Book Review: Art for the nation: exhibitions and the London public, 1747-2001

Abstract

Why do people visit exhibitions? The curious practice of entering public galleries to look at works of art has a history that, for lack of evidence, cannot easily be told from the perspective of the people who chose to be spectators. It is even more difficult to tell it from the point of view of those who were dragged or dragooned along, those who just arranged to meet friends there, or those who popped in for a few minutes to find some shelter from the wind and rain. Brandon Taylor has not quite taken on this task in a work which deals with the issue of ‘how visiting art galleries became one of the privileges and duties of the citizen’ (p. xiii), but it is a question which runs as a constant counterpoint within his detailed examination of what those who exhibited art in public galleries liked to think about the people who came in and saw it. The book runs chronologically from the beginnings of the public art gallery in eighteenth-century London to (in a brief coda) Tate Modern at Bankside. Each chapter is oriented around a significant gallery space in London and the debates surrounding it in the period it was opened to the public: the Royal Academy of Arts (late eighteenth century), the National Gallery (early nineteenth century), the V&A (mid-nineteenth century), the Tate (late nineteenth century), the Duveen wing at the Tate (1920s and 1930s), the ICA (1940s and 1950s) and the Hayward Gallery (1960s). Put simply, Taylor’s argument is that the publics imagined for these spaces within the ideas and arguments of those exhibiting art have changed over time, and that these changes are a matter of the relationship between class and nation. One of the central themes of the book is that from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards a key concern of art professionals, and of those who have given them the financial and political resources to put on exhibitions, has been with the moral ‘improvement’ of the public and the incorporation of individuals into a national culture through the contemplation of art. Since a major, if changing, concern throughout this period has been with class divisions, then the agenda of this moral crusade has been one – particularly in the nineteenth century – of a crusade to civilize the working classes. Drawing on gallery archives and on newspaper and parliamentary debates, Taylor extends familiar discussions of rational recreation into detailed examinations of gallery spaces in terms of financing, siting, collection building, lighting and policing. However, a second concern of the book is to detail the failure of art to heal class divisions. First, because the gallery space was constructed as an implicitly middle-class space. Second, because of the fracturing of any idea of a ‘national public’ at the end of the nineteenth century in terms of attitudes to change: in this instance through the debates over modernism and, in particular, Picasso and Matisse. Here again Taylor offers an explanation based on class. This pits the Royal Academy, the landed gentry, new industrial patrons, the provincial intelligentsia, the armed services, the Church and Whitehall on one side against metropolitan intellectuals, the BBC and the Arts Council on the other. While this analysis is pursued with some subtlety through detailed examinations of the Book reviews 479