In the early 1980s, when I was the director of Sheffield City Art Galleries, I had to host a visit from a senior politician from our twin city in China. He looked around with interest and surprise, and then asked, through his translator, how big the place was
in square metres. I said that I didn’t have the figure at my fingertips, but could get it for him.
He looked satisfied and then added: “We could do with one of these in Anshan.” I was surprised. Public galleries, which I’d assumed to be a part of everyday life, were not by any means worldwide.
Giles Waterfield, himself a distinguished curator, has drawn on a wealth of original research to tell – with a light and ironic touch – the story of how these peculiar things called public art galleries came to be a “physical presence in the collective consciousness”.
They were, he argues, the product of the aspirations of civic leaders, the enthusiasm of wealthy individuals and the express wishes of the masses whose appetite they satisfied with remarkable success.
Of course, this was in the days before film, television and computers, before cars and package holidays. Above all, these galleries blossomed within a Christian society, which alone among the major religions of the world taught that God could be seen in his creation and therefore validated the visual arts.
And it was a culture in which entertainment was hemmed in by strict taboos – the only thing you could do on Sundays was pray or improve your mind. Waterfield could, perhaps, have made more of this. And maybe of the weather too.
There is a local joke in Glasgow: “How do you define an intellectual? Someone who goes to art galleries when it isn’t raining.”
The density of provision of public galleries across Europe is closely related to isotherms and isohyets – the colder and wetter the climate the more thickly they are found on the ground.
Dutch, Danish and Nordic provision of galleries is not covered in this book, but Waterfield does compare British galleries with their equivalents in Germany and France and explains why ours were exceptional in the depth and breadth of their appeal to the community.
Waterfield is right to put so much emphasis on the great world exhibitions. There is a telling cartoon (the book is packed with unfamiliar, evocative images) showing the streets of Manchester deserted in 1851, as everyone had gone to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace.
Several museums and collections became lasting relics of these public celebrations and they sustained, for decades, the original enthusiasm of their audiences. They appealed not just to the aspirant middle classes, wishing to educate themselves, but to the working classes, for they celebrated craft skills and industrial pride.
The crowds who visited them felt they were participating in building Britain and its empire. Art galleries, at this time, were not cut off from civic life in any way. This is what made them unique in world terms. Waterfield, perhaps, makes a marginal error of judgment when he writes that these popular galleries were different from the “Enlightenment style of collecting and display that inspired the national and university galleries”.
This was perhaps true of those museums where collections were acquired in the process of research, but the nationals always had a popular educational agenda that was close to the social role served by the regional galleries.
It could be argued that it was these regional galleries that led the way, as they fought to survive in a changing cultural environment: being nearer to their public, it was they who developed new ways of attracting audiences. Museums are all community galleries now.
This book needs to be read by every art curator, and should grace the shelves of every gallery library, because if the people who run these institutions don’t know where they have come from, they won’t know where they are and they will be unlikely to get to where they want to be.
Julian Spalding is a writer and former museum director
in square metres. I said that I didn’t have the figure at my fingertips, but could get it for him.
He looked satisfied and then added: “We could do with one of these in Anshan.” I was surprised. Public galleries, which I’d assumed to be a part of everyday life, were not by any means worldwide.
Giles Waterfield, himself a distinguished curator, has drawn on a wealth of original research to tell – with a light and ironic touch – the story of how these peculiar things called public art galleries came to be a “physical presence in the collective consciousness”.
They were, he argues, the product of the aspirations of civic leaders, the enthusiasm of wealthy individuals and the express wishes of the masses whose appetite they satisfied with remarkable success.
Of course, this was in the days before film, television and computers, before cars and package holidays. Above all, these galleries blossomed within a Christian society, which alone among the major religions of the world taught that God could be seen in his creation and therefore validated the visual arts.
And it was a culture in which entertainment was hemmed in by strict taboos – the only thing you could do on Sundays was pray or improve your mind. Waterfield could, perhaps, have made more of this. And maybe of the weather too.
There is a local joke in Glasgow: “How do you define an intellectual? Someone who goes to art galleries when it isn’t raining.”
The density of provision of public galleries across Europe is closely related to isotherms and isohyets – the colder and wetter the climate the more thickly they are found on the ground.
Dutch, Danish and Nordic provision of galleries is not covered in this book, but Waterfield does compare British galleries with their equivalents in Germany and France and explains why ours were exceptional in the depth and breadth of their appeal to the community.
Waterfield is right to put so much emphasis on the great world exhibitions. There is a telling cartoon (the book is packed with unfamiliar, evocative images) showing the streets of Manchester deserted in 1851, as everyone had gone to the Great Exhibition at Crystal Palace.
Several museums and collections became lasting relics of these public celebrations and they sustained, for decades, the original enthusiasm of their audiences. They appealed not just to the aspirant middle classes, wishing to educate themselves, but to the working classes, for they celebrated craft skills and industrial pride.
The crowds who visited them felt they were participating in building Britain and its empire. Art galleries, at this time, were not cut off from civic life in any way. This is what made them unique in world terms. Waterfield, perhaps, makes a marginal error of judgment when he writes that these popular galleries were different from the “Enlightenment style of collecting and display that inspired the national and university galleries”.
This was perhaps true of those museums where collections were acquired in the process of research, but the nationals always had a popular educational agenda that was close to the social role served by the regional galleries.
It could be argued that it was these regional galleries that led the way, as they fought to survive in a changing cultural environment: being nearer to their public, it was they who developed new ways of attracting audiences. Museums are all community galleries now.
This book needs to be read by every art curator, and should grace the shelves of every gallery library, because if the people who run these institutions don’t know where they have come from, they won’t know where they are and they will be unlikely to get to where they want to be.
Julian Spalding is a writer and former museum director
