ART: Mind your own business
Why the Duke of Northumberland should ignore his critics
Sharp-eyed, learned and lucid, Richard Dorment (chief art critic at the Daily Telegraph) is also, by all accounts, a very pleasant and sane person — something all the more remarkable in a profession not over-endowed with even slightly pleasant or sane people. All of which made the last paragraph of his recent round-up of 2002 particularly alarming:
The Duke and Duchess of Northumberland deserve a special mention for selling a Raphael off the walls of the National Gallery to the Getty Museum for a reported £20 million. Considering that they only knew they owned a Raphael because a curator from the gallery told them so, that the National Gallery has hung and insured the work for a decade, and that their graces did not apparently tell the National Gallery that they were in negotiations with the Getty until the deal was completed, their vulgarity takes some sort of biscuit.
Vulgarity?
Well, obviously, were I as delightful a person as Mr Dorment is regularly said to be, not only would I not have drawn your attention to this embarrassing little eruption, but indeed would have consigned it to oblivion, where it so obviously belongs. Since, though, I’m that other, more typical sort of art critic, it seems to me well worth pointing out the many, many ways in which Mr Dorment’s short paragraph fails to coincide with reality — and the many, many reasons why the Duke of Northumberland should be congratulated, rather than vilified, for the decisions he’s taken regarding his own property.
In 1992, a little panel painting called The Madonna of the Pinks was loaned by the 11th Duke of Northumberland and his trustees to the National Gallery. Trustees? Well, like virtually all the great estates in this country, much of the Duke of Northumberland’s property is held in trust, and hence subject to the intricate tangle of rules and obligations consequent on that sort of arrangement. The painting was displayed as the work of Raphaello Sanzio, known here as Raphael, ‘Il Divino’, that quintessential Old Master himself. It is true that the admirable National Gallery curator Nicholas Penny had seen this picture at Alnwick in 1991 and had told the Duke that he thought the painting, unlike legions of stately home ‘Raphaels’, had actually been painted by Raphael. It is also true that the painting had been purchased in 1853 as a Raphael, had long been accepted in the family as 'quite possibly' being autograph, and that it was labelled as a Raphael at the time Penny saw it. Finally, it is equally true — although this is so obvious as hardly to need saying — that while attribution is the fluffiest and most subjective of all possible sciences, things have come to a sorry pass when the mere glance of a National Gallery curator, however widely admired, is deemed to have conferred authenticity on a doubtful if likeable work, rather than simply reflecting an authenticity that was latently there from the beginning. And yet what is the sense of Mr Dorment’s comments if not that the folk up at Alnwick ought to have been more grateful to Mr Penny for thus improving their painting?
That’s neither here nor there, though. The Duke loaned the painting to the National Gallery. Yes, the Gallery insured it. But anyone who has ever taken out insurance will presumably understand that no one but the National Gallery could easily have insured the work, seeing that the painting was housed in the National Gallery, protected by National Gallery staff and National Gallery security precautions, and perused by National Gallery visitors in their hundreds of thousands. What else, exactly, was the Duke supposed to do vis-a-vis insurance, other than deciding not to loan anything at all?
The 11th Duke died in 1996 and was succeeded by his brother, the present Duke. He and Northumberland Estates trustees decided to allow the Raphael to remain at the National Gallery. Arguably this was a generous thing to do, since the presence of such a painting could only have secured extra visitors for Alnwick — that magnificent bastion which even now looks more like a family home than some ghastly National Trust ‘heritage site’, yet which in today’s world must earn its own keep as a tourist attraction.
The 1990s, though, were years blighted by the fallout from BSE, followed by the onset of Foot & Mouth — terrible times for pastoral agriculture — all of which brings us to another fact about the Duke of Northumberland conveniently ignored by Mr Dorment. Mr Dorment’s piece strongly implies that the ‘vulgar’ Northumberlands shirk responsibility wherever possible, while at the same time seeking to wring every last farthing out of their estate, presumably all to spend on dissipation and opulent living. In fact, however, as plenty of people could have told him, nothing could be further from the case.
