Birmingham used to have greater claims to fame than bankruptcy and binmen. One was its Museum and Art Gallery — BMAG for short — home to a collection of international importance. It was a blow when, in March 2020, the Gallery closed, “in order to improve the visitor experience”. Last October it reopened, announcing it was now “sharing more of the city’s collection” and “unlocking thousands of stories”.
So, has the visitor’s experience improved?
I went back to the Gallery’s Round Room. This was an iconic space — both an entry point and the institution’s heart. Its domed ceiling and decorative tiles remained, but where were the paintings? For decades, the curving walls had been hung with an array of nineteenth century artworks. Just two or three of them remained, positioned almost out of sight.
The area was now occupied by a contemporary display called “One Fresh Take”. It was like returning to the ancestral home, only to find that your eccentric aunts and loveable grandparents had, in the name of progress, been put away.
The idea of setting up public galleries and museums across British cities was a genuinely fresh one. Extracts from Hansard suggest the debate before the passing of the 1845 Museums Act was enthusiastic:
When the Bill would be carried into operation in large towns, the museums would be opened at such hours and under such regulations as would be advantageous to the working classes. The great drawback on the improvement of the operative classes was, that there was no public institution in existence which they could call their own. (Mr Philips)
The Act allowed boroughs with populations over 10,000 to levy a halfpenny rate in the pound to establish museums which:
… should contain specimens of antique art, of mediaeval art, and of modern art. (Mr Ewart)
No longer was art only for Londoners, who might visit the new National Gallery. It wasn’t just in the private homes of the rich. Ordinary folk were to get the best of everything. Mr Ewart and Mr Philips were early proponents of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. (Of course, it’s possible these gentlemen had other motives for caring about the workers. Anything that stopped them from hanging out with those pesky Chartists, who kept agitating for Parliamentary Reform, was worth a try.)
Why is the work that was “modern” then, now so hard to find? One answer is that many local authorities are close to penury. Birmingham’s “reopening” is a prolonged part-closure. Yet the same push towards obscuring older art is there in better-funded institutions.
Take Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum. Last year they did their own “fresh take”, rehanging their collection. The new Nature Gallery still displays John Constable’s much-loved Hampstead Heath. But there’s a new sign with a trigger warning. “Paintings showing rolling English hills” do not just reinforce “loyalty and pride towards a homeland”, we are told: “The darker side of evoking this nationalist feeling is the implication that only those with a historical tie to the land have a right to belong.”
When Birmingham’s Museum and Art Gallery opened in 1885, the city’s inhabitants included a big Irish community. There were German-Jews, Italians, people from Eastern Europe, and incomers from rural areas, whose ties to the land had been severed. Yet at a time when municipal confidence was high, the city’s new art collection may have given its various citizens shared pleasure, a collective sense of ownership.
The Fitzwilliam’s signs are about today’s cultural milieu, not the past. They represent pushback by a curatorial caste, who feel angered by Brexit and alienated by the flag-waving antics of politicians.
Constable is the archetypal English artist. His status means he can be besmirched, but not banished. And yet gallery stores hold work by artists who, two hundred years back, were even more celebrated. Why do their paintings so rarely see the light of day?
In a world where images of heathland evoke “dark” feelings, it’s unsurprising if artworks about military conflict stay in the vaults. But among them are paintings that turn a critical eye on war. William Mulready’s The Convalescent from Waterloo, held at the V&A’s East Storehouse, is one of them.
The Battle of Waterloo resulted in thousands of deaths and casualties. Mulready depicts a single pale survivor who sits by the sea. He clutches his side, gazing into the middle distance. His wife and children are near, yet the former soldier seems somewhere else entirely. It’s a strikingly bleak picture — which may explain its mixed reception when, in 1822, it was shown at the Royal Academy.
In an age when art is promoted as a way to unlock stories, this panel delivers a tale of loss, fragility, and pain.
Religion, like warfare, is full of narrative. Yet gallery directors prefer to follow Alistair Campbell; they “don’t do God”. At best they regard art that explores Christian ideas as outmoded. At worst it’s seen as dangerous. This puts them at odds with their nineteenth century predecessors who were busy “doing” Christianity, and whose paintings reflected their outlook.
William Collins, an Evangelical and Royal Academician, is a case in point. His painting Sunday Morning, exhibited in 1836, has been in the Tate’s stores for three decades. It shows a family where everyone helps Grandma, who walks with a stick, to church. Children hold the horse for her; the parents escort her down steps. In the background we see other churchgoers, tiny figures moving from darkness towards light. While the scene is intensely human, it nudges us toward the spiritual.
It’s an irony of today’s artworld that so many galleries tell us they promote access, embrace diversity and welcome young and old alike . Yet when “genre painters” such as Mulready and Collins express the same ideas, it results in their work being devalued.
And if Christianity gets a bad press, to accuse an artist of Orientalism is positively damning. European depictions of Arabic subjects are found guilty of exoticism, othering and objectification. In sensitive times it is better for such work to be out of sight.
Yet suppose an Arab ruler asks a Scotsman to paint him? That is how David Wilkie’s 1841 portrait of His Highness Muhemed Ali, Pacha of Egypt came into being. It is clear Wilkie had his own ideas about the commission. An initial sketch shows the Pasha firmly grasping a scimitar. In the finished work the scimitar simply rests near Ali’s hand. The ruler, having recently been defeated by European forces in battle, objected to the first drawing because, “the British have deprived me of my sword”. The Pasha wanted control of his image — like any celebrity being photographed for Hello magazine.
What should be made of today’s curatorial classes, with their ever-narrowing views on what is to be seen
Wilkie’s portrait did emerge from the Tate’s store in 2008, for the gallery’s exhibition, The Lure of the East. The Guardian reviewed the show, opting to note sniffily, “There is not a single work by a Muslim artist”. A fair point, perhaps. It is also one, that, if pushed to its logical conclusion, would result in artists only being allowed to paint themselves.
We’ve been persuaded we no longer need paintings from the early nineteenth century. They were made by chaps with the wrong ideas, who were priggish and privileged, who misused their powers. We may even be inclined to mock the founders of museums and galleries, with their zeal for edifying and educating the masses.
Yet what should be made of today’s curatorial classes, with their ever-narrowing views on what is to be seen, how we are to see it? They deliver a partisan version of the past, one that is only to be viewed through the lens of contemporary identity politics.
This deprives us of the breadth and depth of British art. We lose our sense that art, rather than dividing, can unite us.
