Connoisseurs and cheapskates

Britain's art is currently enjoying the attentions of cataloguers to an unprecedented degree. Two remarkably ambitious series of catalogues are now under way: Public Sculpture of Britain, published by Liverpool University Press, has reached its eighth volume, on Greater Manchester, and a new enterprise by the Public Catalogue Foundation, listing all the oil paintings in public ownership in the country, has made a brave start with a volume on Leeds. Such projects make the scale of the country's public holdings of art vividly obvious, and they also make it all the more astonishing that one man should have sought to encompass them in one volume.

That man is Mark Fisher, member of parliament for Stoke on Trent Central and Minister for the Arts from 1997 to 1998. Last month, Penguin Books published his Britain's Best Museums and Galleries, a critical guide to 350 of the some 2,500 museums and galleries in the United Kingdom. The book is part of a series initiated by Simon Jenkins's phenomenally successful England's Thousand Best Churches. In some ways it is even more ambitious than that industrious book, and not only because Mr Fisher has covered the whole country and not just England. Mr Jenkins always had The Buildings of England for guidance. There was nothing similar for Mr Fisher.

As far as the book's coverage of art galleries is concerned (and it covers much more than art, ranging from the Royal Naval Submarine Museum in Gosport to the Museum of the Scottish Lighthouse in Fraserburgh), the closest analogy to Mr Fisher's enterprise is Gustav Waagen's The Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854-57). Just as Waagen's book provides an invaluable picture of the state of private collecting and connoisseurship in mid-Victorian Britain, so Mr Fisher's is a snapshot of great vividness of the state of the country's public art collections (he includes private collections in houses open to the public) at the start of the twenty-first century. Like Waagen, Mr Fisher is a man with a mission; like Waagen, he wants to to improve public understanding of art, to see regional collections developed and to encourage the Government better to support the national collections.

Waagen recorded some 9,000 works in British collections; I suspect that Mr Fisher passes comment on scarcely fewer. His informed, penetrating and always personal comments make one want to go at once to Stalybridge, for example, to see the Italian gold-ground altarpieces collected by J.R Cheetham, or to the south coast to spot the Lievens once owned by Rembrandt that Brighton Art Gallery has hung in the corridor leading to the lavatories (Mr Fisher, with characteristic generosity of spirit, comments that this is 'demonstrative of a certain diverting confidence'). The book excels in what are in effect potted biographies of galleries, told with narrative verve. I particularly enjoyed the account of Bradford's Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, opened in 1904 for the enjoyment of what a local newspaper called 'honest, healthy English art', and now the home of an internationally significant collection of contemporary Asian decorative and fine art. Who could resist reading the account of the University of Hull Art Collection that begins, 'Only the foolhardy, the brave or the divinely inspired would try to create a serious collection of early-20th century art with an endowment of 300 [pounds sterling] a year'?

Mr Fisher is good at hitting off the flavour of a gallery in a phrase--the Fitzwilliam's 'connoisseurial stamp', for example--and at catching the character of collectors. Here is Sir Merton Russell-Cotes exposed as a 'social-climbing poseur and cheapskate'; Robert and Lisa Sainsbury at Norwich being told by George Eumorfopoulos to 'Only buy must haves'; Swindon Art Gallery being patronised by Kenneth Clark: 'They take art seriously in Swindon. They are good people.'

The book also generously comemmorates inspired directors--Thomas Bodkin at the Barber Institute, Hans Hess at York Art Gallery, for example--and therein lies its commitment. Mr Fisher's ministerial career was short-lived because he refused to be a Blairite yes-man. That failure to toe a politically correct line is evident in his sideswipe at a favourite Government phrase in the entry on the print collection at the Aberystwyth School of Art: 'There is much talk of "art for the many, not the few" but little enthusiasm for the techniques that could make that a present reality'. In his introduction he deplores the way policies of social inclusion and marketing budgets now count for more in many museums than scholarship and curators, and he sees something worrying in the way that many new museums and galleries choose names that do not identify their nature: the Lowry Centre, Jorvik, Tate Modern, and so on. If this book is as successful as Simon Jenkins's on parish churches--as it deserves to be--it may draw to wide public attention its author's heartfelt cry for the enduring values that the words 'museum' and 'art gallery' embody. In that, but not for that alone, this is a very important book.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Apollo Magazine Ltd.
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