by training, has for a number of years worked as a researcher and, latterly, as a second pair of eyes for the Mayfair art dealer, Philip Mould, who happens to be a highly active “stripper-downer” of paintings in search of something better and more valuable underneath. In countless BBC television programmes, in his 1995 book Sleepers and in his 2009 book Sleuth, Mr Mould has been a most effective propagandist for today’s professional restorers, of whom Grosvenor evidently now entertains doubts. Mould himself has conceded with increasing frequency that great risks attend the stripping down of paintings. When asked recently on the best method of cleaning pictures, he replied somewhat flippantly “With spit and polish” and made no mention of the solvents – principally acetone – and scalpels used by his own restorers. (We have been haunted for some years by advice given on how to remove nail varnish when no acetone nail varnish remover is to hand: brush on fresh nail varnish, leave for a few moments and then wipe off. The acetone in the new liquid varnish swiftly dissolves the old hard varnish enabling both to be removed with the same cloth.)

Concealment and Disclosure

With the public museum sector we feel compelled to examine the bizarre and perverse phenomenon of promoting demonstrably wrecked paintings in special loan exhibitions. One such is the Clark Institute’s Turner “Rockets and Blue Lights”, which work is once again being promoted in Britain as the Belle of Turner’s Ball, this time at the Greenwich Maritime Museum’s “Turner and the Sea” exhibition. As our colleague in New York, Ruth Osborne, has established, another such restoration-wrecked picture hangs in the Frick Collection as an autograph Vermeer (“Vermeer Interrupted: A Study of Johannes Vermeer’s ‘Girl Interrupted at Her Music’ at The Frick Collection”). The Frick has refused to release to ArtWatch an archive photograph that shows the frequently undone and redone picture at its most pictorially deranged and incoherent “in-restoration” state. A copy of that photograph is held by the Getty Institute but it cannot be released because of the Frick’s enforcement of copyright ownership. All but the most informed visitors to the Frick will likely have no inkling of what lies beneath the present surface. Where Philip Mould seeks to identify and uncover works of quality that have been distorted by later accretions (- the art trade’s “sleepers”), the Frick presently conspires to pass off tricked-up underlying pictorial carnage as Vermeer’s own handiwork.

The Frick is not alone. The Phillips Collection in Washington has repeatedly spurned our requests to examine the conservation and filmed records of the Kecks’ ruination of Renoir’s “Luncheon of the Boating Party”. Museums have grown bolder in promoting their own conservation efforts, sometimes placing restorers behind glass walls to permit public scrutiny. This seeming increase of public accessibility can have an ulterior motive: one leading international conservator disclosed that the practice serves to prevent embarrassing public outbreaks of shock and indignation when familiar works are unveiled after long incarceration in conservation studios. A Turner painting currently undergoing such public exposure is running at the Bowes Museum where the restorer is presently taking a break after encountering difficulties not identified by preliminary “scientific investigations” – the very type of investigation in which Philip Mould has expressed great confidence.

As we have seen in a number of televised Mould restorations, carrying out preliminary scientific tests does not eliminate surprises in the course of restoration once restorers start swiftly cutting through varnishes with their swabs and solvents to get to the paint underneath. We remain sceptical of the value of preliminary scientific or chemical analyses, not least because, as in the case of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling, the analysis said to “prove” the artist had not completed his frescoes with glue-based painting conflicts with other more relevant – and, in fact, irrefutable – proofs of the kind often demonstrated on this site, as here today at Figs.13, 14 and 15.

ArtWatch has another full and ideologically challenging year ahead but a first priority will be to demonstrate the extent to which naïve and misplaced faith in today’s restorers can make professional monkeys of scholars, curators and trustees.

Michael Daley

Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com

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Above, Fig. 1: The now notoriously “restored” wall painting of Christ (Ecce Homo), seen here before (left and centre) and after (right) treatment. (See The “World’s worst restoration” and the Death of Authenticity, and The Battle of Borja: Cecilia Giménez, Restoration Monkeys, Paediatricians, Titian and Great Women Conservators.) The fame of the incident led to a great increase of visitors to the parish church in Borja, Spain. The church imposed an entrance charge. At the end of December the parish priest was arrested for what the Daily Telegraph reports as “suspicion of misappropriating funds [£174,000], of money laundering and sexual abuse”.
Above, Fig. 2: The Daily Telegraph’s report of 23 October 2013 on the Chinese Government-approved, £100,000 restoration during which a Qing dynasty temple fresco was entirely obliterated by luridly colourised repainting. This crime against art and heritage came to light when a student posted comparative photographs online. In the resulting furore, a government official from the city responsible for the temple described the restoration as “an unauthorised project”.
Above, Figs. 3 and 4: The Telegraph reported that Wang Jinyu, an expert on fresco restoration from the Dunhuang Academy, had said the intervention could not be called “restoration, or [even] destructive restoration” because “[It is] the destruction of cultural relics since the original relics no longer exist”. It was noted that the case had echoes of a headline-grabbing incident last year when an elderly parishioner performed “a disastrous restoration” on a 19th century fresco of Christ in the Spanish town of Borja. One Chinese website user wrote. “They have turned a classic painting into graffiti. It looks like something out of Disneyland, doesn’t it?”
Above, Fig. 5: Above: Michelangelo’s prophet Daniel from the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, before (left) and after (right) cleaning. The great brightening of colours, simplifications and flattening of design, and destruction of shading and modelling that occurred during restoration led many to complain of the “Disneyfication” of Michelangelo’s work. Note particularly here the loss of folds on the drapery over the shoulder to the left, and the loss of the previous dark shadow to the right of that drapery. Supporters of the restoration defended such alterations on the grounds that Michelangelo had originally painted over-brightly and without chiaroscuro in order that his images would “read” through the gloom of a smokey, candle-lit chapel. Today, despite the creation of a hugely increased chromaticism during the restoration, the Vatican authorites are contending that there needs to be a ten-fold increase in the (artificial) lighting of the ceiling because the present lighting creates a “low-contrast twilight that fails to bring out the colours in Michelangelo’s masterpiece”. Have the colours faded to a tenth of their previous intensity over the last twenty years?
Above, Fig. 6: A greyscale version of Fig. 5. The contention that Michelangelo’s work needs ever-more artificial illumination is ironic – and, in truth, confessional. When his painting was originally unveiled in 1512, observers were stunned not by any brilliance of colouring (no one mentioned his colouring) but by the fact that the artist had given such great emphasis to light and shade, and to “sculptural” modelling in between his great tonal contrasts, that his figures appeared real, not painted, and that they seemed to be occupying real space and not merely decorating surfaces. Experts marvelled that such were Michelangelo’s powers of design that surfaces on the ceiling that were actually advancing towards the viewer, appeared to recede because his his brilliantly conjured illusion of perspective. This novel and revolutionary development was recognised for nearly five centuries…until the last restoration. There are no historical or artistic grounds for accepting claims that the unexpected restoration changes constitute miraculous “revelations” of original values.
Above, Fig. 7: Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses from the tomb of Pope Julius II. In this reproduction we see how light and shadows are trapped/made by the architectural projections. In painting his monumental figures on the Sistine ceiling Michelangelo mimicked the kind of lights and shades that are seen on sculpture placed in architectural contexts, according to the (given) light source. We know that Michelangelo had done so on the ceiling because his effects were described and copied by his contemporaries and then by copyists in following centuries. Defenders of the restoration have claimed that scientific (i. e. chemical) tests, or “diagnostic analysis”, proved that, contrary to previous understanding, Michelangelo had not “modelled” his forms on the ceiling with tonal gradations but that he had modelled principally with colour. This is easily disproved: had Michelangelo constructed his forms with shifting colour values, then all black and white photographs and all black and white engraved copies of the ceiling would look less sculptural. Demonstrably, that is not the case. Similarly, if Michelangelo had constructed his forms by colour, removing the material described by restorers as dirt or varnish, would have produced images more sculptural than before the “cleaning”. That this was not the case is seen in the before and after photographs in colour first at Fig. 5, and then in greyscale at Fig. 6.
Above, Fig. 8: This engraving (of c. 1790) of Michelangelo’s Prophet Daniel shows intense, almost “cinematic” contrasts of light and shade and of very strong shadows that appear to have been cast by the depicted forms and draperies. As such, this image accords perfectly with the responses of Michelangelo’s contemporaries when the ceiling was first painted. It accords with accounts of Michelangelo producing model sculptures of figures that he was painting, in order to study the shadows that would be cast onto the ground or onto adjacent walls. Those who had studied the frescoes’ surfaces at close quarters (before the the last restoration) concluded that Michelangelo had reinforced the shadows on the ceiling with glue-paints carrying black pigment.
Above, left, Fig. 9: This section of the Prophet Daniel seen before cleaning (left) and after cleaning (right) shows stronger shadows and modelling before the restoration. Moreover, it shows that Michelangelo used the black glue-paints to revise the drawing and the modelling in the section of drapery on our left that hangs from Daniel’s right shoulder. When restorers remove material that changes the design of paintings, they usually claim that what was removed was not original but had been applied by previous restorers. That argument can easily be shown to be spurious in this case: where complete records of copies exist, it can be shown that shadows which were lost in the last cleaning had been recorded in all previous copies, including, sometimes, ones made during Michelangelo’s own lifetime. (See, for example, How to Take a Michelangelo Sibyl Apart, from Top to Toes, Frankenweenie – A Black and White Michelangelo for Our Times, and, Cutting Michelangelo Down to Size and Figs. 12-14 here.)
Above, Figs. 10 and 11: Here, we see a detail of Michelangelo’s Erythraean Sibyl before cleaning (top) and after cleaning (above). Once again, we see (in microcosm) the losses of shading and modelling that occurred throughout the ceiling. If we make careful comparative appraisals we can see the loss or break-up of actual brush-strokes. We can see that before restoration, the forms of the ear were more decisively drawn (note the black line that picked out the bottom of the ear lobe) and more sculpturally modelled. A straightforward cleaning of a dirty painting would enhance, not diminish, the values that had previously been visible even under dirt.
Above, top, Fig. 12; Above, centre, Fig. 13; Above, Fig. 14.
The above sequence of images of Michelangelo’s Jonah on the Sistine Chapel ceiling shows the continuity of features – note especially the shadow cast by Jonah’s left foot – that were recorded in an unbroken sequence from within Michelangelo’s lifetime until the last restoration. Thus, in Fig. 12 we see a wash drawing by Giulio Clovio which records in its bottom corners parts of two lunettes that Michelangelo had painted before 1512 but then had destroyed by 1534 to prepare the altar wall for his Last Judgement. It is therefore a record of how the figure appeared before the frescoes had become dirty and before any restorer had approached the ceiling. This single image refutes the testimony of the Vatican laboratory’s chemical analysis which was said to have established that Michelangelo had not painted the shadows. The shadows not only survived for centuries they were recorded in all copies and photographs of the figure up to the time of the last restoration. In Fig. 13 we see two engravings made in the early 19th century. In fig. 14 we see a photograph (on the left) showing the extent to which the shadows had survived until the last restoration, and one (on the right) taken after the restoration during which the shadows were removed.
WAYS OF CLEANING
Above, Fig. 15: Turner’s 1810 painting “Lowther Castle – Evening” which was given to the nation and presented to the Bowes Museum at Barnard Castle. As the Northern Echo has reported, on acquisition, the Bowes Museum decided to restore the painting. The museum’s conservation manager, John Old, carried out some “background work” and “a chemical analysis” and began the restoration which is visible to the public every Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. Like Philip Mould’s restorers (see Figs. 17 and 18), Mr Old began by cutting a rectangular “window” directly through the old varnish until paint was reached. This method of cleaning is widely encountered but is controversial within the field. It was strongly opposed, for example, by the influential and famously moderate or “minimalist” restorer Johannes Hell, for reasons that will be given in a future post.
In today’s picture restoration there is constant methodological churn. There are no agreed methods of cleaning – some restorers favour solvents; some favour soaps; some favour abrasives; others, lasers. Some advocate total and swift cleanings; some commend slow and partial ones. Some favour selective cleaning. There are no universally accepted codes of ethics, no strict rules of professional behaviour, there is no striking-off from professional registers. Despite frequently assumed quasi-medical airs and talk of diagnostics, patients and such, there is, as the painter Thomas Torak has regretted, no Hippocratic Oath to “do no harm”.
Above, Fig. 16: John Old at work, as shown in the The Journal of 26 December by which time many overlapping windows had been cut through the varnish. The Journal reports that “Although a chemical analysis was carried out” before work began, “it still turned out to be a bigger challenge than he expected as he discovered areas of paint loss probably caused by damp”. It is disturbing that neither chemical analysis nor close visual scrutiny – or background researches – identified the problem before work began: “Although we did a lot of scientific analysis you can never really tell what you’ll find until you start work”, Mr Old said. It is not reassuring that Old “retouched” the damaged area even before the cleaning was finished. Today, with varnish still to be removed when part of the picture has already been repainted, Old is taking a break from work “while further chemical analysis is undertaken to trace the different techniques used by Turner across the painting”. Given that the preliminary analysis failed to detect the surprise passages of damaged (and presumably repainted) work, how confident can we be at this point that further analysis will succeed in identifying all of Turner’s notoriously quixotic techniques on this painting?
With an artist like Turner, can it ever be sensible to begin by cutting windows quickly through sections of varnish, rather than by proceeding in a gradual and overall campaign to thin the varnish and, thereby, approach what is suspected to be the underlying paint surface with circumspection and retaining the option of holding back where necessary or desirable?
Above, Figs. 17 and 18: The dust wrappers of Philip Mould’s books of 1995 (left) and 2009 (right), both of which show rectangular windows cut sharply through discoloured varnish.
Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.


A Poor Day of Remembrance for Burrell

11 November 2013

In June ArtWatch UK was invited (as “campaigners for the protection of works of art”) to give evidence at a hearing at the Scottish Parliament on a private bill to overturn the prohibition on foreign loans from the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. The experience was both heartening and depressing.

The transparency of the Scottish Parliament’s procedures could not be faulted and we have rarely enjoyed such courtesy and assistance in making our case, or of proceeding with such comprehensive documentation to hand. Our written submissions to the committee and a number of items of additional information were readily accepted into consideration (as were those of colleagues in Donor Watch and Barnes Watch) and made available online. The witness hearings have been televised and their transcripts published online. The testimonies given at the hearing of 9 September are discussed below by Selby Whittingham of Donor Watch. Those given on 19 September are discussed opposite. (The filmed record of the latter can be seen on YouTube.) The record of what was said by whom of which interest group is there for all to see.

