museum news - national heritagenationalheritage.org.uk/files/mn89.pdfmuseum news chairman’s letter...

museumnewsEnglish Heritage’s radical new focus 2Welsh National Gallery opens 2£27 Museum of Liverpool opens 3V&A’s new director 3£55m Endowment Fund 4HLF/ACE Catalyst schemes 4 Bristol’s M Shed opens 4Swain to head up ACE museums team 4 Conran gives £17.5m to Design Museum 5

local focus

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nH deBaTe

Watts Gallery, Compton 8

Stuart Davies on ancestor worship 9

Volunteers to rescue of crisis museums

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National Museum of Scotland 7Sir John Soane Museum 10Foundling Museum 12Hepworth Wakefield 12

MuseuM of THe year revisiTedMuseum of Lakeland Life 11

nH profileMaria Balshaw 6

naTional HeriTage guideA selective list of current and forthcoming museum and gallery exhibitions 14

Almost half of local authority museums are reducing staff by 10% or more, and many are replacing professionals with volunteers.

A report due to be published by the Museums Association on July 20 is expected to show that two thirds of museums funded by councils have had their grants cut and are having to reduce services. More than half are changing opening times, often with an extra day’s closure a week, and 70% are having to increase charges to school groups.

The report is the result of a confidential cuts survey among local authority museums, for which respondents were asked to compare their current situations with that of April 2010.

Of the 63 to have responded, 37% have increased the use of volunteers over the year, and of those 35% have cut paid staff by between 10% and 25%, and 22% by more than a quarter.

Education departments, fundraising teams, warding staff and curators, as well as catering and shops which would be such vital income streams if they could operate properly, are affected.

Maurice Davies, the Museums Association’s head of policy and communications, said:

“The increasing proportion of volunteers and the apparent growing interest in trust status may mark a move towards the Big Society model for local authority museums.

“As successful museums trusts show, this can be a good thing. However, problems will arise when this is combined with vicious funding cuts and a related decline in the skilled and expert staff.

“More volunteers, in principle, is a good thing, but not at the expense of paid staff or if it exploits people seeking a paid career in the sector.”

Meanwhile, museums are closing. The Botanic Gardens Museum in Southport closed in April after Sefton Council cut its funding in a £66m savings drive.

In August the Pumphouse Educational Museum in Rotherhithe will celebrate its 20th birthday by closing after Southwark Council cut its entire funding.

At Wakefield, where a new £35m art gallery has just opened partly funded by the district council, Wakefield Museum is expected to close and its collections moved to a new civic

sculpture by him sold recently at Christie’s. Near to the gallery is Limnerslease, the house

and studio that Watts and his wife Mary built in the Arts and Crafts style, which has been in private ownership since 1938 and is now for sale. The trust need £9m to buy and restore it. “G F Watts was a visionary who believed in art’s potential to transform lives and the power of the artist as a singular independent voice that can speak for all” she said. “I am happy to be able to support the revitalisation of his home and studio as a place of inspiration.” Watts Gallery director Perdita Hunt said the acquisition of the house and studio would enable her to complete the mission of turning Compton into an international centre for the study of Victorian art, social history and craft, offering inspiration to more contemporary artists.

Gormley launches new Watts appeal

Only weeks after the Watts Gallery at Compton near Guildford reopened following its £11m restoration, as we report on page 8, Antony Gormley – pictured here with Watts’s Physical Energy in Kensington Gardens - is leading a campaign to save George Frederic Watts’s house and studio by giving the £160,000 proceeds of a

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Editor: Simon TaitEditor NH Guide: Angela BirdDesign: Liz Moorewww.nationalheritage.org.uk

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THE JOURNAL OF NATIONAL HERITAGE l SUMMER 2011l ISSUE 89 l

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Chairman’s letter English Heritage’s 35% cut means radical new focus