It must have been a faintly embarrassing thing to do, but recently the Duke of Northumberland was prompted by a flurry of under-informed attacks on him, of which Mr Dorment’s piece is only one example, to write an article in the Daily Telegraph. In this he pointed out, calmly and sensibly, the unenviable situation he and his trustees faced.
The basic point relates to the breadth and scale of his responsibilities. Not only does the Duke of Northumberland own and maintain both Alnwick Castle and Syon House — Grade 1 listed buildings of architectural and historical interest — but he owns 200 other listed heritage buildings as well. He employs hundreds of people, many of them in a part of the country scarred by the agrarian hardship of recent years. He has a role in maintaining a particular sort of landscape that is one of Britain’s greatest treasures. Most of all — and how on earth is Mr Dorment, or indeed many of us, supposed to empathise fully with this? — he obviously has a strong sense of responsibility for protecting, conserving and strengthening an historic landed estate, together with the people who live and work on it. There are, after all, some things that are more important than pictures — even pictures by Raphael.
The Duke of Northumberland is well aware of this. In the wake of the Foot & Mouth crisis, Northumberland Estates made a large donation to assist farmers who had lost their livelihood, and gave stock farmers a rent reduction in the spring of 2002. Does Mr Dorment think that is ‘vulgar’? Other schemes have recently been introduced to help farmers diversify or retire from farming. Is that ‘vulgar’, too? The Estates have supported village schools, shops, pubs and post offices facing closure, as well as developing programmes to help local schoolchildren. They have provided a £500,000 site to build a new sports facility. He had also done a great deal to ensure that local people develop specialised skills that actually do carry weight in today's economy — skills as masons, carpenters, joiners, plumbers, accountants — this list is a long one, and indeed could go on and on. Perhaps this is why, last year, Country Life magazine chose Alnwick as the best place to live in Britain. Yet Mr Dorment is strangely yet eloquently silent on these subjects. Canada Square is, after all, a long way from the bare hills and mass cattle-graves of the North East.
But at the same time, the Northumberland Estates must maintain their listed buildings, keep their paintings and furniture in good shape, support their employees and tenants, and generally seek to do what they can for an economically-deprived part of our country. One can easily see, in this context, why selling off a small picture for £32 million (Dorment gets the price wrong, too) might have seemed an attractive proposition. After all, the Getty Museum — while not sited in Britain — is in every sense a worthy institution. It owns some absolute masterpieces. It employs some serious scholars. It attracts large audiences. And its standards of conservation certainly invite comparison with those of the National Gallery, where ‘transparency’ and ‘openness’ remain alien concepts, and nasty scraped-down finish rules supreme.
Yet somewhere, implicit in Mr Dorment’s argument, there is the suggestion that it is somehow ‘vulgar’ to send this Raphael out of the UK. One senses that the patriotism of the Duke of Northumberland (whose uncle, the 9th Duke, a 27-year old Grenadier Guardsman, was killed in action in 1940) is being called into question. All of which is not only — well, vulgar, frankly — but stupid as well. There is really no good reason why the Madonna of the Pinks needs to be in Britain. If this were — well, one struggles to list an equivalent British work of art, but let’s pretend for a moment that there was something actually painted in Britain in the early sixteenth century that was of similar quality — this might make some sense. But Raphael, for heaven’s sake, was born in Urbino, not Hampstead or Crouch End or Walthamstow. Is it really more desirable for a painting by Raphael to be in the UK than it is for it to be in the United States? And if so, why is it, for instance, better for the painting to be in the UK than in Italy? And what is so wrong with the people of Los Angeles that they do not deserve a chance to look at this Raphael too?