We were impressed, too, by the vigour and vigilance of the Scottish press. The Sunday Times (Scotland) journalist, Mark Macaskill, for example, had done what the Scottish Parliament, the Glasgow Council’s many tiers of cultural agencies, and – shamefully – the Burrell trustees themselves, had all failed to do – locate and heed (6 November 2013) the views of one of Sir William Burrell’s descendants: “Mona Dickinson, who lives in Evedon, Lincolnshire, said neither she, nor the wider family, had been consulted by the council or the trustees of the Burrell Collection. ‘I rather suspect they have tried to smuggle this through’, she said yesterday.” This intervention would not have been lost on the Art Fund’s director of development, Amy Ross, who argued in October’s Museums Journal that where no family members survive who might agree to renegotiate a bequest’s terms, existing arrangements should stand, for fear of clear breaches of trust dissuading others from making future bequests. Ms Dickinson’s opposition to the proposed overturning of Burrell’s terms of her ancestor’s bequest could not have been firmer or clearer: “Glasgow Council obviously thinks it can get the bill ratified this time. I’m sure it thinks sending some of the collection overseas will make money and attract publicity. But this debate was thoroughly rehearsed in 1997. Experts warned then, as now, that every time you wrap and unwrap a tapestry, some sort of damage can occur. It is inevitable.”

The hearing in which we gave evidence took place on 19 September under the committee set up to scrutinise the BURRELL COLLECTION (LENDING AND BORROWING) (SCOTLAND) BILL. We had assumed that consideration was being given to a proposal to over-ride the terms of Sir William Burrell’s bequest but learned, rather, that concrete arrangements were already underway to lend the collection’s works to a succession of venues within Britain and abroad even though this operation (known as “The Tour”) expressly ran against Burrell’s clear wishes and instructions, as set out in both his will and an agreement with the City of Glasgow. It began to seem as if the Scottish Parliament (which the comedian Billy Connolly dubbed a “Wee pretendy parliament”) was in danger of being bounced by an invitation from a big city council not to thwart a linked series of major and mutually dependent projects already set in train and fronted by a co-opted assembly of influential art world players in a new organisation – “Burrell Renaissance” – created to drive the not-authorised plans along.

It had not been reassuring that on the day of the 9 September hearing, the Convener of the scrutinising committee, Joan McAlpine, (SNP), a journalist on The Daily Record, had told The Scotsman that plans were already in motion through Glasgow Life (which she sees as “the arms-length organisation which manages the Burrell”) to send part of the Burrell Collection to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, and that these provided “an opportunity to enhance the reputation of the collection, the city and Scotland”. Nonetheless, she assured the newspaper, her committee had an “open mind”. It certainly appeared that, under the committee members’ interrogations, the case for the (prospective) enterprise had repeatedly fallen apart. The public discomfitting of the enigmatic Glaswegian director of the British Museum, Neil MacGregor, drew from him both an insistence on an earlier “neutrality” that had escaped some commentators and an impassioned espousal of the present attempt – to which he is party as a co-opted adviser – to overturn Burrell’s terms.

It became apparent during the hearings of 9 September, for example, that the sums being sought (£15m here, £15m there) had the precision of little more than a bureaucrat’s back-of-an-envelope wish list. It had further emerged that in little over a decade there had been a tenfold increase in the claimed cost of remedying the Burrell Collection’s leaky building. The fact that rectifying the Council’s long-standing neglect of the building (the roof of which had leaked from virtually its first days) was said to require such huge and rounded sums – as well as the closure of the collection for no less than four years – was itself presented as a justification for breaching Burrell’s terms and sending his works abroad as revenue-raisers and civic/national flag-wavers. In 2001 the estimated bill for repairing the roof was put at £1.75 million. With further sums allotted to upgrade the museum’s plant, retail and display and exhibition areas, the total was said to be “likely in the region of £4 to £5 million.” Today, the latter is put at between £40 and £45 million. No explanation was given for this staggering inflation.

Because of the clarity and force of Burrell’s explicit wishes and terms of bequest, it had been conceded that no possibility exists of their being overturned or “re-interpreted” in the courts: “As there is no legal remedy which would allow all the restrictions on lending and borrowing to be relaxed, Glasgow City Council must pursue a private bill in order to achieve this end”. If successful, the Council and its cultural satellites would not only breach Burrell’s prohibition on foreign loans but also those against loans within Britain of entire categories of vulnerable works, thereby creating not just a precedent for further general subversions of benefactors’ wishes and terms, but also a potentially lethal one for benefactors’ attempts to protect their art from being subjected to needless risks.

The extent to which, as previously described, all of the arts and sport have been brought under firm political control in Glasgow is remarkable and might be thought unfortunate. The two spheres are administered by an entity known as “Glasgow Life”, which is both a charity and a company with the formal title “Culture and Sport Glasgow”. The directors and trustees of Glasgow Life are appointed by the Council – and its chair is the deputy leader of Glasgow City Council, Councillor Archie Graham. Glasgow City Council manages all of the City’s museums and galleries through this body. In the case of the Burrell Collection, Burrell Renaissance has been created with a chairman who is also a member of Glasgow Life’s own, Council-appointed board of directors. At the bottom of this interlocking edifice is to be found the seemingly ineffectual Trustees of the bequeathed collection (- playing a “long-stop” role, in the chairman’s words). As for the Collection’s curators, when we attempted (through Glasgow Life) to meet them at the museum on September 18th we were met instead by three Glasgow Life officers.

Now we know better: the Committee is today recommending that Burrell’s prohibition be over-turned and that Glasgow Council’s wishes be met in full. The locked-in cash value of a fabulous artistic inheritance gifted to the people of Glasgow may now be harvested internationally by an administration that has brought the collection’s home to a shameful level of dereliction as it indulged itself elsewhere with expensive “Grand Projects”. Yet another tranche of hitherto well-preserved works will be consigned to the unvirtuous conservation cycle as works get “conserved” so as to be made “fit-to-travel” and then “re-conserved” to put them right on their return from their ordeals – if they return, that is, and are not filched en route (see right). The Committee has placed its faith in assurances given by the over-turners. We cannot share it.

THE BURRELL COMMITTEE HEARING OF 9 SEPTEMBER 2013

The Committee: Joan McAlpine (SNP) (Convener); Jackson Carlaw (Con); Mark Griffon (Lab); and, Gordon MacDonald (SNP). The Witnesses: Alan Eccles LLP; Cllr Archie Graham (Glasgow City Council Deputy Leader and Glasgow Life Chairperson); Sir Angus Grossart (Glasgow Life, Independent Director); Dr Bridget McConnell (Glasgow Life, Chief Executive); Hon. Christopher McLaren (Samuel Courtauld Trust, Chairman); Ben Thompson (National Galleries of Scotland, Chairman of Trustees); Jeremy Warren (Wallace Collection, Collections and Academic Director).

THE BURRELL COMMITTEE HEARING OF 19 SEPTEMBER 2013

The Committee: Joan McAlpine (SNP) (Convener); Jackson Carlaw (Con); Mark Griffon (Lab); and, Gordon MacDonald (SNP) (not present). The Witnesses:Michael Daley (ArtWatch UK); Prof. Hope Gretton (University of Edinburgh); Sir Peter Hutchison (Charirman, Burrell Trustees); Frances Lennard (Centre for Textile Conservation and technical Art History); Robert Taylor (Bannatyne Kirkwood France & Co); Peter Wilkinson (Constantine).

Secrecy, Transparency and Equivocations

Dr Whittingham discusses the September 9th hearing:

Ben Thomson for the National Galleries of Scotland on the subject of wills typifies those who want to have their cake and eat it. They profess fidelity to them to encourage future donors, but in practice think that they need not (sometimes/always) be followed. This contradiction is squared by arguing that the donor, if alive, would (mirabile dictu!) be someone of entirely the same opinions as the curator and would not only agree to the changes, but heartily advocate them! (So here Sir Angus Grossart on Burrell, 19; Hon. Christopher McLaren on Lord Lee of Fareham, 60-1).

Thomson’s equivocations are hard to understand, as he says that the NG of S adheres to conditions which they think are either absurd (their former Director, Sir Tim Clifford, derisively listed some in a radio programme in which I took part) or outdated – the latter in the case of the Vaughan Bequest of Turner watercolours, an example which must be awkward for advocates of the Burrell Bill.

The Hon. Christopher McLaren for the Samuel Courtauld Trust/Courtauld Gallery is much more gung-ho about lending and about overturning wills, admitting that they have done this in the case of the Seilern Bequest with the consent of the Charity Commission (47,60). He claims that no one has objected, but I did and I remember that Prof. Michael Hirst did.

In fact hard evidence is not given for many of the assertions and aims of those supporting the Bill. The financial benefits of tours are dubious. Whether they attract more visitors to the lending city is also unclear. The benefits to research are also debatable. The supporters say that loans promote it, whereas Jeremy Warren says that they take up curatorial time. When I first arrived at Manchester City Art Gallery, the committee chairman complained to me that the latter was the case.

Grossart says that the fact that Burrell lent to the 1901 Glasgow International exhibition shows that he was internationally minded (Grossart, 17). But that exhibition attracted visitors from abroad to Glasgow, just the opposite of what Grossart is advocating. The Chairperson of Glasgow Life (Cllr Archie Graham) states that Burrell was determined that his collection “should benefit the people of Glasgow” (14), whereas, Grossart says that “from a museums point of view, collections are left for the benefit of humanity” (17). No evidence is produced that this was Burrell’s aim or that it trumped his wish to benefit Glasgow. Of course supporters of the Bill argue that reciprocal inward loans benefit Glasgow, but again no evidence is produced that that was what Burrell wished. The promoters have conducted polls which show a majority is not opposed to the proposed change. But how was the question framed and how far did the respondents appreciate all the factors?

The Convener says that in the past Neil MacGregor opposed changing the will (33). But he has supported just the opposite. True, David Lister reported in The Independent (13.10.1997) that MacGregor, while maintaining “the need to respect the wishes of benefactors once they have been agreed by trustees”, was going to tell the Burrell Commission next day that the Museums & Galleries Act 1992 allowed some national Museums to ignore those wishes after 50 years. In fact he had stated that in the evidence submitted to the Commission on 1.8.1997. I can only imagine that he felt obliged to enunciate a general (and in practice meaningless) support for donors’ wishes as Director of the National Gallery, while in his heart having little sympathy with that. I remember attending a lecture at the Courtauld Institute years earlier in which he derided donors. Then in 1997-8 it was while he was Director that the National Gallery tried to persuade the Wallace to lend a Rubens contrary to the terms of the Wallace bequest. If he is now reluctant to give oral evidence to the committee, that would not be surprising. When I tried to tackle him in person on the subject of donors’ wills (at the AGM of the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution), he made a quick exit.

As for the 1992 Act, it was a reiteration of those of 1883 and 1954. In 1883 The NG was acutely short of space and had an unbalanced and partly unwelcome collection. It was at a high tide of extreme Liberalism. The responsible Minister, George Shaw Lefevre, was “on the radical wing of the Liberal party” and was following the policy of a predecessor, Acton Smee Ayrton, “a former Treasury apparatchik recklessly determined on cost cutting” (Simon Thurley, Men from the Ministry, 2013, pp.31, 40). Financial Secretary to the Treasury 1882-4, Leonard Courtney, was another radical, who in 1916 supported the abortive Bill allowing the National Gallery to sell pictures. (In that debate he explained the variation in 25 and 50 year terms after which wills could be breached, something which puzzles people to-day; House of Lords, 21.11.1916 ). Both the 1883 Act (passed after virtually no debate and uncritically copied since) and the 1916 Bill had the same aim – of ridding the National Gallery of part of the Turner Bequest. As such they have no relevance to the Burrell question.

Numbers of works in collections are adduced as an argument for lending, on the grounds that there is not space to show most. Thus the Burrell can only display 2,000 out of 9,000 items (25). The National Galleries of Scotland have 100,000 items (44). These figures are meaningless unless broken down into those for works (a) which cannot usually be shown for conservation reasons (b) which are of little interest (c) which are the key ones. It is of course the last that foreigners want to borrow, and which (if not on loan) attract visitors to the home museum. For 150 years the figure of 30,000 or so works has been used by those wanting to argue for splitting up and loaning the Turner Bequest, a wholly misleading and nonsensical figure when one comes to exhibiting it and realises that there are only 20-40 key works that can be shown constantly.

Jeremy Warren admirably puts the case against undoing Burrell’s lending conditions (48-52). On the Wallace’s own record, he refers to the refusal to lend its Rubens landscape to the National Gallery in 1998 despite the pressure to do so from the latter. Warren’s evidence should be accorded great weight also because the Wallace Collection is the museum among those cited most analogous to the Burrell Collection.

The Hon. Christopher McLaren says that he and Warren, contrary to appearances, don’t really disagree, as he has recruited Dame Rosalind Savill to the Samuel Courtauld Trust (56). That begs the question of how far Warren and Savill agree (her somewhat nuanced views were briefly reported by David Lister in The Independent, 16.4.1997). It was under Savill that the Wallace held the Freud and Hirst exhibitions. Was she overpowered by Freud’s charm and forcefulness or did she really believe in her heart that showing his work in the midst of Wallace’s was compatible with the spirit of Lady Wallace’s stipulation that the collection be kept unmixed?

McLaren argues that what matters is the spirit and not the detail (47). Of course disregarding the letter for the spirit conveniently allows the woolly subjectivism which is so often employed to overturn donors’ stipulations. In the case of the Lane Bequest, the National Gallery stuck like a limpet to the letter of the law in disregard of what a House of Commons committee judged was Lane’s actual intention. Ironically it was said that under Scottish rather than English law Lane’s un-witnessed codicil giving his collection to Dublin rather than to London would have been legally valid. MacGregor naturally favoured the National Gallery view, supported by a false understanding of the history, which I had to correct in the columns of the Museums Journal.

McLaren’s view of Lord Lee (60-61) is hard to reconcile with Lee’s opposition in the House of Lords and The Times in 1930 to the British Museum & National Gallery (Overseas Loans) Bill. Lee’s opposition nearly provoked a physical attack on him in the Lords by the proponent of the Bill, Lord d’Abernon! His statement of the risks of travel was reported at length in The Times (16-17.12.1930) and would surely have influenced the views of Burrell. The Bill was opposed by the BM, for which Lord Hanworth, Master of the Rolls, spoke. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, another BM trustee, gave three reasons for opposition: 1. Disturbance of study. 2. Danger of damage. 3. Difficulty of resisting pressure to lend. The BM was dropped from inclusion when the National Gallery (Overseas Loans) Bill was introduced in 1935. This and the exclusion of the BM from subsequent Bills constitutes an awkward fact for Neil MacGregor. The 27th Earl of Crawford found fault with the 1935 as with the 1930 Bill. He argued that, if the object was to promote Britain abroad, that should be done by British art, leaving the restrictions on lending foreign art, which was what was agreed. Mention has been made of art as a tool of diplomacy. Of course art has been used for that from time immemorial, but as gifts. No doubt international relations have a part to play today, but only when other considerations do not militate against lending.