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The good and the bad

The news that Michael Portillo is to chair the Government’s new £80million endowment fund to help the arts and

heritage will be greatly welcomed, not least by museums and galleries. The fund will make available grants of up to £5million to museums, galleries, theatres and opera houses provided they can raise a matching sum from other sources, and what has particularly pleased museums has been Mr Portillo’s enthusiastic involvement as chairman of the judging panel of this year’s Art Fund Museum Prize (see report on page 5 of this issue). During the presentation ceremony he made clear how impressed he had been with what he had seen, and this should encourage museums to consider applying for a grant, as well as entering for the Art Fund Prize. National Heritage is naturally proud of its involvement in the awards, having launched the first Museum of the Year Awards in 1973. Until we ran out of sponsors 31 museums won the major award, with many more winning subsidiary prizes in individual categories, and nine museums have subsequently won the much larger single award of £100,000 put up first by the Gulbenkian Foundation and now by the Art Fund. This year a second award was inaugurated for museum learning, sponsored by the Clore Duffield Foundation, and we hope that others will be introduced in future years.

Certainly museums will need all the help they can get during this time of cuts. Research by the Museums Association reveals that a number of local authority museums are replacing some of their paid (and skilled) staff with volunteers as well as reducing opening hours and introducing charging. Larger, and even our national museums, are also affected. The British Museum (spectacular winner of this year’s Art Fund Prize), the National Museum of Science and Industry, the Imperial War Museum, the British Library and English Heritage are among those making redundancies and seeking other ways of reducing costs to meet cuts in their funding.

National Heritage cannot be immune to the current economic crisis. We have lost members, including member museums, and thus our core financing, and are, as members will already know, having to reduce some of our activities, including the number of organised visits to museums and the number of issues of Museum News. Nonetheless we are determined if possible to stay alive in some form, and continue to support and stimulate interest in our museums and galleries, for yet another recent report has shown that visiting museums can, as well as improving our knowledge and understanding of the world, also improve our health and general wellbeing.James Bishop

English Heritage has announced a radical new programme of top priorities to meet a cut in its grant of more than £50m over the next four years.

Speaking at Apsley House, the Duke of Wellington’s London home now administered by EH, chief executive Simon Thurley launched a National Heritage Protection Plan, setting out how England’s vulnerable historic environment will be safeguarded up to 2015.

While 400 EH staff are to lose their jobs and grants and services are to be cut because of the government’s 35% reduction in its subsidy, Thurley said particular areas of concern had been identified and would be focused on.

They include the marine heritage, historic towns and suburbs, rescuing heritage at risk, tackling heritage crime and ensuring heritage protection continues under changes to the planning system.

He said the NHPP would also support local authorities to meet their responsibilities,

and support the sale of public assets to encourage their sympathetic reuse.

There is to be a new report on the fall in conservation capacity, and another on tackling deskilling in the current economic situation.

Thurley also launched a new National Heritage List, an online database of the country’s 400,000 listed buildings, including Portico (www.english-heritage.org.uk/portico), a catalogue of sites and monuments.

“England’s historic environment is the nation’s most visible and extensive cultural asset” he said. “As its national guardians our aim is to ensure that the cultural legacy of our past continues to form a foundation for a successful modern society.”

Tourism and heritage minister John Penrose welcomed the new initiatives, saying the government’s priorities were to get listing up to date, the rewriting of the Buildings at Risk register and philanthropy.

building, while the grade-II listed 17th-century farmhouse Clarke Hall in Wakefield is under threat of closure because of local authority cuts, and a petition is appealing for a reprieve.

York Museums Trust has to make six compulsory redundancies among curators at the Castle Museum after losing a £500,000 city council grant.

Derby’s Silk Mill Museum, housed in reputedly the world’s oldest factory, is to be “mothballed” for two years to save the local authority £200,000 a year.

After cancelling its entire arts and heritage service, Croydon Council is in negotiations with the Heritage Lottery Fund to keep its Museum

of Croydon open, with one option under consideration being that the borough archive and local studies centre have limited access.

Admission charges are being introduced at the Potteries Museum in Stoke, the Russell-Cotes in Bournemouth, and in museums in Birmingham and Gloucester.

National museums are not immune. The British Library is to lose 215 jobs, the Science Museum is making 40 redundant, and the British Museum is losing 23 posts, 11 of them in the Paul Hamlyn Library that may have to close. At the Imperial War Museum, a voluntary redundancy scheme has resulted in six departures, and the museum is consulting on a further compulsory redundancy.

