I recently moved house. Which books do you throw away?
Guidebooks you keep as you might refer back to them. But paperback novels you chuck – in British publishers’ hands they’re just words squeezed together with cheap glue. An increasing number of books offer enlightenment, or a summary of something, or simply promise too much: A bite-sized history of the Middle-East, say, or, anything with the words “great”, “short” or “100” in the title. Every book published to make a splash will, at some point, sink by its own importance.
But I can’t throw away books that distil experiences. I always keep memoirs. Even if a book is self-published, it still has the pulse of a fellow life.
There was an exhibition in New York 10 years ago of photographs by Milton Gendel of the Italian jewellery designer Fulco di Vedura’s works, which featured many of his friends and travels too. I did not see the show, and the people in the pictures are strangers to me, but there are lives caught in the pages of that catalogue, like feathers, or beatles, stuck into an album.
Arthur McGregor’s catalogue of John Tradescant’s Ark, a collection bequeathed to the University of Oxford in the 17th century, is sacred; the entries initialled by curators of art, armour, ethnography and science – at a stroke – justifies our profession by the intensity of knowledge applied in a few hundred words.
The inspiration for our current exhibition Cedric Morris: Artist-Plantsman is the catalogue for the retrospective of the artist at the Tate Gallery in 1984. It was written by Richard Morphet, who curated the Tate show. It’s just a paperback, largely in black and white, but is pregnant with the expertise of a curator who loves his subject. It was a gift from the Tate’s remainder pile, by Andrew Lambirth, the art historian and critic who 24 years later has curated our exhibition on the artist’s flowers and gardens.
We can only afford to do a catalogue for one in three exhibitions. Why Morris? Lambirth wrote the essay within his fee and also compiled a selection of memories of Morris’s home and art school at Benton End, by his plant protégé Beth Chatto, his friend Ronald Blythe, and a pupil, Maggi Hambling. We had a sponsor, the gallerist Philip Mould. And, finally, Morris’s paintings are irresistible, bursting with pollen on the page.
Mould published his own catalogue of a complimentary exhibition of Morris’s travel paintings and landscape, which includes an excellent essay by Lawrence Hendra, prickling with the discoveries made in months devoted to archives. How many museums could afford to invest so much time in research?
I suspect it is staff time, as much as money, that deters museums from publishing. Colour printing is so much quicker and cheaper than a curator of my generation could ever imagine. Who remembers the days of agonising over whether you could afford four or eight pages of colour?
And we live in a Babylon of talented graphic designers. One thing I’ve learned is to trust the designer to turn your material into an object that people want to pick up.
Brian Webb of Webb & Webb argued that by putting 64 pages of material between cloth covers, tucked inside a delectable fold, the retail value would leap. To be hardback was an extra £1,500 for a print run of 1,000, sold at £15. It worked. We’ve just pressed go on a second print run.
It’s only the second or third time that a catalogue in which I’ve been involved has sold out.
A study day organised long ago by the excellent Esmée Fairbairn Regional Museums Initiative established that strike rates vary from one catalogue sold for every 12 to 25 visitors. The maths are daunting. Until, that is, you add in the years of afterlife. The best exhibition catalogues are seed pods, dormant with expertise. Contemporary theory fades as quickly as Victorian epitaphs; research, and passion, stay young.
If you are bursting to publish, that energy will sprout. Cedric Morris has.
Christopher Woodward is the director of the Garden Museum, London. Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman is on until 22 July
Guidebooks you keep as you might refer back to them. But paperback novels you chuck – in British publishers’ hands they’re just words squeezed together with cheap glue. An increasing number of books offer enlightenment, or a summary of something, or simply promise too much: A bite-sized history of the Middle-East, say, or, anything with the words “great”, “short” or “100” in the title. Every book published to make a splash will, at some point, sink by its own importance.
But I can’t throw away books that distil experiences. I always keep memoirs. Even if a book is self-published, it still has the pulse of a fellow life.
There was an exhibition in New York 10 years ago of photographs by Milton Gendel of the Italian jewellery designer Fulco di Vedura’s works, which featured many of his friends and travels too. I did not see the show, and the people in the pictures are strangers to me, but there are lives caught in the pages of that catalogue, like feathers, or beatles, stuck into an album.
Arthur McGregor’s catalogue of John Tradescant’s Ark, a collection bequeathed to the University of Oxford in the 17th century, is sacred; the entries initialled by curators of art, armour, ethnography and science – at a stroke – justifies our profession by the intensity of knowledge applied in a few hundred words.
The inspiration for our current exhibition Cedric Morris: Artist-Plantsman is the catalogue for the retrospective of the artist at the Tate Gallery in 1984. It was written by Richard Morphet, who curated the Tate show. It’s just a paperback, largely in black and white, but is pregnant with the expertise of a curator who loves his subject. It was a gift from the Tate’s remainder pile, by Andrew Lambirth, the art historian and critic who 24 years later has curated our exhibition on the artist’s flowers and gardens.
We can only afford to do a catalogue for one in three exhibitions. Why Morris? Lambirth wrote the essay within his fee and also compiled a selection of memories of Morris’s home and art school at Benton End, by his plant protégé Beth Chatto, his friend Ronald Blythe, and a pupil, Maggi Hambling. We had a sponsor, the gallerist Philip Mould. And, finally, Morris’s paintings are irresistible, bursting with pollen on the page.
Mould published his own catalogue of a complimentary exhibition of Morris’s travel paintings and landscape, which includes an excellent essay by Lawrence Hendra, prickling with the discoveries made in months devoted to archives. How many museums could afford to invest so much time in research?
I suspect it is staff time, as much as money, that deters museums from publishing. Colour printing is so much quicker and cheaper than a curator of my generation could ever imagine. Who remembers the days of agonising over whether you could afford four or eight pages of colour?
And we live in a Babylon of talented graphic designers. One thing I’ve learned is to trust the designer to turn your material into an object that people want to pick up.
Brian Webb of Webb & Webb argued that by putting 64 pages of material between cloth covers, tucked inside a delectable fold, the retail value would leap. To be hardback was an extra £1,500 for a print run of 1,000, sold at £15. It worked. We’ve just pressed go on a second print run.
It’s only the second or third time that a catalogue in which I’ve been involved has sold out.
A study day organised long ago by the excellent Esmée Fairbairn Regional Museums Initiative established that strike rates vary from one catalogue sold for every 12 to 25 visitors. The maths are daunting. Until, that is, you add in the years of afterlife. The best exhibition catalogues are seed pods, dormant with expertise. Contemporary theory fades as quickly as Victorian epitaphs; research, and passion, stay young.
If you are bursting to publish, that energy will sprout. Cedric Morris has.
Christopher Woodward is the director of the Garden Museum, London. Cedric Morris: Artist Plantsman is on until 22 July