Attempts having failed in 1930 and 1935 to allow the loan abroad of foreign art, in 1953 the 28th Earl of Crawford told the House of Lords that the Treasury was “asking you for the third time to change your minds” (24 November 1953, 466), though again only for the National Gallery and Tate. Again examples of damage done to works when on loan were cited – this time by MPs as well. The debates stretched into a whole year and raised questions about various wills such as Sir Hugh Lane’s. Like other donors Lane changed his provisions over time, as did Burrell, who according to his secretary, Mrs Shiel in 1997, once thought of locating his museum in London. This has been used as an argument for not regarding donors’ final wishes as binding for ever on the reasoning that if they had lived longer they might have changed again. However donors such as Lane, Turner and Burrell had laid their plans over many years and settled on their final one after much thought, perhaps sometimes more thought than that given to the matter by those who wish to change their provisions. The advocates of changing wills might come to change their minds too.

Today’s wish to “liberate” collections (Grossart, 16), the belief that what matters is “getting the works out and about” (McLaren, 56) may in the future seem to be just a fashion, the consequences of which come to be regretted, in some cases too late. McLaren says that the modification of Seilern’s conditions did not remove his one against lending paintings on panel, which the Courtauld would have adhered to anyway (McLaren, 48). This is tantamount to saying that a donor’s wishes should only hold when they concur with those of the curators and trustees for the time being. It should be clear that the main advocates of this Bill in fact do not believe that donors should control their collections from beyond the grave except perhaps for a short time after their deaths, whether or not the collection had been accepted on that basis. Is retrospective legislation desirable?

McLaren says that no one has objected to the changes made by the Courtauld. But the general public will not be aware of such changes. I cannot think of any recent museum catalogue or guide which states the donor’s conditions, much less any changes made to them by the museum. The old catalogues of the Wallace Collection, reprinted in successive editions over many decades, did, but that was unique. The V&A went further in setting up boards giving the conditions of gifts such as that of Sheepshanks, but it is hard now to discover the terms under which many of its main bequests were given. When I suggested some time ago that it would be easy to give these on the museum’s website, I was told that that would be too much trouble. That trouble would arise from the public knowing too much was clearly the unstated thought. The art world in general is shrouded in secrecy. Moves to greater transparency such as the Tate’s publishing the minutes of its board meetings online end in farce when one sees how much is deleted first. Dr Penny has asked for his submission to this committee to be removed from the website and has said that he will reveal details of damage to works of which he knows only under the cloak of the greatest secrecy. In such a state of affairs one cannot have much faith in museum assertions about damage or anything else unless these are closely challenged. Meanwhile curators commenting on a report on the Burrell hearings in the Museums Journal find it advisable to do so anonymously.

Statistics are also sometimes dubious. Thus Ben Thomson states that the Burrell exhibition at the Piers Art Centre at Stromness was visited by 80% of local residents (54). How local? Did they pay or get in free and in the latter case how were they counted? Is he talking about the total number of visitors or of visits?

Reference is made to maintaining or increasing the reputation of museums. In the case of Warren reputation among potential donors seems to be what is meant (49). In the case of the others the reputation of the curators among their colleagues round the world. It is doubtful if the wider public is much influenced by these considerations. A museum’s reputation may be damaged more directly when visitors go to it and are disappointed in their expectation of seeing key works which turn out to be out on loan. Again this may affect only a minority. Mention is made of the Cluny Museum in Paris, which has started lending abroad (Grossart, 22-3). That has lent its famed Unicorn tapestries to Japan. When I checked the first 50 (out of 800) visitors’ comments on the museum on TripAdvisor’s website many mention their absence, but only three thought their visit ruined thereby. Even so, is that an acceptable percentage?

Though I think the Bill makes an unnecessary and undesirable change, I am not wholly out of sympathy with its promoters. Julian Spalding, who initiated the move when he was Director of Glasgow museums, in May gave us a very stimulating talk, most of which I strongly agreed with and which consisted of suggestions probably too radical for many of the Bill’s supporters! When I was a curator at Manchester, I was frustrated by the “squirrelists” (Grossart, 22) and took the conservation concerns too lightly. Long thought about the issues has, I hope, made me wiser. Truly liberal views will take into account the dead and unborn as well as the living and current fashions. J.S. Mill recognised that opinions differ, which is why the peculiarities of donors’ provisions are to be cherished rather than dismissed. Otherwise museums will lose their individuality. Of the Burrell it is said that “the asset and unique selling point … is the imagination and vision of the man who created this incredible collection – that in itself is an amazing story” (McConnell 29) and that it constitutes a union of collection and building (McConnell 20).

I also have sympathy with Sir William Burrell’s Trustees. They opposed change in 1997 but now back it under the pressure of those who urge the dire necessity of raising money for the building (as their Chairman stated in the September 19 hearing). The same much contested argument was used to overturn the wishes of Dr Barnes, resulting in an even more fundamental departure from the donor’s ideas. The Trustees argue that they will have the final say in what should be lent abroad and some say in what should be lent in the UK. However they will be under the pressure to lend which Lords Crawford and others thought could be intolerable. Parts of the lending code are flabby (39-40). An object, it says, should not be lent for 5 years after it has returned from exhibition unless there are “exceptional circumstances”. Any circumstance can be exceptional for those bent on circumventing restrictions. Objects, it adds, shall not be on loan for longer than 3 years except for a tour longer than 3 years. That is no real restriction at all.

If the Committee is minded to back the Bill, the Code should be tightened up and the Trustees given final say in all cases. If a long tour is contemplated, the Bill should limit that to a one-off and thereafter strictly definite restrictions on time, repetition, material etc. should apply.

Selby Whittingham

Selby Whittingham is Secretary of the Watteau Society, Donor Watch and The Independent Turner Society.

UPDATE 19-11-13:

Restoration Damages Market Value

Philip Hook, a director and senior paintings specialist at Sotheby’s, has given further “from-inside-the-art trade” confirmation that restorations can damage the value of paintings. Writing in the Guardian (“Got anything in the red”, Arts, 19.11.13) on the present art market disconnect between sheer artistic quality and realised top prices, Hook gives good account of the Bling Factors driving markets fuelled by super-rich aesthetic chumps seeking instantly recognisable works above better but less familiar ones. He well describes the effects of atists’ biographical back-stories and the assistance given to prices by appealing subject matter: pretty women; animals that are depicted alive and not dead, and so forth. In discussing negative market forces, Mr Hook also cites the effects of picture restoration: “Condition is a factor. Paintings suffer and age over time, some more than others. Like human beings, some are subjected to cosmetic surgery. Where this has been too extensive, the price of a painting will be affected.” It is precisely for this reason that accidents suffered by loaned and borrowed works are so little reported. If paintings were required to be accompanied by log books which listed and described all known previous “conservation treatments”, owners might think twice about agreeing to take risks by lending works to travelling exhibitions.