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Welsh National Gallery opens in CardiffThe new National Museum of Art has opened in Cardiff, giving the first access to the full range of the national collection in six new galleries at the Cathays Park site.

The ten year project has cost £6.5m and the collection includes work by internationally renowned artists such as Monet, Renoir and Cezanne, as well as by Welsh masters like Augustus John. There is now a dedicated space

for temporary exhibitions, and the opening show, I Cannot Escape this Place, features work by Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud and David Hockney.

David Anderson, director-general of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales, said: “The country’s collection of works by Welsh artists and international names is outstanding and it now has a home it deserves”.

£72m Museum of Liverpool opens to tell people’s stories

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V&A names new director Professor Martin Roth, a German curator and academic, is to succeed Sir Mark Jones as director of the Victoria & Albert Museum in September.

Currently director general of the Dresden State Art Collections, Roth, 56, was curator at the German historical museum in Berlin, and director of the German hygiene-museum in Dresden, before being appointed to oversee the state collections in 2001.

“The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design and I am honoured and delighted to be appointed as its new director,” said Professor Roth. ”I am looking forward to working with the staff and trustees of the museum and building on the success achieved by Mark Jones over the past ten years.”

Sir Mark, whose major achievement at the V&A has been the creation of the medieval and Renaissance galleries, is leaving to

Liverpool’s long-awaited new city museum is due to be opened on July 19, at a cost of £72m. Designed by the architects 3XN and standing at the city’s Pier Head beneath the famous Liver Birds of the Royal Liver Building. It opens after long controversies over its design, its placement and its funding, but is expected to become a major visitor draw for Liverpool with more than 750,000 a year anticipated.

More than 6,000 objects, many of which have never been on public display before, reveal an array of stories spanning the Ice Age to the present day. People can see the stage where John Lennon and Paul McCartney first met, witness the city’s growth into the world’s greatest port, see first-hand the last remaining carriage from the famous Liverpool Overhead Railway, and be immersed in the city’s rich sporting and creative history.

David Fleming, director of National Museums Liverpool, said: “The Museum of Liverpool is all about telling the stories of the city and its people. This includes the times of struggle such as the Toxteth riots, the triumphs of our musical exports including The Beatles, and the dramatic histories of our football teams.

“Every single event has helped shape this city’s personality. The Museum of Liverpool is here to tell the tale, and like the Liver Building, will be around for many years to come.”

The museum will confirm Liverpool’s place in history through those stories. The world’s first commercial enclosed wet dock opened here in 1715, Britain’s first canal opened in 1757 connecting Liverpool to the coalfields around St Helens. Since the early 19th-century it has been home to Europe’s oldest Chinese community, and the world’s first inter-city passenger railway ran from Liverpool to Manchester - the oldest passenger railway station in the world still operates on this line at Edge Hill, having opened in 1836.

When it opened in 1934, the Queensway Tunnel, running under the River Mersey from Liverpool to Birkenhead, was the world’s largest underwater road tunnel. The first package holiday flight departed from Liverpool Airport in 1952.

In sport, Liverpool is the only city – through Everton FC and Liverpool FC – to have staged top-flight football in every League season since 1888, and Britain’s first purpose-built boxing stadium was built in here in 1932.

Liverpool singer Lita Roza was the first British woman to top the charts with How much is that doggy in the window? in 1953, and four years later John Lennon met Paul McCartney at a church fete, going on to form the greatest band in the world and contributing

to the fact that Liverpool has had more number one hit singles than any other city in the world.

And in 2008 Liverpool was European Cultural Capital, which had been led by Phil Redmond, chairman of National Museums Liverpool. “Liverpool’s waterfront is known the world over, and we are pleased that we will soon be welcoming visitors to what is undoubtedly a stunning addition to that World Heritage Site,” he said.

“Liverpool’s role in history is also known the world over, as is its iconic symbol, the Liver Bird. It is fitting then that the first purpose-built museum to examine a city’s role in world history, is opening its doors 100 years to the day that the Liver Building itself opened for business.”

become Master of St Cross College, Oxford. Roth’s main task will be overseeing the museum’s new Exhibition Road extension.


