Barnes, Burrell and a Beck Memorial Lecture: “Philippe Mercier Watteau’s English Follower” ~ by Martin Eidelberg
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
![](http://lh5.ggpht.com/_C8RKf1feDnY/TRkMb2_I8AI/AAAAAAAAAOY/K-VsX8Z6Jis/s800/hr-line950x1px.png" height="1" width="800"){kind=spacer}
Protecting the Burrell Collection ~ A Blast against Risk-Deniers
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…'”
Comments may be left at: artwatch.uk@gmail.com