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MR MACGREGOR AND THE BRITISH MUSEUM’S UNDERPINNING OF GLASGOW COUNCIL’S PRIVATE BILL:
Above, top, Fig 1: Neil MacGregor, director of the British Museum and former director of the National Gallery (1987-2002).
Above, Fig. 2: Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery (since 2008).
1) A Director’s Thrust…
Item: On 15 September the Evening Standard Londoner’s Diary reported:
Don your armour. The British Museum’s director Neil MacGregor has unsheathed an antique sword and is pointing it at National Gallery director Nicholas Penny. “At stake is whether a Glasgow gallery can lend out its collection, but it pertains to both institutions’ policies of moving art around. When William Burrell left his art collection to Glasgow in 1944, he stipulated it shouldn’t be moved. It was housed outside the city but the building now needs renovating and its trustees have asked permission of the Scottish Parliament to change the terms of the bequest to allow the works to tour. “Penny wrote a letter to the Scottish Parliament, objecting, adding darkly that there were many incidents of galleries damaging works of art while moving them and he was prepared to describe them in confidence to a ‘single trustworthy individual nominated by Scottish Government [sic]’. The letter went up on the Scottish Parliament website but was then removed . “Now MacGregor has also submitted evidence. The British Museum has offered to help with transportation and MacGregor cites prior examples of successful moves by, er, the National Gallery. “‘The National Gallery in 2011 invited museums abroad to lend their Leonardos for a temporary exhibition,’ he notes. ‘In return, we lent the supremely fragile Leonardo Cartoon to the Louvre, confident it could responsibly move it, exhibit it there, and then bring it safely home.’ “Next year’s Rembrandt exhibition opens at the National Gallery. It has borrowed Man in Armour from Kelvingrove, the Burrell’s sister gallery in Glasgow. Borrowing okay, but lending not?”
It seemed unlikely that Nicholas Penny, who had attempted to give his evidence in confidence to the Burrell Committee, had been the journalistic source for this item. The charge of hypocrisy had been made in the Scottish parliamentary committee hearing on 9 September by Dr Bridget McConnell of Glasgow Life and the Chief Executive of Culture & Sport Glasgow. She declared herself: “surprised to hear that view from Dr Penny, not least of all because we loan items from our museums collection to him. Indeed he has asked for a Rembrandt from Kelvingrove museum – probably our most valuable item – for a major exhibition next year”. At the same hearing, Sir Angus Grossart (he also being of Glasgow Life and the chair of Burrell Renaissance on which Neil Macgregor serves as an adviser), held Penny’s views “inconsistent with his own practice”. Those views were put to ArtWatch UK’s director Michael Daley at the 19 September parliamentary hearing by the committee’s convener, Joan McAlpine (SNP), to which he replied:
That is perfectly true. As director of the National Gallery, Dr Penny is clearly in an awkward position – after all, the The National Gallery has loan policies – but from the beginning he has made clear his general disapproval of loans. He thinks that far too many loans are made at far too much risk and has sought to introduce new types of exhibitions at the National Gallery in which the need to draw in works from abroad is greatly reduced. Moreover, he thinks that many blockbuster exhibitions are, in fact, quite naked revenue raisers that serve little or no academic scholarly purpose and he personally is very keen and committed to developing exhibitions that are more thoughtful and more helpful to the public and in which the borrowings, in so far as they are made, are of less famous and well-known artworks.”
Item: Nicholas Penny had received support during the hearings of 9 September. In his testimony, Jeremy Warren, the Collections and Academic Director of the Wallace Collection, said: “On Dr Penny’s views, although his head is organising Vermeer and Vienna secession exhibitions – because he has to and it is part of what is expected of museums these days – his heart is probably saying some of the things that I have said. Actually, there is a risk whenever an object is moved. Even if an object is moved within a museum, it is affected in however miniscule a way. We have been through an age of exhibitions having become almost like medieval pilgrimages, but that might change in years to come, and there might be more focus on the integrity of collections…”
Item: Nicholas Penny might have been aware that his predecessor as director of the National Gallery, Charles Saumarez Smith, was reportedly taunted during a Board meeting by its chairman on the low visitor numbers for his special exhibitions. Such pressures are immense in today’s museum world. When serving as the director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Dr Alan Borg, was chided by Alan Williams MP: “When you have one of the highest grants-in-aid per head per visitor, you have a duty to the taxpayer to try and get more people through your doors. The idea is to get people into the museums…Your blockbusters do not bust many blocks, do they?”
Item: In The Times of 27 February 2008, Dalya Alberge reported that “Nicholas Penny, the new director of the National Gallery, said yesterday that the 184-year-old institution had a duty to display art with which the public was unfamiliar rather than yet another parade of an artist’s greatest hits….What is important is encouraging historical and visual curiosity in the general public…I have a lot of thinking to do about our exhibitions and the direction they are taking.”
Item: The Stifling of Museum Officials’ Anxieties. In his preface to Francis Haskell’s last book The Ephemeral Museum, Penny addressed the charge of hypocrisy…as it had earlier been levelled against Prof. Haskell:
…And he was also accused of hypocrisy because he was, and indeed continued to be, on advisory committees for exhibitions. Francis’s position was never the simple one of objecting to all exhibitions, though it was always a principle with him to refuse to be associated with pressure on directors who were reluctant to lend. [In any event] No public rebuttal was attempted of the case he made, since it would only have brought to public notice the near accidents of recent years and might have prompted public statements from other senior figures. At least one other eminent art historian – Sir Ernst Gombrich – has expressed misgivings about the transportation of great masterpieces. But museum officials are obliged to stifle their anxieties…”
Item: On 30 December 1995 Sir Ernst Gombrich wrote (letter to Michael Daley):
…When I was in Vienna in October, the Kunsthistorisches Museum was under enormous pressure to lend Vermeer’s Artist in his Studio, indeed in the end the Queen of the Netherlands rang the President of Austria (who had no idea what she was talking about!) So the Museum called in ‘experts’ including a restorer from Germany who all said that the picture was not in a condition to travel. So even restorers can do some good!”
(On 21 July 1995 Sir Ernst had written: “I need hardly tell you that I have much sympathy for the aims of ArtWatch”.)
Item: The Met’s Strong-arming of Reluctant Lenders. The director of the Metropolitan Museum, New York, Thomas P. Campbell, said in 2007, when serving as the museum’s curator of tapestry: “I do have the potential to organize exhibitions on a level that other museums simply don’t have. I mean no one but the Met could have pulled off the exhibition of Renaissance tapestry we had here a few years ago, where there were forty-five tapestries on show. The politics involved, the financing involved, the leverage, and the expertise involved: No one else had that. We bribed and cajoled and twisted the arms of institutions around the world – well, we didn’t bribe, of course – but politically it was very complicated negotiating the loan of these objects, which came from the British royal collection, the Louvre, the Hermitage, the Vatican and were just absolute masterpieces.” (“Museum ~ Behind the Scenes at the Metropolitan Museum of Art”, Danny Danziger, 2007, Viking.)
Item: Above, the National Gallery’s 16th century wood panel painting, Beccafumi’s Marcia, which was dropped and smashed on January 21st 2008 during the de-installation of the exhibition Renaissance Siena: Art for a City. After the accident it was said by the gallery (Report, 13 March 2008) that the panel is “fragile” and will “never be allowed to go out on loan.” The panel is one of two Beccafumis owned by the National Gallery. They had been removed from their customary place in the gallery’s high-ceilinged, naturally lit Renaissance galleries for the special, temporary exhibition in the artificially lit basement galleries. There, they had been united with a third panel of the original Beccafumi series, and all three were mounted together in a special showcase. The people who ‘dismounted’ the special showcase had not fully appreciated its complicated manner of construction, and in the process one of the three panels slipped and smashed on the floor. The odds had been two to one against the borrowed panel being the victim in this accident. An international incident had been narrowly avoided. Because the damaged panel belonged to the National Gallery itself, it was immediately repaired before even the Trustees had seen its condition. After repair, the damaged panel and her sister were both placed in the National Gallery’s badly and entirely artificially lit, cramped reserve collection (which is open the public for only a few hours each week). No press release was issued announcing the accident but brief mention of it was later contained in an online report of the Board’s minutes. When ArtWatch UK commented on the accident in its Journal, the press picked up the story. The then new director at the gallery, Nicholas Penny, gave ArtWatch UK hard copy photographs of the smashed panel and a copy of an independent report of the accident commissioned by the gallery. [“Report on the Circumstances behind the Accidental damage to NG 6369 Domenico Beccafumi’s Marcia“, by Tadeusz J. A. Glazbus, Head of Internal Audit, the British Museum.] A striking feature of that report was evidence of the chaotic circumstances that can arise when large exhibitions are dismounted. Once exhibitions are over owners seek to have their works packed and returned as quickly as possible. As a result floor space rapidly fills with packing cases and materials, couriers and conservators, around whom in-house curators and visiting scholars step with guests who are eager to study the backs of works as they are removed from the walls. One Trustee of the gallery told us that it “had been pandemonium on the day”.
Item: In The Times of 19 January 2013, Magnus Linklater reported that the priceless contents of the Burrell Museum are to be taken abroad on tour, despite the specific wishes of its creator, Sir William Burrell that they should never leave the country. The decision that they should do so had been taken collectively by Glasgow Council, Glasgow Life and and the Burrell Trustees even though it would “require a bill to be presented to the Scottish Parliament in order to amend the strict terms of Burrell’s bequest”. [Our emphasis – we would have thought that getting a bill passed by the Scottish Parliament was a more appropriate term.]
Item: On 6 September 2013, Phil Miller in The Herald reported:
“One of the art world’s leading figures has raised serious concerns over Glasgow’s attempt to tour the treasures of its famous Burrell Collection abroad, saying there is a “deplorable tendency” to deny the risks of transporting art around the world.
“In a candid submission to the Scottish Parliament committee considering The Burrell Collection (Lending And Borrowing) Bill, Dr Nicholas Penny, the director of the National Gallery in London, says moving works of art has led to several major accidents, incidents and damage to works, many of which have not come to public attention:
“‘What is very often forgotten in discussions of this kind is the moral advantage and tangible (if not always immediate) benefit of a declared preference for honouring the wishes of of the donor. Real concern for the future is always more persuasive in those who have a genuine feeling for the past;
“‘The financial benefits of touring art collections are also greatly exaggerated and do not lead to any significant increase in visitors to the galleries touring the works;
“‘While there has always been much talk of profile-raising to palliate the mercenary motives or to compensate for disappointing fees, the interests of those brokering or encouraging touring exhibitions may not always be very obvious but should be examined very severely.'”
Item: On 23 January 2013, The Herald reported that the British Museum had been lined up for the first stop of an ambitious world tour of the Burrell Collection: “The British Museum, whose director is Glasgow-born Neil MacGregor, is planning a show of of at least six months if Glasgow City Council’s bid to change the rules governing Sir William Burrell’s bequest…is successful…”
Item: On 25 April 2013 The Herald reported that Burrell Renaissance, led by financier Sir Angus Grossart, will be driving the plans for the Burrell Collection which were expected to cost more than the Kelvingrove museum’s £35m facelift. The newly instituted group included Dr Bridget McConnell, the CEO of Glasgow Life, Lord Kerr of Kinlochard, a former ambassador to the US and head of the Foreign Office, and Neil MacGregor, “the Scottish director of the British Museum” who was to be a special adviser. MacGregor listed among potential venues for The Tour the British Museum itself, Europe, North America and Asia.
MR MACGREGOR’S NO-SHOW AT THE SCOTTISH PARLIAMENT HEARINGS
At the September 9 hearing the following exchange occurred: The Convener: Is it correct that the tour is being organised in collaboration with the British Museum? Dr McConnell: Yes. We spoke to Neil MacGregor last week about this. As you can imagine, given that the British Museum lends 4,000 items a year, it has an extensive touring department. We are talking about contracting the British Museum not to deliver the tour but to mentor our staff, because we want some of the skills to transfer here and we want to build awareness and knowledge. We have some of that, but we want to augment it by either working through his staff or contracting some of his staff to work here in Glasgow. An arts agency – I have forgotten its name, but we can get it for you – co-ordinated the Kelvingrove tour in North America on our behalf. It took all the insurance risks and made all the preparations for opening events and so on. It has indicated that it would be interested in doing that again in North America this time and our staff are exploring with the British Museum any similar opportunities with similar agencies. The Convener: We have invited the British Museum to give evidence, but unfortunately it has not been able to accommodate us. What benefit will the tour bring to the British Museum? Dr McConnell: Without putting words in Neil MacGregor’s mouth, I know that he would be delighted to provide written evidence if the committee wants it. Sir Angus Grossart: He has been on holiday. Dr McConnell: He has been abroad on business and then he is off on holiday, so he is out of the country… The Convener: Neil MacGregor said on record in the past that he was against changing the will, so it would be interesting to receive from him written evidence that tells us why he has changed his mind. Around the time when the Burrell Renaissance was being formed and Neil MacGregor from the British Museum was invited to be a consultant to it, a story appeared in a newspaper – I believe it was The Scotsman – saying that the British Museum would be centrally involved. Could a conflict of interest be perceived in Mr MacGregor’s role in Burrell Renaissance? Were other partners considered? Sir Angus Grossart: Many international options were considered. Neil MacGregor is a pre-eminent figure. He was not chosen out of deference to the British Museum; he was invited to be an adviser on his merits. If we were to show any part of the collection in London, that museum would be the most fitting and matching destination [Over the much better temporary exhibition accomodation of the Royal Academy? – Ed.] I do not think any preference was given. I doubt whether there was any intent to give Neil MacGregor, who was previously the director of the National Gallery in London, a preference. I would not have been party to anything like that. The Convener: The collection could be shown in London without changing the will? Councillor Graham: Yes. Dr McConnell: Yes.
MR MACGREGOR’S (LATE) SUBMISSION TO THE BURRELL COMITTEE:
Item 1: Concerning Mr MacGregor’s 1997 “neutrality” Mr MacGregor submitted to the current Parliamentary Committee a transcript of his earlier views, as submitted to the House of Lords on 1 August 1997 when consideration was being given to the restrictions on international lending at the Burrell Collection. Specifically, MacGregor had then been invited to give evidence on: “the practice of inter-gallery lending in both the domestic and the international context in terms of its prevalence, its purposes, its effects and its risks”. Mr MacGregor stated that although he had been called as a witness “by the Promoters”, [Glasgow Council] he wished it to be made clear that, at that date, he had taken the position in which: “I neither support nor oppose the specific proposal that Glasgow City Council should be allowed to lend abroad objects from the Burrell Collection. On that my position is one of neutrality.” Mr MacGregor further stated that: “The passage from the wall to the packing case is widely considered to be the most dangerous stage of art transport.” Although he did not say so, we would assume that, at that date, Mr MacGregor accepted that sending works abroad on multi-venue tours necessarily and inescapably increased the risks to which all loaned works are exposed. Professional art insurers have assessed the risk of loaning a work to another venue as being six times greater than when the work is left hanging in a museum and gallery. That being so, it would follow that works being sent on a six-venues world tour would be placed at six times six more risk.
Item: In the Spring 2008 ArtWatch UK Journal No. 23, we ran the following report:
‘Museums now have to do blockbuster shows to get the people in’, Paul Williamson, of the art transporting firm Constantine, said on BBC Radio 4’s The World Tonight [on 5 November 2007], adding ‘They’re under financial pressure to tour the exhibitions: so various exhibitions may undertake a five, ten or fifteen-venue tour around the world.’ On the same programme, a spokesman for the art insurers Hiscox disclosed that a large claim was filed when a forklift truck driver at Heathrow drove his forks through a very well-known painting that was very lovely.”
NB – The identity of the painting was not disclosed. This is common procedure with accidents – no owner, whether private or institutional, lightly discloses news of an accident and the subsequent covering of traces by a restorer. For this reason, private owners whose work is damaged when on loan to a large institution will usually prefer to have the in-house restorers make a no-charge repair rather than submit an insurance claim for privately commissioned restoration repairs.
Item: Concealing travel injuries. The role of restorers (aka conservators) in concealing injuries is abhorrent to us but often welcomed by arts bureaucrats. As we reported in posts of 2 February 2011 (Why is the European Commission instructing museums to incur more risks by lending more art?) and 8 February 2011 (The European Commission’s way of moving works of art around), the European Union sees its objective of generating smart, sustainable and inclusive growth at a time when many of its industries are in decline, as being most realisable in the cultural sphere. To create jobs, the Commission exhorts more museums to loan more works and to be prepared to take more risks with their holdings. A specific European suggestion is that lenders should: “not insure works while they [are] at the exhibition venue”. This ignores the fact that (as Neil MacGregor and many others acknowledge) most injuries occur during the time of the exhibitions – and especially at moments of handling: mounting/dismounting, unpacking/repacking. In addition to those principally human hazards, environmental stress and risks can prove higher during exhibitions than during the travelling time. This occurs because when well-publicised exhibitions draw the crowds they seek, the atmospheric “micro-environments” of galleries can fluctuate at alarming and hazardous rates as heat and humidity levels soar and then decline at the end of each day at rates with which air-conditioning units cannot cope. ArtWatch knows of many panics that have been triggered among museums’ curatorial and conservation staffs by the phenomenon of heat/humidity surges. In attempt to avoid this problem, the National Gallery greatly restricted the number of potential visits (and hence income) to the recent Leonardo exhibition, but not all institutions share such scruples. Notoriously, and perhaps least scrupulously of all, the Vatican continues to pack visitors in their tens of thousand each day into the confines of the Sistine Chapel, even though the last (artistically disastrous) restoration had, by stripping off Michelangelo’s final layer of glue-based painting, exposed the bare fresco surfaces to the ravages of modern Roman environmental pollution for the first time, and even though it has been admitted that the present air-conditioning is not fit for purpose. For its part, the EU urges both that greater risks should be taken with security (by reducing the role of couriers) and that the depreciation of value which results from works being injured and then repaired should be discounted because “in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are”.
MR MACGREGOR’S (LATE) SUBMISSION TO THE BURRELL COMITTEE
Item 2: Concerning Earlier Misunderstandings of Mr MacGregor’s Position:
1. I have been invited to comment on the application to vary the terms of the Will of Sir William Burrell in order to allow objects from the Burrell Collection to be lent for exhibition outside of the United Kingdom. I am sorry that I was unable to attend the the committee’s earlier meeting. “2. I note that in the proceedings of the committee of 9 September 2013, column 33, the Convener asserts that I ‘said on the record in the past that [I] was against changing the will’. I fear the Convener is mistaken. In previous discussions of the topic, in 1997, I explicitly state that my position was one of neutrality. That is clearly recorded in the formal precognition dated 15th August 1997 and the report of the of proceedings at the public enquiry page 1272 section A dated 14th October 1997. My [then] position was accurately and unequivocally reported in the Glasgow Herald of 15th october 1997. “3. I have no idea why Tom [sic] Dalyell in his obituary of Colin Donald wrongly suggested that I was opposed to a change in the Will – I was not; nor do I know why David Lister (Independent 13th October), writing before I had spoken to the commission on 15th October, mistakenly assumed that I would argue that the wishes of benefactors should always be paramount.”
Item: Tam Dalyell’s 27 October 2006 obituary in the Independent on Colin Donald, Burrell Collection trustee:
When in 1997 the Director of Glasgow Museums, supported by Glasgow City Council, mounted a legal challenge to the terms of the will of one of their greatest benefactors, there was outrage among museum staff nationwide. Julian Spalding sought to lend out items from the Burrell Collection, contrary to the specified wishes of the collector and ship owner, Sir William Burrell, who died in 1958. Neil MacGregor, Director of the National Gallery, among many others, deplored the challenge, but it was left to Colin Donald to fight it…As senior trustee he was absolute in defence of of the interests of Sir William Burrell’s Trust. ‘The Trustees’, he wrote in a letter to the Independent in 1997, have been obliged to oppose [the Spalding challenge] formally as we are of the view that we have a prescribed agenda to follow, which is to uphold the terms of the gift so meticulously set out by Sir William Burrell…”
Item: “Protect works of art from moving” ~ Colin Donald’s letter to the Independent, 28 April 1997:
Sir: David Lister (“When treasure becomes a burden”, 16 April) is free to draw his own conclusions about the Burrell Collection from the facts, but it is important that these facts are correct. “It is not the trustees who have ‘called in the parliamentary commissioners’. The draft provisional order has been promoted by the City of Glasgow. The trustees have been obliged to oppose it formally as we are of the view that we have a prescribed agenda to follow, which is to uphold the terms of the gift so meticulously set out by Sir William Burrell. “In any event, the widened lending powers being sought will bring no benefit to the collection, although I suppose they might have a spin-off for Glasgow in tourism terms, but even that is arguable. The trustees have seen no evidence that Glasgow has ‘lost out’ on any exhibitions because of the restrictions on lending items from the Burrell Collection abroad. In any event, there are many items in the rest of Glasgow’s excellent collection which can be loaned without restriction. “The changes which the City seeks to make amount to somewhat more than ‘dots and commas’. The draft provisional order seeks powers to lend items from the collection for exhibition in any public gallery or other public place in any part of the world, without being responsible for any damage or injury thereto or for any loss or depreciation thereof … with such arrangements (if any) for insurance as the Council may decide. They thus want to sweep away the carefully negotiated lending terms inserted by Sir William in the memorandum of agreement and the will.”
NB – The present Burrell Trustees’ seeming abandonment of their primary duty to respect and enforce the wishes of the benefactor is striking. At the 19 September Parliamentary Committee hearing, the Chairman of the Trustees, Sir Peter Hutchison, spoke in a manner indistinguishable from that of Glasgow Life officers: notwithstanding what he described as “the problems of overseas lending”, he welcomed the sending of Burrell Collection works overseas on what he referred to as “the tour”; he expressed confidence that if he were to hold an imaginary conversation between his own and Sir William’s consciences, that the latter, 55 years after his death, might react favourably if asked to trust his [present] trustees; he cited as a kind of authority for the proposed overturning of Burrell’s conditions, the fact that the trustees of the Barnes foundation had recently performed a similar manoeuvre; most disturbingly of all he seemed to show a distinct deference to the wishes and abilities of the municipally over-arching body that is Glasgow Life. He used an unfortunate cricketing analogy: henceforth, although the trustees would assume a new role in monitoring loans in general (- which was to say, loans at home and abroad) their position would be not that of a wicketkeeper but that of the fielding position long-stop (i.e. the hapless role seen in schoolboy cricket of a fielder placed behind the wicketkeeper on the boundary in hope of stopping all of the missed balls from scoring four runs). The reason for this self-diminishing role would seem to be that the trustees will now be working closely with Glasgow Life, which body already directs the lending policy of the city’s museums generally. In effect, Sir Peter was accepting what he might well have felt to be a politically inevitable homogenisation of museums and galleries within the city. We note that in 1997, when Julian Spalding was pushing for an overturning of Burrell’s conditions, the position of Keeper at the Burrell Collection had recently been axed. As mentioned above, opposite, we were unable to discover if anyone might be employed in that capacity today. It seems extraordinary to us that such a fabulous collection should be bereft of both strong and independent curatorial leadership and strongly supportive trustees.
Mr MacGregor’s September 18 Reply to the Burrell Committee, continued:
5. It was suggested by the Convener on 9th September (column 33) that as the British Museum might be involved in helping organise the logistics of a possible loan, and as works from the Burrell Collection might be shown at the British Museum, I might find myself in a position of conflict of interest. I think I can assure the Convenor that this is not so. The British Museum would not profit financially from either aspect of such co-operation with our Glasgow colleagues…” NB That absence of any financial benefit to the British Museum would only be so if visitors throughout the proposed six-months exhibition were not charged, and if they were to spend no money in the museum’s shops and cafes.