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£55m Endowment Fund to encourage fundraisingCulture Secretary Jeremy Hunt has announced a £55m challenge fund to help arts and heritage organisations to build endowment funds. Grants of between £500,000 and £5m will be available from the new Endowment Fund, provided private donors can match the money.

Former Cabinet minister Michael Portillo is to chair the fund’s advisory panel which will review bids. About 50 organisations are expected to benefit.

The new Endowment Fund is part of the philanthropy fund Hunt announced in December, made up from £50m from the Arts Council Lottery Fund and £30m from the DCMS. That has now been added to

with £20m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (see right), bringing the total to £100m.

The £55m Endowment Fund is based on the department’s £30m contribution enhanced by expected philanthropic gifts over the next four years.

Hunt said the intention was to give arts organisations the means to build their own financial resilience and with that, artistic freedom.

“Many cultural organisations are fragile,” he said. “They’re led by talented, passionate people who rightly think that great art matters more than great money. Yet without financial security, fragility becomes vulnerability - and great art can sometimes wither on the vine.”

HLF/ACE launch £60m Catalyst funds

Bristol’s new, admission-free, city museum has opened in one of the waterfront’s 1950s transit sheds from which the museum takes its name. Converted at a cost of £27m, M Shed joins SS Great Britain, the Arnolfini Gallery and the Watershed Media Centre in Bristol’s cultural hub. Through 3,000 exhibits the museum uses thousands of stories of Bristol people to draw the city’s narrative, from Nick Park’s Aardman Animations, creators of Wallace and

The Arts Council, which is taking over the role of the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, and the Heritage Lottery Fund have announced new Catalyst funds to enable heritage and arts organisations to increase their fundraising potential.

All the money will come from projected National Lottery income, and both schemes are part of the government’s £100m philanthropy fund, announced last December.

ACE’s new £40m Catalyst Arts fund is to be invested in three different ways. £30 million will be used as an integrated match-funding and capacity building scheme to increase arts organisations’ ability to fundraise, offering tailored awards for three-year periods. Individual organisations or partnerships that have some experience of fundraising will be eligible, and they will be expected to develop their ideas and capability in the first year, then explore innovative ways of using match-funding to generate and secure new private giving. ACE expects this to lever £25m of new money by 2015.

Another £7 million will be invested in a one-off grant scheme to support arts organisations with less experience to build their fundraising capacity, with awards ranging from £15,000 - £25,000 to provide the tools and skills needed to begin to increase private income. A further £3 million will be spent partly on practical advice on how to secure new sources of funding and partly on sharing knowledge gained from Catalyst Arts with the wider sector.

The Heritage Lottery Fund have added their own Catalyst fund to help build long-term financial resilience for heritage organisations, with £20m available. £15m will be used to create challenge endowments of £500,000 upwards, with the remaining £5m for capacity building to increase the ability of heritage bodies to fundraise and encourage giving. The fund is expected to be open for applications in early September.

Eligibility, criteria and timings for applications for this funding will be set out in detail following further consultation. It is currently envisaged that the endowment challenge funding will be available for existing HLF-funded voluntary sector and charitable organisations across the full range of heritage supported by HLF – including natural heritage bodies - throughout the UK.

“Being part of the Catalyst initiative is a real opportunity to build financial resilience in the heritage sector,” said Carole Souter, chief executive of HLF. “This £20m Heritage Lottery Fund investment challenges voluntary and charitable organisations of all sizes to focus on engaging with new supporters and benefactors.”

Hedley Swain, the MLA’s director programming delivery, is to be director museums and Renaissance for Arts Council England as ACE takes over museum and library duties from the MLA before its abolition next spring. He will start in October.

Hedley Swain to headup museums for ACE

Two other important appointments in ACE’s new department are Charlotte Johns as director, museums and investment, from being MLA’s Renaissance programme co-ordinator; and Nicola Morgan will be director, libraries, having been programme manager for sector development at the MLA.

There are to be 53 new posts with the remaining roles announced over the summer.”

Gromit, to the Bristol Bus Boycott led by black workers in 1963. Julie Finch, Head of Bristol Museums and Archives, said: “M Shed … builds on Bristol’s great heritage to bring experts and the community together in the joint endeavour of building a new narrative for the city. I hope M Shed will become a destination for the understanding and celebration of the history of Bristol and its people and a vibrant learning resource for the future, open to all.”