Or perhaps Mr Dorment feels that once a painting is loaned to a museum or gallery, it should somehow stay there? If so, he’s stepped onto some very muddy ground. Mexico, for instance, has a policy which mandates that if pre-Columbian works are returned to Mexico — say, for a special exhibition — they will be seized by the Mexican state. The result of this is that no sane institution will loan such works to Mexican institutions, and thus that the greatest Aztec show of the current age is taking place in London, not Mexico City. All of which is lovely for us, here in London, but a bit tough on the many Mexicans who cannot afford the aeroplane fare to London, and who are thus prevented from ever seeing great swathes of their own heritage. The moral? If you start treating loans as if you own them, no one will ever loan you anything. And the double standards here are unspeakable. The rubbishy, regrettable Kitaj show at the National Gallery a couple of years ago juxtaposed a few hasty daubs by a living artist with a good Cézanne, and doubtless did great things for the value of those daubs in the process. But if a landowner loans a picture to the National Gallery for a few years, it is obviously supposed to pass seamlessly into the ownership of the National Gallery.
It’s a cheap question, but an obvious one: would Mr Dorment loan a jumper, an old monograph or — heaven forbid — a picture to a friend on that sort of basis? And as far as art-world interests go, this sort of thing cuts both ways. Sir Denis Mahon, for one, has loaned some very beautiful works to the National Gallery, but periodically threatens to take them back if the government does not back down regarding admission charges, or other policies with which he disagrees. Oddly, though, when this happens, the massed ranks of art critics do not tend to bay for the wholesale nationalisation of Sir Denis’s paintings.
There is more that Mr Dorment either ignores or does not know. Once the Northumberland Estates had decided that they needed the cash more than they needed the Raphael, they were under an obligation to realise as much for the work as they possibly could. And then, to return to a final point from Mr Dorment's article, they could have told the National Gallery about the negotiations until they were blue in the face. It would have made no difference. There is no way the National Gallery would have been able to match the Getty's prices without engineering one of these periodic 'crisis' situations in which some relatively unknown work of art, with no public enthusiasm whatsoever behind it, must suddenly be 'saved for the nation'.
The Getty is not exactly a fly-by-night, dodgy gallery. It is a serious, prestigious institution. It can also pay top dollar. Why? Well, among other things, because in the United States, charitable donations are tax-exempt. This is the main reason why American institutions — not only the private ones, either — have the money to attract serious works of art. The UK could change its tax policy to follow this promising lead. Instead, it varies, occasionally and sloppily, the amounts of funding that pass through non-descript quangos, while ignoring anything that would encourage private support for public collections, let alone the creation and maintenance of important private collections. And thus art continues to haemorrhage away from the UK towards the US. Once upon a time, in the nineteenth century, when Britain attracted the best art and artefacts in the world, we were not so obsessed with the idea that once in a certain country, a work of art has to stay there. The fact that we are thus obsessed now says nothing very encouraging about our present state of affairs.
If there is a real tragedy in this story, it does not lie in the imagined ‘vulgarity’ of the current set of Percies. Instead, it resides in one of two places: in the inability of the UK to produce individuals or businesses able to challenge the buying-power of the Getty, or in an economic situation in which great landed families ever have to sell anything to which they, or indeed we, might feel remotely attached. The Madonna of the Pinks does not belong to Richard Dorment. He should stop trying to act as if it did. But he should also face up to some facts about the nature of cultural hegemony. No nation ever developed a really great collection of art — especially of other people’s art — simply by whining very loudly about the importance of having a really great collection of art. What it took was prosperity, self-confidence, individual initiative, a sane set of priorities and a robust attitude towards personal property. That one of our better critics — writing for an allegedly conservative newspaper, no less! — can be so blind both to the realities of the countryside and to the realities of the arts, is more than a little disconcerting.
And so the situation stands. Tessa Jowell, our 'Culture Minister', has applied for a six-month export ban, and the National Gallery has resourcefully put in for a £30 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund in order to keep the Madonna of the Pinks in Britain. Presumably the Gallery's press team have been briefing ferociously against the Duke, rather than thanking him for lending this lovely little work as long as he did; presumably all private lenders to the National Gallery are quietly considering their options — and presumably Mr Dorment continues to ponder and promulgate his own, deeply personal notions of 'vulgarity'.
Bunny Smedley is ERO's arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, January 16, 2003 11:10 AM