Item: How Future Loan Exhibitions Might Help Fund the Urgently Needed Repairs of the Burrell Museum and the Proposed Refurbishments of the Building.

It is not clear how, without entrance charges, lending works to the British Museum might offset in part the estimated high costs of putting the Burrell Museum to rights during the period between 2016 and 2020 when its building is scheduled to be closed for already urgently needed repairs. During the 9 September Hearing, the Committee’s members showed distinct concerns about what might be termed “the business model” of The Tour. In fact, the revenue-raising capacity of The Tour seemed to disappear in a single question/answer exchange:

The Convener: Paragraph 25 of the promoter’s memorandum suggests that lending the collection will provide a revenue stream to support the [Burrell building’s] remedial works. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and about how much you stand to gain financially from lending to put towards the cost of refurbishment? Dr McConnell: Touring does not in itself make money. If it washes its face and make a small profit, it is doing pretty well.”
Mr MacGregor’s September 18 2013 submitted view on the nature of loan risks:
…10. The question of the risk of damage to objects lent is a very important one, and has been much discussed. I attach an appendix to this statement detailing the procedures followed by the British Museum to minimise such risk. Clearly there are some objects which which are not fit to travel. But the best argument on this point seems to me to be the the practice of all the world’s great museums. They are all committed to the safety of their collections. All lend valuable and fragile objects, because they believe there is an overall public benefit in doing so. To cite but one item: the works of Leonardo da Vinci are among the most precious and vulnerable objects in all European art. The National Gallery in London in 2011 invited museums abroad to lend their Leonardos for a temporary exhibition – and they did. And in return, the National gallery lent the supremely fragile Leonardo Cartoon to Louvre, confident that could responsibly move it, exhibit it there and then bring it safely home. We take Mr MacGregor’s reference to the loan of Leonardo’s supremely fragile “Cartoon” to the Louvre to be a sarcasm (re his spat with the present director of the National Gallery) and not an expression of confidence on his own part that that highly fragile, shotgun blasted and “restored”, ancient drawing really had suffered no deleterious consequences on its journeys (- by lorry and train through the Channel Tunnel?) How might he know such a thing? The effects of vibration on old fragile paintings have been little studied. How might they be? Would any responsible curator permit an old master painting to be fixed inside a container and shaken variously and erratically for hours on end like an IKEA chair on a test bed? The truth is that Mr MacGregor’s writ on the safety of travel today does not and cannot run throughout the world. On 12 July 2001, when bringing ten panels from Massacio’s Pisa Altarpiece to the National Gallery in London, he claimed that it had become safe at some point in “the past five to ten years” to jet works of art around the world because little gadgets in modern packing cases alert handlers to “any movement in the container”. What then? Mr MacGregor did not explain what a handler might do if so alerted in mid-flight. In the real world, in 2000, pages of the Book of Kells were damaged by vibration when the precious illuminated manuscript was flown from Ireland to Australia. In 2004 a Raphael was found, on arrival for the National Gallery’s “Raphael: From Urbino to Rome” show, to have suffered “a raised crack” in transit. And so on and so forth… 12. Of course there is some risk in any showing of any work to the public. It is the duty of those responsible for collections to strike the reasonable balance between public benefit and the likely danger of damage. In the field of loans, this balance has, thanks to advances in transport and conservation, changed greatly in the last 40 years. Yes, indeed, there is always risk when sending art out into the world, but the notion of “reasonable balance” is weaselish. Trusting to the “likely” when putting irreplaceable works needlessly or lightly in potential harm’s way is not to perform a reasonable action. 13. I can speak with confidence only of the experience of the British Museum. Between 2003 and 2013, the Trustees of the British Museum have lent around 30,000 objects* (many very fragile) to venues within the U.K. and abroad. In those ten years, there have been eight recorded instances of damage – in all cases minor, and repaired by the Museum’s conservation team. While deploring and regretting these eight cases of damage, the Trustees believe the balance of public benefit has been overwhelmingly positive. I think that the recipients of these loans, among them museums across Scotland, would agree.”
Item: While Mr MacGregor appeals to the authority of a Universal Practice among all the Great Museums, in December 2010 ArtWatch UK received an appeal for assistance from leading art historians and restorers in Krakow to help oppose a planned loan (for a substantial fee that was paid by the exhibition’s sponsors) of the many-times loaned Leonardo da Vinci panel painting Lady with an Ermine to the special exhibition at the National Gallery in London in 2011-2012 to which Neil MacGregor has referred. See “An Appeal from Poland” and our post of 29 December 2010. For an account of our objections to that Leonardo exhibition, see “The National Gallery’s £1.5 billion Leonardo Restoration” and “Leonardo, Poussin, Turner: Three Developments in London and Krakow”. On July 14, 2011 it was reported that, as a consequence of the protests and “in order to improve the functioning of the Foundation of the Czartoryski Princes and to assure the correct collaboration with the National Museum in Krakow,” Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski, heir to the collections of the world-renowned Czartoryski Museum, has approved the dismissal of the enterprise’s entire management board, including its chairman, Count Adam Zamoyski.
Item: Concerning Mr MacGregor’s appeal to the authority of his own museum’s performance we note that there are good grounds for treating such accounts with a degree of scepticism: In 1993 the New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman, addressed the problem of self-censorship within museums (- to which Nicholas Penny referred, as cited above, in his introduction to Prof. Haskell’s book): “no museum, either as lender or borrower, wants the taint of irresponsibility or carelessness. Although conservators, curators and directors privately raise doubts all the time about fragile and important works of art being moved around by other institutions, they virtually never speak out. When they do, it is as one chorus: nothing goes wrong where they are.” A further inducement towards scepticism is the public record of the British Museum’s own art handlers. As we reported on 13 December 2010 (“An Appeal from Poland”), in 2006, the British Museum sent 251 Assyrian objects – including its entire, incalculably important, fragile, wall-mounted Nimrud Palace alabaster relief carvings in foam filled wooden crates in two cargo jets to Shanghai for the “Assyria: Art and Empire” exhibition. Mr MacGregor claimed that: “It’s easier to transport these big valuable objects now – but it’s just as important to be certain they’ll be safe at the other end.”
The other end can be a long way away. The only flight capable of transporting all of the massive carvings to Shanghai left from Luxembourg to where the crated objects had to be moved by lorry/ferry/lorry. The planes stopped in Azerbaijan during their 16 hours flights – giving a total of four landings and four take-offs each on the round trip. On arrival in Shanghai, it was discovered that the recipient museum’s low doorways and inadequate lifts required that the crates with the largest carvings be “rolled in through the front door – which meant that we had to get a mobile crane to get them up the stairs”. So said Darrel Day, the British Museum’s senior heavy-objects handler. “Even then we had to unpack three of the crates to get a bit more clearance…[one carving] was still too tall, so we had knock a bit off”. No! – we jest of course, that should read: we had to “lay him down on his side”. When the collection was finally unpacked (delay had occurred because a replacement had to be found for the Chinese museum’s ancient unsafe forklift truck), it was found that “a few little conservation things had to be done” and that a support had broken off one of the carved reliefs. Nic Lee, head of the Museum’s Stone, Wall Paintings and Mosaics Conservation Section, reportedly said: “that was a bit of nineteenth-century restoration that I’d been wanting to get rid of for ages, anyway”. So that breakage was alright, then? A restorer at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, has claimed that within the museum world there is a professional concept of “acceptable potential loss” when considering works for loans. There would certainly now seem to be a systemic tolerance of failures in the movement of great art works. Forward planning seems an art yet to be achieved by many travel-happy museums (- a wider use of tape measures might help). An incoming Morgan Stanley sponsored exhibition of Chinese terracotta figures at the British Museum produced another art-handling pantomime. The more than two dozen wooden crates required were delayed for two days in Beijing because they would not fit into the holds of the two chartered cargo planes. When they finally arrived at the British Museum, they would not pass through the door of the round Reading Room (from which Paul Hamlyn’s gifted library had been evicted for the six months duration of the show). Even after the Reading Room’s main door frame had been removed, the largest crates still could not enter the temporary exhibition space built above the famous circular desks of the library, and had to be unpacked outside the exhibition space in the Great Court. The difficulties loan arrangements can generate were discussed by one of Mr MacGregor’s predecessors, David Wilson, in his “The British Museum: A History”, (The British Museum Press, 2002 – pp 334-336, “Exhibitions – A Vicious Circle?”). Sir David admitted, for example, that objects occasionally get damaged and sometimes even “go missing”. As indeed they sometimes do: Every year, more than £2bn of art is stolen, some of which is art on the move. In November 2006, the Toledo Museum’s Goya, Children with a Cart was stolen en route for an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. In 1994 the Tate Gallery loaned two Turner paintings insured for £24m to the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. “We will not be sending a courier”, Tate director, Sir Nicholas Serota, told the museum, “but as the works have high values we would like a member of your staff to supervise the arrival/depalletisation of the cases at Frankfurt [airport] and their transit to the Schirn Kunsthalle”. In what was clearly an “inside job” the pictures were stolen from the Frankfurt museum and only returned to the Tate in December 2002 after payment of a £3m+ ransom to the thieves in 2000. In December 2010 thieves broke into a warehouse and drove off with a van filled with £5m-worth of works by Picasso, Botero and Eduardo Chillida being returned to Spain from a loan to Germany. Police said that the robbery had all the hallmarks of “an inside job”. Police/Museum/Criminal relationships are a vexed subject. In the February 2001 Art Newspaper, it was reported that Geoffrey Robinson, the former Paymaster General had claimed that the German police had infiltrated the gang (“a group of particularly nasty Serbs”) that had stolen the two Tate Turners, but had “then loused up on the recovery operation”. There are grounds for suspecting a de facto going-rate “reward” of ten or fifteen per cent of a work’s insurance value in order to effect a recovery and avoid a full pay-out.
* This number of cases had been omitted when the post was first published. [With apologies, M. D., 17 November 2013.]


Barnes, Burrell and a Beck Memorial Lecture: “Philippe Mercier Watteau’s English Follower” ~ by Martin Eidelberg

14 October 2013

In 1991 a restorer brought Professor James Beck of Columbia University to trial in four Italian cities on charges of aggravated criminal slander. (Beck’s comments to one journalist had been carried in four regional newspapers.) Facing a possible three years jail sentence and ruinous, punitive damages – the restorer demanded 60 million lire for “material and moral damages” – Beck was exposed, vulnerable, alone. The restorer had sued Beck but not the four newspapers that had carried the allegedly damaging comments by the world’s leading authority on Jacopo della Quercia, whose famous marble carving in Lucca Cathedral, The Ilaria del Carretto, had been stripped of its ancient patina in a “conservation treatment” that included being blasted with particles to remove abrasions and scratches and saturated with penetrating oil to produce a homogeneously shiny surface (see Figs. 2 and 3). Despite the awfulness of the restoration everyone expected Beck to lose. One person who knew that he was going to lose – the trial judge in Florence – told the prosecuting lawyer as they left the court building together for lunch on the first day of the trial that he would find the scholar guilty: “Eh, but I shall convict him”.

Fortunately, that declared intention was overhead by an intern-lawyer and former policeman who happened to be working for Beck’s own lawyer. The judge and the lawyer disputed the attributed words but not the fact that they had left the court talking to each other about the case. Despite their joint denial, eventually, the judge was replaced and Beck was acquitted. (The story of that trial is told in the book “Art Restoration ~ The Culture, the Business and the Scandal” by James Beck and Michael Daley.) By then, Beck had resolved to set up an international organisation dedicated to speak and act on behalf of art against harmful practices and abusive or exploitative treatments. ArtWatch International was founded in 1992 to be that organisation.

When Beck died in 2007 we knew that the best way to honour his courageous stance was by continuing to campaign through ArtWatch. At the same time, to commemorate his achievements as a rigorous (Rudolph Wittkower-trained) scholar and highly popular teacher, we instigated an annual memorial lecture, alternating between London and New York, to be given by scholars of high esteem. We have been honoured by talks from Professors Hellmut Wohl and Charles Hope in London in 2009 and 2011, and by Professors Mark Zucker and David Freedberg in New York in 2010 and 2012.

The fifth lecture was given in London this year on September 30th by Professor Martin Eidelberg at the Society of Antiquaries of London in Burlington House. It was a sparkling and instructive occasion as Professor Eidelberg showed (through more than fifty PowerPoint slides) a succession of visual comparisons which deftly separated the subject of his talk, Watteau’s English follower, Philippe Mercier, from the many inferior works that had been attached to the artist as a kind of attributional flag of convenience, thereby exposing the intriguing conundrum of a painter of considerable quality who had remained a faithful pastichist of his chosen master, borrowing motifs at every step of his own career. An account of this elusive artistic entity will be carried in the next ArtWatch UK journal – just as the fourth lecture by Charles Hope (“The National Gallery Cleaning Controversy”) is carried in the current journal. Professor Eidelberg cites on his (excellent, as Selby Whittingham describes below) website, Watteau and His Circle, an anecdote about the friend of a colleague who responded to a general archaeology exam question with:

an incredibly detailed answer about a minor type of Roman provincial pottery. The examiners were bowled over by this man’s extraordinary knowledge on such a minuscule topic, but then asked him why he had expended so much energy on a subject that only three or four people in the world knew anything about. His reply was ‘I realize that, but with them I have such interesting conversations.'”

Martin Eidelberg expresses the hope that his own essays will find a readership, encourage others’ research, lead to stimulating conversations on the art of Watteau and his circle. Certainly, his lecture on the 30th left the (distinguished) audience delighted and flattered to have been party to so discriminating and illuminating a conversation. Given the talk’s rarified subject it seemed appropriate to ask a specialist in the field, Selby Whittingham, who is Secretary of the Watteau Society, Donor Watch and The Independent Turner Society to offer a note on the speaker and his researches.

Dr Whittingham recalls:

It is 29 years since I first met Martin Eidelberg at the colloquium at Paris to celebrate the tercentenary of Watteau’s birth, to which we both contributed, Martin on Watteau and his early master, Gillot. The speaker immediately preceding myself, Brian Allen, spoke about early imitators of Watteau in England, of whom “easily the most important” was Philip Mercier. Fifteen years earlier John Ingamells and the late Robert Raines, a founder member of the Watteau Society in 1984, held an exhibition on Mercier at York Art Gallery, followed by a catalogue of his works published fittingly by the Walpole Society (Horace Walpole having owned an actual Watteau, now at St Petersburg).