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British Museum’s ‘100 Objects’ is 2011 winner“This,” said a founder trustee of the Museum Prize, “is the kind of thing we started this for,” when the British Museum won the award for its project A History of the World. “It conveys not just the magic of museums, but more importantly of why they are there and the treasures that await our discovery”. But there had been concerns back in 2002 about it.

At £100,000 it was the biggest art prize in the country, deliberately so to make it worthwhile, but the founding institutions – the Museums Association, the Art Fund, the Gulbenkian as first sponsor, the Campaign for Museums and, of course, National Heritage – were worried that small museums would be discouraged from competing for fear of being out-gunned by large ones, and that national institutions would feel it was not for them.

Since then, plenty of smaller museums have triumphed, and benefited enormously from the cash-input, and there have been bids by large ones too. But this is the first time a national has taken the prize (although the British Museum was the last winner of the old National Heritage Museum of the Year Award in 2000 for its Great Court).

The purpose of the prize is to recognise and stimulate originality and excellence in museums and galleries across the UK, and increase public appreciation and enjoyment of all they have to offer.

A single award of £100,000 goes to the institution that, in the opinion of the judges, best meets those criteria through a project completed or mainly undertaken in the previous calendar year. The judges this time were heritage consultant Kathy Gee; journalist Charlotte Higgins; Baroness Young of Hornsey; Antiques Road Show expert Lars Tharp; and Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller. The chairman was Michael Portillo.

There was also a new award this year, the Clore Award for Museum learning supported by the Clore Duffield Foundation, and it was jointly won by the South London Gallery and the Pitt Rivers Museum & Oxford Museum of Natural History, which each receive £10,000.

But for the main Art Fund Prize, the shortlist along with the BM was The Polar Museum, University of Cambridge, for Promoting Britain’s Polar Heritage; the new Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, Scotland; and The Roman Baths Museum, Bath.

The chair of the judges, Michael

Portillo, said: “It was inspiring to see the transformation brought about by each project and to meet the enthusiastic, dedicated staff behind each one. Choosing a shortlist was not easy, but we are agreed that these four museums and galleries exhibit remarkable innovation and flair, which excited us and clearly draws in the general public too.”

But, he said at the presentation at Tate Britain on June 15, the eventual winner was the unanimous choice of the panel.

“We were particularly impressed by the truly global scope of the British Museum’s project, which combined intellectual rigour and open heartedness, and went far beyond the boundaries of the museum’s walls,” he said. “Above all, we felt that this project, which showed a truly pioneering use of digital media, has led the way for museums to interact with their audiences in new and different ways. Without changing the core of the British Museum’s purpose, people have and are continuing to engage with objects in an innovative way as a consequence of this project.”

A History of the World was the notion of the British Museum’s director, Neil MacGregor, to tell the story of the world through 100 objects held in the most comprehensive museum in the world. He did it through a collaboration with BBC Radio 4 which broadcast 100 short programmes.

He said it took three years of intensive research and debate within the museum, and the eventual choice of objects covered two million years and told a narrative history of the world, from a chopping tool made from

Above: Neil McGregor with the Art Fund Prize; left Minoan Bull Leaper, c1700-1450BC Crete

Sir Terence Conran, who founded the Design Museum 30 years ago, is to give £17.5m for its move to the former Commonwealth Institute building in Kensington. He has promised a cash gift of £7.5m and the value of the lease of the present museum building at Shad Thames, thought to be worth £10m.

“Moving to the Commonwealth Institute will allow all our dreams and ambitions for the Design Museum to come true, to create a world class space with the size and scope for the serious promotion and celebration of design and architecture in this country” he said.

Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, added: “Terence Conran has transformed Britain. His contribution to the

a piece of olduvai stone two million years ago to a modern credit card. More than 550 museums across Britain took part, with their own seminal objects and special exhibitions going on show in sync with the broadcasts.

Presenting the most treasured object in the BBC Radio 4 programme, MacGregor told his audience: “Perhaps the best thing of all about being director of the British Museum, and one that still gives me the most enormous thrill, is that now and then I’m allowed to take some of the objects out of their cases and hold them. And today I’m being allowed to hold something that is absolutely astonishing… This is one of the first things that humans ever consciously made. And holding it puts me directly in touch with them.”

He passed the olduvai stone chopping tool to his companion, Sir David Attenborough. “Holding this, I can feel what it was like to be out on the African savannahs,” Sir David said, “needing to cut flesh for example, needing to cut into a carcass, in order to get a meal.”

The prize money will be spent on sending BM objects to museums around the country on special loan, MacGregor said.

Conran’s £17.5m gift to help Design Museum’s move

way we live, eat, and shop over six decades has been enormous. The gift to the Design Museum is a hugely generous investment in the future. By making our ambition to move to the former Commonwealth Institute much more achievable, he makes possible a project that will give the museum three times as much space as it has now. The new Design Museum will be the definitive voice of contemporary design, reinforcing Britain’s place as one of the world’s leading creative economies.”

Conran, who will be 80 later this year and will be the subject of a special exhibition at the Design Museum, has given it £50m since the museum began as The Boilerhouse in the V&A in 1981. It opened in Shad Thames eight years later.

The Grade II* listed 1960s Commonwealth Institute building has been empty since 2001. Planning permission for its conversion was given last year and its refurbishment will be completed by 2014 at a total cost of £77m.


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Double city life Dr Maria Balshaw, director of the Whitworth and Manchester Art GalleriesThe contest between town and gown in university cities has always been keen, but usually both elements agree to rub along together in the interests of the community.

In Manchester the relationship has moved on from mere coalescence to partnership, with the appointment of Maria Balshaw, director of the University of Manchester’s Whitworth Art Gallery, to be head of the city council’s Manchester Art Gallery – to do both jobs simultaneously, and combine some of the expertise and services of both institutions.

It is a unique deal, and other cities are looking at similar arrangements. “I suppose I didn’t think I was busy enough,” she says.

Dr Balshaw was a successful academic, a Fellow at Birmingham University, before she went on the first Clore Leadership Programme. Within months of completing it she had been appointed to the Whitworth. That was in 2006.

Married to Nick Merriman, the director of the Manchester Museum whom she met on the Clore Programme, she has two children from a previous marriage, aged 13 and 11. Now 41, she was listed as one of the Fifty Women to Watch last year when her qualities were listed as “smart, savvy and fun”. One of her recreations, according to Who’s Who, is “Dancing (especially in kitchen with my kids)”.

The Whitworth Institute and Park was founded in 1889 in the great Victorian age of philanthropy

in the name of one of its great industrialists, Sir Joseph Whitworth. In 1958 it was transferred to the university and changed its name.

Almost everything has changed there in the last five years - there were 80,000 visitors a year then, there are 170,000 now. “The gallery was relatively inward facing and now it’s one of the best connective galleries outside London” she says. “The staff hasn’t changed much, there was always great talent and desire to do good work, but it had lost its sense of connection to the university and outside world”.

Now, connections with the community have blossomed through a more lively exhibitions programme and external focus - working with local Sure Start centres, for instance - and the family programme brings in thousands of children each year. Next year for the first time the Whitworth will have Arts Council revenue funding.

Although the Whitworth Gardens behind had originally been part of the gallery as a part of the city fathers’ mission to improve the inhabitants’ well-being, through the years the building has turned its back. She has HLF funding now for a £12m scheme to extend and open the gallery to the gardens, which should be completed in summer 2014.

“The gallery’s at the limit of capacity, it can’t take any more school groups and is often very crowded” she explains. “There are

55,000 objects in the collection available to use but no space to work with them. And there’s a beautiful park around us we can’t really engage with, the back is horrible, and we feel we need to embrace the park and pull people in as well as take our art out.

“The collections are wonderful and deserve it, and Manchester deserves a gallery that can work in that way. There’s a connection that’s just been undermined and lost down the years, so in a sense we’re going back to the vision of the original founders, the great men of Manchester.”

Manchester Art Gallery is even more venerable, started in the 1820s as the Royal Manchester Institution for the Promotion of Science, Literature and the Arts. Its art galleries were opened to the public ten years later, and in 1882 it was handed over to corporation care. It enshrined other collections along the way, together with major bequests of mostly classical and British art. Now, since a £35m expansion under Virginia Tandy a decade ago, there has been a focus on contemporary collecting.