As Martin’s conclusions will appear in his excellent Watteau blog, suffice it to say that he has once again challenged accepted views and causes us to revise our ideas about Watteau and his satellites. It was a rare privilege for a London audience to hear such an erudite talk, as the subject of Watteau long bypassed London, the blame for this being laid on the embargo put by Lady Wallace on the Wallace Collection from lending any of its pictures! However the accession of Christoph Vogtherr as its Director (successor but one to Ingamells) has now shown that need not be so, and that scholarly publications are not dependent on blockbuster loan exhibitions. On the other hand it is regrettable that an exhibition, mainly of photographs, on Watteau’s techniques held just after the tercentenary at Brussels never transferred, as its organisers had wished, to England, as the matter would have been of great interest to supporters of ArtWatch, some of whom will remember how a conservation mistake was shown by Martin Eidelberg at a previous meeting to have obliterated additions to a painting made by Watteau himself.”

The earlier ArtWatch talk to which Selby Whittingham refers was much appreciated by James Beck. As well as providing a platform for good talks, Artwatch soon discovered that people feel freer to approach and pass on intelligence to a dedicated organisation than to individuals. One of the first to do so was Nick Tinari, a young electrical engineer and devoted student at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. He brought news of an attempt to overturn a prohibition on loans of art works from the Barnes Foundation’s fabulous collection of modern paintings. This, indeed, was alarming: tours not only constitute greatly increased risks (six-fold in the judgement of one insurer) but too often serve also as pretexts for “conservation treatments”. With the Barnes collection (as with that of the Sterling and Francine Clark collection – see “Taking Renoir, Sterling and Francine Clark to the Cleaners”), the now-at-risk paintings were in the best, which is to say, least-restored conditions.

The justification for the proposed breach of a fabulously generous donor’s wishes and conditions was that money could be raised through a foreign tour of key works in the collection to make “conservation” improvements to the building in which the collection was housed. Alleged conservation needs provide morally-coercive cover for many professional expansions and building projects. Tinari saw the proposal as a ruse contemptuous of Barnes’ intentions and philosophy. Events proved him right – the assets of an institution were effectively hi-jacked and its educational purpose greatly subverted. The story of that heist has been well told (and see Tinari’s own comments below). Less sufficiently appreciated is Tinari’s own remarkable and tenacious defence of Barnes’ wishes and instructions against the hot-shot lawyers of the would-be institutional transformers. Those encounters so sharpened his awareness of and appetite for the law that he turned to law school himself and now works as a patents attorney.

Artwatch has always seen itself as something of a standard bearer and supporter of other worthy autonomous campaigns on Art’s behalf. James Beck had great fondness for courageous campaigning individuals and created a small prize which he named after the New York painter Frank Mason. Mason, a longstanding and popular traditionalist teacher at New York’s famous Art Students League (among his student/devotees was the great American satirist and author of “The Painted Word”, Tom Wolfe), was a pioneering anti-restoration figure in the US, leading marches of artists and students at the Art Students League to the Metropolitan Museum in protest at its picture restorations. In opposition to the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel ceiling he enlisted the engagement of the writer and former art critic of Time Magazine, Alexander Eliot. With the philosopher Thomas Molnar and the cultural historian Arcadi Nebolsine, Mason had founded The International Society for the Preservation of Art, which organisation was incorporated within ArtWatch International at its 1992 foundation.

At this year’s James Beck Memorial Lecture we awarded the 2013 Frank Mason Prize to Nick Tinari. He, like Selby Whittingham (the recipient of the 2011 Frank Mason Prize), has joined our campaign against Glasgow City Council’s attempt to have conditions of Sir William Burrell’s bequest overturned by the Scottish Parliament so as to permit foreign tours of works from the collection. The submissions to the Scottish Parliament made by Donor Watch, Nick Tinari, and ourselves, can be read at this site. Evidence given to the Parliamentary Committee by ArtWatch UK and others can be seen here.

Nick Tinari’s submission begins:

I am a practicing attorney and an electrical engineer. I am also an alumnus of the education program of the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Like Mr. Burrell, the founder of the Barnes Foundation, Dr. Albert C. Barnes, made his gift of an extensive art collection including the stipulation in an Indenture of Trust that none of the works should be loaned. This stipulation was temporarily breached in the 1990s based on the argument that the foundation was lacking funds to maintain theMerion gallery and that a “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunity had opened for a tour of the artwork to Washington D.C., Paris and Tokyo, with the French and Japanese venues paying a total of $7 million for the loan. This was one of the earliest instances of outright rental of artwork for exhibition and at the time the largest sum ever paid for such a transaction. Since then, the practice has become commonplace…”

In view of this great familarity with the Barnes case and its clear relevance to present considerations of the private bill presently before the Scottish Parliament, we asked Nick Tinari if he might address that relationship when making his response to receiving the Frank Mason Prize.

Nick Tinari’s response:

I want to thank everyone at ArtWatch for awarding me the Frank Mason prize this year. I’ve worked alongside ArtWatch for many years and they are doing important work that no one else is addressing, namely, protecting our artistic heritage for the long haul, not just for the next exhibition or next year, but for as long as we will continue to recognize artistic genius, which hopefully is a very, very long way out.

In addition to being a remarkable artist and teacher, Frank Mason was an early voice against imprudent “restoration” of artwork. We are in the small club of those who organized protests at museums, his in the 1970s at the Metropolitan Museum and mine in the 1990s at the Washington National Gallery and Philadelphia Museum of Art.

I met Jim Beck many years ago when I was trying to stop the dismantling of the Barnes Foundation in Merion Pennsylvania. One aspect of the plan to break the founder’s will was an international tour of 80 works from the collection. It was a story that is very similar to the current plans for the Burrell Collection in Glasgow. The trustees no longer had connections to the donor or his intent and they wanted to elevate their own agendas and “put the Barnes on the map,” which was, of course, ridiculous because the Barnes Foundation was world-renowned long before the arrival of new trustees.

I asked Jim for help because the tour organizer, the Washington National Gallery of Art, wanted to remove varnish from many of the works, many of which came into the collection directly from the artists’ studios and thus were in pristine condition, even if not bright enough for the kinds of shows the National Gallery puts on.

This was in the infancy of ArtWatch and Jim wrote some letters and we did press releases together and got some attention to the matter. In the end, the works were not touched for the tour, the rumor being that the French organizers objected to altering the paintings, although some of the same institutions have certainly made their own mistakes since then.

Between 1993 and 1995, roughly 80 Barnes paintings did travel to Washington, Paris, Tokyo, Fort Worth, Toronto, Philadelphia and Munich. Because I did not believe the National Gallery’s officials’ promises about the supposedly careful transit conditions—they actually claimed the works would be safer on tour than in Merion—I examined the works myself in Washington, Paris, Fort Worth, Toronto and Philadelphia. Aided by the condition reports for the paintings prepared before the tour by the National Gallery and which I obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, I documented damage to several works as they were moved from city to city.

The most dramatic damage that I saw was in the form of stretcher creases extending the width of one of the four-meter-wide canvas sections of Matisse’s la Danse [see Figs. 24 and 25], which Barnes commissioned for three lunettes in the central gallery at Merion [see Fig. 17]. Contrary to National Gallery testimony that climate-controlled trucks would be used, the large panels were shipped from Merion to Washington in open-air flat bed trucks in 40 degree Fahrenheit weather and then laid flat and rolled up to a special opening in a large window at the National Gallery [see Fig. 19]. I did not witness it, but presumably, a similar procedure was used to move the panels to the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris. We have photos of the arrival of the panels at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, again on open trucks and again laid flat before being moved into the building.

These photos [Figs. 24 and 25] show the damage as I recorded it at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, where the painting was on display while the remaining works traveled to other cities. The National Gallery’s incredible response was that they simply had not noted the stretcher creases on the original condition reports. This is belied by an earlier report prepared by chief conservator, Ross Merrill, prior to removal of the work from the Barnes’ walls. In the report, Merrill states that the panels were in “remarkably good condition . . . taught and in plane.” An independent conservator, Paul Himmelstein, testified that the stretcher creases were typical of damage caused by laying a work horizontal against its stretchers, especially during a period of change in relative humidity. That is exactly what one would expect in bringing the work from the heated gallery in Merion to an unheated ride down I95 to Washington and then to be laid flat on the ground there. Prior to this, the work had not been off the wall or out of vertical position since Matisse saw it installed in 1934.

A second instance of National Gallery mendacity involved the large Seurat les Poseuses, which a previous conservator at the Barnes Foundation stated should not travel [see Fig. 23]. The National Gallery approved the Seurat’s travel but, remarkably, changed its mind after the work had been to Washington, Paris and Tokyo. The claim was that the painting was not damaged but just should not travel any further. Of course this makes no sense. Either the painting was in the exact physical condition that it was in when it left Merion and thus fit for continued travel or it had been degraded since Merion, which was why it was no longer fit for travel. I suppose the third option is that, as the earlier conservator observed, the work was never in condition to travel and the National Gallery, having now exhibited the rare work, was willing to reverse itself, while not admitting that the decision to allow travel was wrong from the start. At least for now, the painting has this helpful footnote in its record should the urge to tour it arise again, although, as in the case of the Matisse, it is pretty clear that Alice in Wonderland rules apply to statements from the National Gallery.

The final affront to the Matisse occurred only recently when it was moved from Merion to a new gallery in Philadelphia. As it played out, the agenda to put the Barnes Foundation “on the map” did not mean on a map of Merion, Pennsylvania but five miles away in center city Philadelphia. Anyone interested in the full saga of the complete reversal of Barnes’ wishes that the collection remain in Merion as primarily a teaching collection should view the 2009 documentary The Art of the Steal or consult John Anderson’s recently-updated book Art Held Hostage. As for the Matisse, the architects and the Barnes trustees responsible for dismantling Barnes’ express mandate for the collection’s use and display did not recreate in Philadelphia the same building details that Matisse worked to. Rather, in keeping with the Modernist design of the new Philadelphia gallery, they eliminated oak moldings above three windows that Matisse clearly used as visual pediments supporting the figures in the mural [see Figs. 17 and 18]. In place of these visual anchors, there is now a wide strip of bare wall with the figures in the work now adrift. This stripping of the Merion details is so obvious a disturbance of Matisse’s harmonization of the mural to the Merion building that it displays the complete and utter ignorance of both the architects and the Barnes trustees, some of whom fancy themselves as “important” collectors, whose mediocre accretions are regularly exhibited with the connivance of the Philadelphia Museum of Art on whose board they also sit.

The Barnes matter is unfortunately being replayed nearly verbatim in Glasgow at the Burrell Collection. The present stewards of the collection want to remove Burrell’s restriction against the works travelling outside of the UK. The premise is the same as it was in Merion, namely, there are insufficient funds to repair the gallery and touring the collection would raise funds, while the real motive, as with Barnes, is to use a tour of the artwork to put Glasgow “on the map.” ArtWatch has joined this present battle, and rightly so, because, collections like Barnes and Burrell are special islands of calm in a noisy field where art is now seen as a commercial enticement for tourist dollars. The conditions that Barnes and Burrell attached to their generous gifts should be observed not only because of the moral imperative, but because I think it is important to have at least some small part of the cultural heritage that is not subject to commercial pressures and dangers of endless tour schedules and inevitable damage and repair, not to mention the desire to brighten up works to suit viewers jaded by digital, LCD-lit images. Because Barnes had such restrictions on his collection, the works were not hastily cleaned when most museums were doing so. I fear that the rare condition of these works is now in jeopardy as they have now become part of Philadelphia’s self-declared “museum mile.”

Jim Beck used to say that the experience between the artwork, and by extension the artist, and the viewer is a fragile one, an experience that cannot bear the weight of other agendas like blockbuster tours and “civic boosterism”. ArtWatch was founded to “speak for the art.” As the Barnes Foundation and Burrell Collection demonstrate, there will always be a need for that voice to be heard and I am glad to be a part of that effort.”

In his closing remarks Nick Tinari evoked one of James Beck’s greatest fears: that Art’s welfare is increasingly considered secondary to that of certain vested interests and professional groups. A key and modish contention employed by those who would overturn Burrell’s prohibition on foreign loans is that they wish to increase “access” to art – when art can only ever be in one place at a time and shuttling it around necessarily means that, in addition to being exposed to greatly increased risks, it becomes inaccessible to anyone except professional art handlers for long periods of time between venues, and entirely inaccessible in its home for what can be exremely long periods. A second contention (which we examine in a forthcoming post) is that shuffling art around facilitates scholarship. Many have complained that the scholarship connected with blockbuster exhibitions is often poor and meretricious. James Beck further held in the Art Review (“Facts and Fictions of Restoration”, January 1999), that the scholarly spin-off of such exhibitions constitutes a professional inducement to take risks:

The ‘new’ interpretations of one artist or another which result from the blockbuster offer the art historian the opportunity to participate in the resulting symposia and international congresses. The same is true of following the restorations of well-known or important works. These too require a whole new apparatus. What art specialist would be willing to forego a role in these activities? This would mean being left out of the massive catalogues that usually accompany art spectaculars. For those who enjoy it, there also opportunities to participate in television interviews or appear on any CD-ROM merchandise. Each of these can involve substantial compensation.”