“The art gallery has been waiting for the next phase as the city centre gallery that has a role as both the cultural shop window for Manchester and providing a service for local communities” Balshaw says, who has appointed a head of operations, Kate Farmery, to “make sure things happen when I’m not there”. Together they are creating a new vision of what the gallery has to do in terms of international connection and local context, “how to make the art gallery feel as distinctive and wonderful as it needs to be.”

Alliances are important and Balshaw has made working connections with other museums and galleries in the city through the Manchester Museums Consortium which involves all the major institutions in Greater Manchester, including the Manchester Museum, the Lowry, the Cornerhouse, the Imperial War Museum North, the Museum of Science and Industry and the People’s History Museum, exchanging ideas, strategies and information. No doubt the new National Football Museum, opening in the autumn in what was Urbis in the city centre, will be a recruit.

The combined post is emphatically not a cost-cutting exercise, she says, and no posts are being lost, but subsidy cuts concern her. “It’s too glib to say we’ll innovate our way out of what is without doubt the most difficult situation that we’ve ever faced, and I don’t want to move to that falsely cheery position. The good things that have happened to museums and galleries in the past decade have fundamentally changed how we do our business, massively for the better, so I look at the prospects and say, ‘How do I protect the things that I absolutely believe in, things that benefit visitors who need the things we offer?’ It means we will have to move more slowly and do things in different ways, and there lie some opportunities.”

The flowers of ScotlandThe National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh


A new, coherent, narrative of the Scottish story opens in Edinburgh on July 29, on time and on budget after a three year closure, drawn from a collection of over four million objects. Hardly believably, 80% of what goes on display will either not have been seen before in public, or not for a long time.

It is been a £46.4m transformation of the 150-year-old Royal Museum building which has seen the vaulted storage space at street level under the former entrance hall - which had been the repository for the museum’s coal supplies and workshops as well as stored objects - cleared out and changed into a new main reception, with two akin staircases leading up to the Grand Gallery atrium created by the V&A’s original architect, Captain Francis Fowke.

The Grand Gallery becomes an exhibition space, clad in Caithness blackstone and limestone, where large objects now proclaim the promise: the Chantry statue of James Watt, a five metre tall lighthouse lens from the Forth of Forth, a four metre long Tahitian wedding bowl, a aircraft auto-gyro hanging, a wind turbine blade. There are 20-metre high object walls with a thousand objects symbolising the wonders within. “It’s the focal point for the whole museum,” says Gordon Rintoul, the director for the last nine years.

Fowke’s archways which had been closed up to create enclosed galleries have been opened (so that visitors can see through the building), allowing 16 new galleries to be created. The whole five-storey height of the building is connected by a glass lift.

This main Chambers Street building was opened in 1866 as the Edinburgh Museum

of Science and Art, inspired by the Great Exhibition of 1851, and later was renamed the Royal Scottish Museum, the first national public building in Scotland. The idea for the museum had grown out of the Scottish Enlightenment of the mid 18th-century when the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland was formed. In the mid-19th century the new Industrial Museum began showing international collections. In 1998 the new Museum of Scotland was built at the Royal Museum’s end.

But as well as different names, the two museums had different logos, different guides, even different floor levels.

“The people before me did the new museum, Mark Jones, Robert Anderson, and while there had been a lot of thinking about the main museum, nothing had really been done” Rintoul says. “I had a piece of paper at my interview which said ‘Sort out Royal Museum!’ It’s what I came here to do.”

Scots-born, 56-year-old Gordon Rintoul studied physics at Edinburgh University and his doctorate, in history of science and technology, was from Manchester in 1982. Two years later he was curator of the Colour Museum at Bradford, then opened Catalyst, the museum of the chemical industry, in Yorkshire, before becoming CEO of Sheffield Galleries and Museums. At Sheffield, he was responsible for the £15m Millennium Galleries, and he developed partnerships with the V&A, the Tate, the British Museum and the Natural History Museum, before being appointed to his present job in 2002.

Rintoul has organised the displays into five themes – science and technology, arts and design, cultures across the world, the natural world and Scotland, and what links them all is the Scottish thread.