Michael Daley

Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com

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Above, Fig 1. Professor James Beck (born 14 May 1930, died 26 May 2007) photographed in his office at Columbia University by Dr Lynn Catterson.
Above, Figs. 2, 3 and 4.
Fig. 2 (top) Jacopo della Quercia’s Ilaria del Carretto before restoration. Fig. 3 (middle) the Ilaria after treatment by a restorer who vainly attempted to return the (nearly six centuries old) monument to “its original state”. Fig. 4 (above) an article in the Independent celebrating James Beck’s acquittal in Florence on 7 November 1991. On the final day of the proceedings, Beck (who had returned to teaching at Columbia University) had submitted the following statement:
During the past three decades I have pondered the art of Jacopo della Quercia and have studied his sculptures together with those of his contemporaries, including Donatello and Ghiberti, and those of his followers, chief among them being Michelangelo. I have sought to extract from the documents related to his life and works insights in order to elucidate the art of this Tuscan master. I suggest that I have earned the right to speak in a public forum about his art. In fact, after a dreadfully long space of time, my third book dealing with the artist, a monograph in two volumes [“Jacopo della Quercia”], has finally appeared.
I believe that not only do I have the right to defend his magnificent statues and reliefs against what I believe to be mistreatment, I also have an obligation to do so: if I declined to speak out, it would be I who were negligent. I would have failed in my duty as an academic, as an art historian and as an art critic to express an expert opinion in the marketplace of ideas. This does not suggest that there there are not other expert opinions which might not agree with mine, nor do I claim a special privilege. Yet following a scholarly preparation and long experience with the material, and, I might add, a period when I was a student at the Academia delle Belle Arti in Florence, not to have spoken out would have been not merely cowardly, but a dereliction of duty.
The possibility that the considered observations of art critics and art scholars should not be aired, or that their judgements need to be cloaked in palliative euphemisms if they are expressed at all, is a dangerous precedent for the principle of free speech and free criticism. If such rights, which are guaranteed by the world charter of the United Nations and by the constitutions of both the United States and Italy, among others, were qualified, the effect would be chilling, and certainly the true losers would be the art objects of the past and future generations who have every right to expect to enjoy and learn from treasures of the culture, conserved and preserved in the best manner possible.”
THE FIFTH ANNUAL JAMES BECK MEMORIAL LECTURE
Above, Figs. 5, 6, 7 and 8; below, Fig 9. Martin Eidelberg delivering his talk on the identity and accomplishment of Philippe Mercier, details of whose L’Heureuse rencontre (oil on canvas, 35 x 30 cm. California private collection) are seen at Figs. 5 and 9. (All photographs of the lecture were by Gareth Hawker.)
THE 2013 FRANK MASON PRIZE
Above, Fig 10. ArtWatch UK’s director, Michael Daley, discussing the origins of ArtWatch International and announcing this year’s winner of the organisation’s annual Frank Mason Prize – Nicholas Tinari.
Above, Figs. 11, 12 and 13.
Top, Fig. 11, the (late) painter Frank Mason in his downtown Manhattan studio, New York. Centre, Fig. 12, the cast of the Louvre’s Winged Victory of Samothrace in Mason’s studio apartment is one of a number of casts that he had rescued from art school modernist iconoclasts. When Mason’s collection of casts was placed with professional storers while he and his wife, Anne, spent several years in Italy, it was moved on a number of occasions resulting in the destruction of many works (on which rental charges had remained in place). Above, Fig. 13, a detail of Canova’s plaster maquette of The Killing of Priam, a Homeric episode which together with other famous scenes of classic literature inspired Canova in one of his most famous series of bas-reliefs. Two months ago, as described by the art historian and blogger, Tomaso Montanari, the work was detached from the wall of the Academy of Art in Perugia to be shipped, just 24 kilometers away, to an exhibition at Assisi simply titled “Canova”. During the removal operation, headed by the shipping company Alessandro Maggi di Pietrasanta, the unique plaster relief was dropped and smashed beyond repair.
We are indebted to Amsterdam’s (excellent) blogger, Maaike Dirkx, for this “accident alert” and for the following account: “Just like bronze, plaster allows you to multiply the originals. In these cases the importance of the specimen is related to the provenance and that of the Perugia relief was impeccable: it was donated by the heirs of Canova’s Academy. The insurance value is approx. 700,000 Euros. The episode was hushed up. Neither the website of the Academy nor that of the Ministry for Cultural Heritage have mentioned it. The disaster only came to light in an interview with art historian Francesco Federico Mancini in the Corriere Umbria.”
Above, Figs. 14 and 15. Top, Ruthie Osborne, Artwatch International’s director, presents the Frank Mason Prize on behalf of ArtWatch’s Board to Nick Tinari. Above, ArtWatch UK’s director explains that because the recipient was to return to New York very early the following morning, the first layer of the framer’s conservation-standard protective shield for the certificate had been left in place.
Above, Fig. 16. Nick Tinari responds to the award with observations on the similarities between the overturning of the terms of the Barnes bequest and the current attempt being made through a private-member’s Bill in the Scottish Parliament to overturn Sir William Burrell’s prohibition on foreign travels for the works in his bequested collection (see transcript, left).
Above, Figs. 17, 18, 19, 20 and 21.
Fig. 17 shows Matisse’s specially commissioned canvas mural la Danse in situ at its original, purpose-built classical home at the Barnes Foundation in Merion, Pennsylvania. Fig. 18 shows the work as housed in the new, supposedly replicated, interior of a modernist building in the centre of Philadelphia. Fig. 19 shows the Matisse mural arriving at the National Gallery, Washington, on the first leg of a money-raising world tour in 1993-95. Figs. 20 and 21 show another loaned large canvas painting being similarly man-handled at a French Museum.
Above, Fig. 22. Nick Tinari discusses the fate of Matisse’s la Danse and Seurat’s les Poseuses during their contoversial foreign travels.
Above, Fig. 23 Seurat’s les Poseuses (top, centre), as situated in the original Barnes Foundation building in Merion.
Above, Figs. 24 and 25, showing damage to a section of Matisse’ la Danse photographed by Nick Tinari towards the end of the dismounted canvas mural’s world tour.
Above, top, Figs. 26 and 27, the director of Artwatch UK offers congratulations and thanks to Professor Eidelberg on his lecture. Below, Fig. 28, TWO FINE FRIENDS OF ART: Nicholas Tinari and Martin Eidelberg, as photographed after the lecture and award ceremony by Peter Strong.
Click on the images above for larger versions. NOTE: zooming requires the Adobe Flash Plug-in.


Betraying Burrell – Shame on Glasgow

24 September 2013

It would seem that the arts (along with sport) have been “nationalised”, or more precisely, municipalised, in Glasgow. Both spheres have been brought under the control of a hybrid entity known as “Glasgow Life” which is both a company and a charity with the formal title “Culture and Sport Glasgow”. The directors and trustees of Glasgow Life are appointed by the Council. Glasgow City Council manages the Burrell Collection and the City’s other museums through this body. In the case of the Burrell Collection, Glasgow Life has established an intermediary overseeing body known as “Burrell Renaissance”, the chair of which is a member of Glasgow Life’s own, Council-appointed board of directors. Glasgow City Council is promoting a private bill in the Scottish Parliament to remove the prohibition on foreign loans that was stipulated by Sir William Burrell when he gifted his entire collection (of some 8,000 works) to the city of Glasgow in a will of 1944 and in a later Memorandum of Agreement.

When we were invited to give evidence to a hearing on the bill in the Scottish Parliament on 19 September we attempted to speak to the curators of the Burrell Collection at the museum itself on 18 September. Contact had to be made through Glasgow Life. After inquiries by that body on the nature of our interest, arrangement was made to meet two Glasgow Life officers (in the event three) at the Burrell Collection with no museum curators present. We had hoped to establish the logic of the development whereby a chronically leaking roof – which requires urgent, immediate action (see right) – had grown into a proposed redevelopment of the museum that would cost £45m and that would require not only that the museum be closed to the public for four years between 2016 and 2020 but that works from the collection would go on foreign tours in hope of raising the profile of the collection and generating “revenue-raising opportunities”.

The private Bill presently before the Scottish Parliament seeks expressly to “remove these restrictions [imposed by Sir William] permanently so that items can be lent and borrowed more freely”. It was explained to us that the purpose of increasing borrowing into the Burrell was to enable curators to put on special exhibitions that would set the Collection’s works into a wider and more scholarly context. However, this proposed move towards what is by now a near universal museum practice is itself problematic because it threatens to disrupt the present unique and very special character of the Collection as bequeathed and as has survived since the museum was opened in 1983 (see below).

The hearings on 19 September were filmed and have been placed in full on YouTube. In the first hearing, the Chair of the Burrell Trustees, Sir Peter Hutchison, and the legal agent of the Trustees, Mr Robert Taylor, presented a case for overturning Burrell’s overseas loans prohibition on a variety of grounds that taken together would cede to Glasgow Life permission to conduct the borrowing and lending policies of the Burrell Collection without hindrance. Both witnesses expressed confidence that a proposed new lending code that has been agreed between Glasgow Life and the Burrell trustees offers sufficient safeguards to “mitigate” (but note, not eliminate) the enduring risks of foreign travel. It was alarming when Sir Peter indicated that while, presently and in compliance with Burrell’s repeatedly asserted wishes and conditions, it is the case that entire categories of vulnerable objects (such as tapestries and pastels) are specifically excluded from permission to travel even within the UK, let alone abroad, in the future (were the Bill to be approved), consideration of what might be loaned both in the UK and abroad would be made not by categories of artefacts but on a “case by case”, object by object basis. This would be done under the provisions of the new lending code which is designed to “harmonise” the collection and to “treat [it] as a single entity”. The justification offered for this radical overturning of previously respected conditions is that within what are recognised as highly vulnerable categories a range of conditions exists in which individual works can vary from great fragility to robust good health. We challenged that notion strongly during the second session and note that in the first session, the Committee’s Convener, Joan McAlpine, pointed out that when the Committee’s members visited the Burrell they had been advised by a textiles conservator how and why textiles are so peculiarly unsuited to the risks of travel.

To our fears that the bill effectively seeks to give carte blanche to those in Glasgow Life who will administer the collection, it can be added that it is not altogether clear where accountability might lie. The relationship between the curators at the Burrell museum and the administrators of Glasgow Life is ambiguous and seems unhealthily lop-sided. Sir Peter offers assurances that, on a successful passage of the Bill, he would expect all parties to work harmoniously together and that if displeased the trustees “could make our views quite clear”. Expectations and expressions of displeasure comprise no guarantees. What became clear under close interrogation by the Committee’s members is that Glasgow Life (which as mentioned is the cultural arm of Glasgow City Council – which body is directly promoting the private bill to overturn Burrell’s prohibition on foreign loans) will have the final say and even the right if challenged to have issues determined on the judgement of such “experts” as it might commission. It seemed unfortunate and not reassuring when Sir Peter likened the future role of the Trustees to that of a long-stop cricket fielder rather than a wicket-keeper. (An awful lot of runs can be conceded without balls crossing the boundary – and besides, in modern cricketing practice, the long-stop position is almost obsolete because wicket keepers are expected to stop all balls that comes along.) Sir Peter accepted that Glasgow and not his trustees should have the final say on the fatalistic grounds that “they already perform that function”. It was not made clear why a Parliamentary bill had been thought necessary at all when, as Selby Whittingham of Donor Watch has subsequently submitted to the inquiry:

There is no need to enact bills to allow for loosening of conditions. This can be done through the courts, as in the case of the Barnes Collection and by application to the principle of cy-pres. If it can’t be done in the Burrell case, one may ask if the case for changing the restrictions is really a good one.”

Certainly the essential claim that Burrell’s restrictions on foreign loans can now be dropped because of increased safety has not been substantiated. Even Sir Peter, a former insurance man himself, recognised that risks remain and are inescapable. Under these circumstances, as he put it, the Trustees have a duty to assess and “mitigate risks as far as possible”. This seems a defeatist position. As we have pointed out, in a world where technical improvements in aircraft safety are offset by great increases of volume and velocities in museum world art swaps, a need to mitigate risks would arise only if Burrell’s many times expressed prohibition were to be overturned. That need not happen. It should not happen. The Trustees’ lawyer, Mr Taylor launched a technical sophistry in the Committee hearings by suggesting that lending to the Louvre today was little different from lending within Britain. This was presumably on a belief that travelling under the English Channel by rail is no riskier than travelling by road within the UK. He had perhaps failed to recall that the tunnel has already suffered a number of very serious fires – including one in 1996 when many heavy goods vehicles were destroyed.

The record of accidents, as the National Gallery’s director, Nicholas Penny, has offered to demonstrate to the Committee, hardly indicates a new, risk-free universe. In 1987 a cross channel ferry, The Herald of Free Enterprise, collapsed and sank in shallow waters, under calm conditions, with a loss of 191 lives and 47 heavy goods vehicles. Three years earlier the Herald’s sister ship, The Spirit of Free Enterprise, had carried two lorries bearing 267 Turners for an exhibition at the Louvre. In 2000, as Dr Whittingham discovered, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston found its Turner oil painting “Slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying” to be damaged and extremely unstable on return from a loan to the Tate Gallery. Despite the picture having been glazed and sealed according to modern “best practices” against changes in relative humidity, it had “reacted significantly” to the voyage and had lost flakes of paint. It was established that the injury had occurred on the homebound journey. As a Tate spokeswoman acknowledged:

It arrived here safely where it was examined thoroughly. Its condition was stable”. Incredibly, she added, as if in some exculpation, “Turner’s paintings are notorious for becoming unstable”. Indeed they are – and no gallery knows this better than the Tate. In 1980 the Observer reported that many Turner paintings were too fragile to travel – that barely 100 out of the 279 paintings were fit to “risk being shaken, bumped or dropped in travelling”. As the Tate’s head of conservation, Viscount Dunluce, put it: “Paintings are not designed to travel but to go on a wall. If you send them about in lorries, trains, ships or planes it is bound to have a deleterious effect on them”.

Against Sir Peter Hutchison’s belief that were Burrell alive today he might be happy to “trust his own trustees” to overturn his prohibition on foreign loans, must be set the fact that when two Burrell pictures were sent against his wishes and without his knowledge to Switzerland in 1953, Burrell himself reminded Glasgow Corporation that:

The Memorandum of Agreement with the Corporation only gives permission to lend items from the collection to any public gallery in Great Britain. That stipulation was made to safeguard the items from damage. Had I known in time it would not have been allowed. It mustn’t occur again.”

That accidents still occur in the air as well as on sea, was the principal force of our own testimony. But all questions of risks aside, the proposed changes do not constitute a well-considered appraisal or culturally desirable end. The impact of the already planned increases of borrowing and lending on the character and the aesthetic appeal of the collection as presently constituted and displayed would likely prove detrimental. That is to say, as Glasgow life explained matters to us, the intention of increased borrowing within the museum (for which borrowing must follow the inevitable quid pro quo of increased lending) is to enable curators to make “more sense” of the works that are held in the collection. This seems an aesthetically and culturally unfortunate form of professional special-pleading. The desire of curators to engage in practices that are becoming near universal within the museum world (but with consequently diminishing results in an international scramble to lay hands on the finite number of plum works) misses or ignores the very traits of the Burrell Collection that are uniquely distinctive and attractive.

What is so remarkable and special about the Burrell collection is that although very large as a private collection, at over 8,000 objects, by its catholic nature it comprises in miniature an easily accessible and digestible cultural “over-view” that is otherwise only available in the grandest “encyclopedic museums”. It should be more widely appreciated (and acknowledged) that nowhere else is it possible to move so effortlessly and rewardingly between great and beautiful artefacts drawn from so many of the world’s great cultures without risking the physical and mental fatigue that so easily sets in when moving through the vast halls and din of traipsing tourist parties of a British Museum, Louvre or Metropolitan Museum. At the Burrell museum, for all its current technical deficiencies and its aesthetically over-asserted means of construction, the building nonetheless has a kind of grace and ease of navigation that is immensely conducive to aesthetic contemplation and enjoyment. The contents of the beautiful classically housed Freer Gallery in Washington afford a similarly high aesthetic payload, but do so on a much narrower palette of art and cultures. The Burrell offers the chance to enjoy, compare and evaluate disparate cultures through a collection of works of remarkably high quality (as is here indicated right without any captions – and without reference to whole treasuries of works in the collection such as tapestries, stained glass, silver and furniture) that is uniquely accessible. This collection should properly and attentively be cherished for what it is and for what it offers and facilitates. It should not be exposed to disruption, adulteration and very greatly increased risks to the works themselves for the sake of turning it, at inordinate costs, into something more common place and altogether less enchanting and special.

ADDENDUM

At the James Beck Memorial Lecture in London on September 30th (see details opposite), the Frank Mason Prize is to be awarded to Nicholas Tinari for his role in opposing the changes made at the Barnes Foundation. (To see his submission to the Scottish Parliament, and those of Donor Watch, ArtWatch UK and others, click here.) In response, Mr Tinari will discuss in brief the lessons for those presently seeking a comparably radical overturning of the terms of governance of the Burrell Collection. Under sharp questioning from the Committee members, led by the Convenor, Joan McAlpine, at the Scottish Parliament on 19 September, Sir Peter Hutchison showed signs of anxiety that money raised by a world tour of works from the Burrell Collection could fall short of that being committed to fund not just repairs to the roof but a greatly more ambitious development of the Burrell’s building. If that were to be the case, could Glasgow City Council be relied upon to pick up a likely deficit of some £40m?

Michael Daley

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Above, the dispiriting dead hand of municipalism hits the visitor arriving at the grounds housing the Burrell Collection. The neglect, as shown here, of a fine gate house to what was until recently a private park and house, does not speak well for cultural pride in Glasgow. (Can no one find a use for this fine, handsome structure? Must it really be left to rats and pigeons?) The firmness of Burrell’s desire for his collection to be housed miles away from the pollution of Glasgow prevented work from beginning within his own lifetime on the museum for which he had provided funds. He died in 1958 at the age of 96. Nine years later, Pollok House and its park was bequeathed by Mrs Anne Maxwell MacDonald to Glasgow. An architectural competition was held in 1971 and it resulted in the opening in 1983 of the present building designed by Barry Gasson.
Below: the problems of a leaking roof in a modern building are not unheard of. Modernist architects have often too “boldy gone” into uncharted technical waters in pursuit of novel technical solutions and forms. In this case the problem appears to be that any leak in the roof glass enters and accumulates within a layer of absorbent foam padding which runs throughout the structure. This padding has, it seems, been absorbing water for years and where the actual breakouts occur within the galleries defies all logic. The solution – which should immediately be applied – can only consist of making good the entire roof, section by section. It inevitably will be a big job in itself and it should not be used as a peg on which to hang additional building projects. Tackling this problem should not be made to wait until 2016 in hope that by that date lucrative international tours of the collection might have provided the means to fund an ambitiously extensive “refreshing” of the entire museum. If made dry, the museum would be fine just as it is.
The staff at this delightful museum are extremely friendly and welcoming, if the visitors may not always be free of larky high spirits.
Above, a sample of the great range and variety of the treasures to be found within the museum.
NOTICE: The 5th James Beck Memorial Lecture
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Protecting the Burrell Collection ~ A Blast against Risk-Deniers

6 – 8 September 2013

In a remarkable development the National Gallery’s director, Nicholas Penny, has served notice to the trustees of the Burrell Collection of the grave risks they would be undertaking if they were to loan the collection abroad against the terms of Sir William Burrell’s magnificent 1944 bequest to the city of Glasgow.

As the Herald Scotland reports (6 September), Dr Penny has attacked the “deplorable tendency” for museum staffs to deny the grave risks that are run when works of art are transported around the world. In his submission to the Scottish Parliament committee now considering the bill to overturn the terms of Burrell’s bequest and his specific prohibition on overseas loans (to which committee we will be appearing as a witness this month), Penny, who has had knowledge of 10 major accidents during his career in museums and galleries in Britain and the US, offered to give details of the cases, in confidence to a trustworthy individual to be nominated by the Scottish Government. News of this offer and of Penny’s views broke when Herald Scotland spotted an accidental posting of his submission on the Scottish Parliament’s website.

Unsurprisingly, Penny’s bombshell has caused consternation among those wishing to send the collection on tour during a refurbishment of the building in Pollok Park which is expected to take four years and cost £40m. (We have have expressed bemusement in the past at the nicely rounded figures of building restoration costs which so often come in at sums like… £40m.)

The body “Glasgow Life” which runs Glasgow’s museums is reported to have been “flabbergasted by this”. If it is surprising that a museum director should be outspoken on this sensitive subject which involves a number of art world vested interests, there can be no surprise to readers of this site about the reality of the risks and the adverse material consequences of which Penny complains. In honour of Artwatch International’s founder, the late Professor James Beck, the Autumn 2007 ArtWatch UK Journal (No 22) carried a thirteen pages long report on the dangers of art loans – “Blockbuster Exhibitions: the Hidden Costs and Perils”, by Michael Daley and Michael Savage. For the full text of the report, click on this PDF. (Michael Savage has posted a response to Penny’s intervention on his Grumpy Art Historian blog.) On 13 December 2010, in response to an appeal from Polish curators and conservators to help halt a further loan of Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (“An Appeal from Poland”), we disclosed the extent of an injury to a panel painting by Beccafumi that was dropped and smashed when being dismantled from a temporary exhibition at the National Gallery (see top, right). That photograph (and an internal report on the incident) had been given to Artwatch by Dr Penny when we commented in our Journal on news of the incident carried on the National Gallery’s website.

On 11 July 2011 we reported (“Questions and Grey Answers on the Tate Gallery’s recovered Turners”) on how the Tate had paid a £3.5m ransom to Serbian gangsters in order to recover two Turner paintings that had been stolen when sent (without a Tate courier) to a small, badly protected German gallery.

The Herald Scotland reports that Glasgow Life is proud to have “formed a partnership with the British Museum, one of the leading authorities on loaning items, to benefit from its expertise”.

It is true that under its present director, Neil MacGregor, the British Museum is a hyper-active dispatcher of art around the globe (- over 4,000 objects in 2006 alone). It should be appreciated, however, that practice does not make perfect in this hazardous arena. As described in our Journal 22 report, when the British Museum packed the peerless, desperately fragile Nimrud Palace alabaster relief carvings and sent them all to Shanghai in two cargo Jets (which broke their 16 hours flights with a stopover in Azerbaijan), it was discovered on arrival that the recipient museum’s low doorways were too low. No one, presumably, had thought to measure them first. It was further discovered that the host museum’s lifts were inadequate. In consequence, the crated carvings had to be “rolled in through the front door – which meant that we had to get a mobile crane to get them up the stairs”, the British Museum’s senior heavy-objects handler, Darren Day, explained in one of the museum’s self-promotional television programmes. When the collection was finally unpacked it was found that “a few little conservation things had to be done.” When crated Chinese terra cotta warriors arrived on loan at the British Museum, they, too, would not pass through the door of the reading room, even when the door’s frame was removed – some expertise?

A restorer in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, has claimed that there is a professional concept of “acceptable potential loss” with regard to loans. As described in our 8 February 2011 post (“The European Commission’s way of moving works of art around”), since 2003 it has been a declared ambition of the European Commission to “facilitate”, “encourage”, “promote” and make “easy” the “mobility of art collections” within Europe. To this end, the EU urges that loaned works of art not be insured, on the extraordinary conviction that accidents can always be remedied: “in many cases, after the exhibits have been restored, only experts can assess the alteration resulting from the damage. The restored artworks can therefore be exhibited as they are.”

The simpliste Eurocratic view of restoration is the more alarming because, travel accidents aside, with increased volumes and velocities of loans come an explosion of needless, often themselves destructive, conservation and restoration “treatments” that are undertaken prior to loan exhibitions as lenders seek to protect themselves by having their works “put in condition” for travel. This is done in order to be able to identify and establish (for insurance or blame-allocation purposes) the origin of subsequent injuries. Unfortunately, putting works into restorers hands in such bids to attain supposedly optimally secure condition for travelling itself presents hazards. We discussed one of the most spectacular examples of needless injury in our post of 8 January 2011. On that occasion an owner put his prized and beloved Renoir into the hands of a pair of leading restorers simply to lay a couple of small blisters and then to dispatch the picture from Washington to Paris. The restorers, without any authorisation, presumed to clean, reline (and wreck) the painting, Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party, as the distraught owner, Duncan Phillips, later confessed. On arrival in Paris, the newly restored Renoir was at first rejected as a Renoir. Having long enjoyed pride of place in the home of the great collector, Phillips moved it on its return from Paris into an anteroom. Today it enjoys pride of a place in a hideous over-scaled modern extension to the delightful period house that Phillips bequeathed, along with his collection. The present administrators of the museum have refused all requests to inspect the records of treatment on that painting, and, generally seem rather more animated by mounting their own special exhibitions than in ministering to the original and perfectly self-sufficient collection:

Intersections is a series of contemporary art projects that explores —as the title suggests— the intriguing intersections between old and new traditions, modern and contemporary art practices, and museum spaces and artistic interventions. Whether engaging with the permanent collection or diverse spaces in the museum, the projects suggest new relationships with their own surprises. “Many of the projects also riff on the nontraditional nature of the museum’s galleries, sometimes activating spaces that are not typical exhibition areas with art produced specifically for those locations.”

Burrell be warned. Awful as recent “developments” at the Phillips have been, the United States has witnessed an even greater betrayal of a bequest: the wresting of the entire contents of the Barnes Collection from its, also bequested, delightful purpose-built original home and grounds, in order to place it in a worse than awful modernist pile a few miles away, hard by a noisy polluting freeway in the centre of Philadelphia. The denouement of the Barnes Bequest hike began (as is proposed at the Burrell) with a vast international travelling exhibition. At the Barnes, as now at the Burrell, the jaunt was premised on the morally-coercive “conservation” justification of putting the building itself “into condition” on behalf of the great collection of works. Humbug has rarely appeared so rank. The specially commissioned “site specific” Matisse mural was detached from the walls of the museum, packed on a flat-bed, open truck – against all reassuring conservation-compatible promises – and carried at an angle (see photographs, right) to Washington. Nick Tinari, who is to submit testimony to the Burrell Inquiry, has informed ArtWatch “I can state unequivocally that damage was done on the tour to the Matisse mural, the Seurat Models and a Picasso. I have documentation for all three.” Tinari further points out that, as with the intended Burrell tour, the Barnes tour – which netted $7m – breached the benefactor’s express prohibition on foreign loans. Far from serving to make the collection safe, that earlier exercise paved the way to a full takeover. More generally, it served as a template for trustees everywhere who might wish to harvest cash value that is otherwise locked into permanently housed works of art.

Clearly, Dr Penny’s intervention addresses much more than the welfare of the Burrell Collection, precious and vulnerable though it is. It is greatly to Penny’s credit that he should have spoken in such frank (and brave) terms. It is also greatly to the credit of the Scottish Parliament that it should be engaging in such an open exercise before another art world horse may be induced to bolt.

Michael Daley

ADDENDUM

On 7 September, Herald Scotland reported the submission of written evidence made by Dr Selby Whittingham of Donor Watch:

“Dr Selby Whittingham, of Donor Watch, says in his submission: ‘There can be a case for departing from the terms of a bequest when those are incapable of being carried out wholly or safely … but that does not apply in the Burrell case in this instance.

This bill is a consequence of the current vogue for loan exhibitions and for using outward loans as barter for inward loans. This vogue is not wholly benign. It deprives visitors to a museum of works which they may expect to see. And we are not convinced that the transport of works of art is as free from hazard as the advocates of this measure optimistically maintain…'”

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Above, the National Gallery’s Beccafumi panel painting “Marcia”, as smashed during the dismantling of a loan exhibition at the National Gallery. Photograph by courtesy of the National Gallery.
Above, top, the travel-deformed right hand panel of Matisse’s mural “La Danse”, as photographed by Nick Tinari when it had been removed from its original home in the Barnes Collection and was being shown on loan to the Philadelphia Museum of Art at the end of a world tour. Above, “La Danse” when arriving on loan to the National Gallery of Art, Washington, as photographed by former Barnes foundation student, Danni Malitzski. Below, “La Danse”, as deformed by its global travels and as seen when on temporary exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Photograph by Nick Tinari.
Below, a 14th century polychrome sculpture of Saint-Bernard which, during the Benedictus Pater Europae exhibition (Gand 1981) was knocked over, with the resulting loss of the major part of its face.
NOTICE ~ The Fifth James Beck Memorial Lecture
Above, a China Airlines Boeing 737-800 which was destroyed by fire shortly after landing in Okinawa, Japan, on 20 August 2007.China Airlines had had four fatal aircraft accidnets in the previous 13 years in which 700 people had died. On 2 September 1998, a Swissair jet carrying paintings including a £1m Picasso, crashed into the sea off Nova Scotia, killing all 229 passengers and crew. On 12 July 2001, Neil MacGregor, then director of the National Gallery, claimed that at some point in the “past five to ten years” it had become safe to shift works of art around in jets because of the invention of little widgets within packing cases that would alert handlers to any movements or shifts of condition.
Above, crowds queuing to Walk past the Mona Lisa when loaned to the Washington National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York. While being stored overnight in a safe vault at the Metropolitan Museum, the Leonardo was drenched with water by a defective sprinkler system. The Mona Lisa then travelled to Tokyo and Moscow in 1974. A request has been made for the painting to be loaned to Florence.
Below, Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine. Our support for an appeal from conservators and curators in Poland to help halt a loan of the painting was reported in the Observer of 12 December 2010. We were subsequently attacked in personal and organisational terms by Count Adam Zamoyski, the board chairman of the Czartoryski Museum, which owns the Leonardo. On 14 July 2011 it was reported from Poland that “in order to improve the functioning of the Foundation of the Czartoryski Princes and to assure the correct collaboration with the National Museum in Krakow,” Prince Adam Karol Czartoryski, heir to the collections of the world-renowned Czartoryski Museum, had approved the dismissal of the enterprise’s entire management board, including its chairman, Count Adam Zamoyski.
Above, the appeal to ArtWatch UK
Below, expert opinion from Prof. Grazyna Korpal, of ASP Krakow, and an expert of the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in the field of painting restoration, on the need to protect Leonardo’s Lady with an Ermine (30 November 2010).
“The work of Leonardo da Vinci called Lady with an Ermine, from the collection of the Czartoryski Museum is one of the most valuable paintings not only in the context of the Polish collections, but also of the world heritage. Such masterpieces require exceptional protection. Prevention is the main priority. Its fundamental principle is the unconditional restriction of movement and transfer to the absolutely necessary. If you transport a picture panel such as the Lady with an Ermine, even the most ideal methods in the form of modern environmental chambers or special anti-shock frames are not able to sufficiently protect the work against a variety of vibrations, shocks or changes in pressure. By allowing the painting to travel we create yet another serious threat, largely extending the area of possible human error, while increasing the likelihood of the impact of the so-called independent factors.
“Given the technology of the picture, it is necessary to keep it under constant microclimatic conditions, in one place, in a tight microclimatic frame of the new generation, made on the basis of the already proven solutions used for panel masterpieces in renowned museums. Only by storing the picture in a fixed location will [it be possible] to eliminate to the maximum such basic threats as unavoidable external pollution, changes in the microclimate, all kinds of shock, vibration, drastic changes in pressure, and reduce the risks resulting from independent factors.
To sum up the basic arguments put forward for the protection of the painting Lady with an Ermine, I firmly declare that each loan and the associated means of transport are a serious, even reprehensible, threat to the state of preservation and safety of this priceless work of art. I also believe that based on the special immunities provided for outstanding works of art already developed and operating in Austria, Germany or the United States, it is necessary to grant such immunity to the painting from Krakow.
Side note:
“Like every masterpiece the painting Lady with an Ermine has a historical value, and in this value is also included – the Czartoryski Museum, Kracow’s atmosphere and the tumultuous history of the picture during the last century. Each loan ‘strips’ the work of this unique ‘setting’, which while not indifferent to the viewer, should be especially nurtured and protected in the Polish reality.”
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