“So now we have stories of great Scottish inventions and innovations, or material about Scots going to the four corners of the earth as missionaries, engineers, soldiers, to make fortunes and bringing things back, collecting stuff for scientific purposes, Scottish inquisitiveness dating from the Enlightenment.

“We have easily the best science and technology collection outside London, but you wouldn’t think so because the key things have not been on display – Fleming’s Nobel Prize for his penicillin discovery, the

MuseuM in THe neWs

National Museum of ScotlandChambers StreetEdinburgh EH1 1JF0300 123 6789www.nms.ac.uk/our_museums/national_museumDaily 10-5Admission free, donations welcome.

world’s oldest colour television set, the earliest signed instrument by Watt (who started as an instrument maker). The key thing is that as well as transforming the building, we’re actually getting on display a lot of the really important stuff that even people familiar with the museum were not aware we had.”

The new museum was paid for with £17.8m from the Heritage Lottery Fund, £16m from the Scottish government and the rest from private sources. There are four shops and three restaurants with a new kitchen to service them, a three-storey learning centre and a new temporary exhibitions gallery. In its business plan is its unique offer as the biggest space for conferences in Edinburgh where 850 people can sit down for a black tie dinner.

“We have one of the largest, longest-standing collections in the world, but this is a new museum for the 21st century in every respect” Rintoul says.

Top: The Grand Gallery, left: Mary Queen of Scots jewellery, above: Gordon Rintoul, director.

Compton’s sleeping giant


The Watts Gallery, tucked away amid the trees of the Surrey Downs at Compton near Guildford, was destined to be one of the sad casualties of modern cultural management. A delightful monument to a once famous artist, created by his wife a century ago amid a creative community, assailed by dilapidation, dwindling visitor numbers and lack of funding, it was on English Heritage’s At Risk Register and seemed certain to close and its collections dispersed to those holdings that would take them, or to the sale room.

On June 18 the Grade II starred building was reopened after a 30-month closure and an £11m restoration and careful expansion, with a new shop, a café, a kiln and an expansive learning centre. It is a triumph for its first ever director, Perdita Hunt.

A former director of communications at the Heritage Lottery Fund, she was appointed in 2004 when the gallery was at its lowest ebb – effectively facing closure because there seemed no prospect of raising the money needed to rescue it from oblivion, but she was undaunted: “We’re waking a sleeping giant” she said.

George Frederic Watts belonged to no school or movement, and for much of his life he was respected by his fellow artists but never accorded the attention of contemporaries such as Millais, Rossetti and Burne-Jones. Shortly before he died he said it would be 100 years, possibly 200, before his genius was properly recognised.

Wilfrid Blunt was the gallery’s curator for

many years, and his definitive biography of 1975 bore the portentous title “England’s Michelangelo”. Watts was a portraitist, a landscape painter, a symbolist, a sculptor and history painter, and although he was associated with the Arts and Crafts movement of the late 19th-century, he stood, and worked, alone.

Yet he is the only artist to have a museum devoted to him, the project of his second wife Mary, a Slade-trained artist and ceramicist, whom he married when he was 69 and she was 36. The Watts Gallery opened in 1904, a couple of months before his death, but his wife lived on until 1938, devoted to the gallery and expanding its activities to establish her artists’ village. She recruited local young people as apprentices who lived and worked there, in the spirit of “art for all” of which they were both dedicatees.

In 2004 visitor numbers had shrunk to 14,000, but among them she detected a loyal group of devotees and began her campaign for rescuing the Watts by recruiting them as volunteers. Watts’s most enduringly popular painting was Hope, an image that had been adopted by enthusiasts as diverse as Egyptian soldiers and Barack Obama, and she used the image again as the emblem of the appeal to raise the funds the gallery needed, the Hope Restoration Project. It has been reproduced many times, but the finest version of the painting has had to be borrowed from its anonymous private owner for the duration of the appeal, and is on show there still.

In 2006 Hunt put the gallery in for the

BBC/HLF Restoration Village series, a gamble that could have seen the project humiliated by public rejection. It didn’t win the prize but it was runner-up, and the TV coverage gave national notice of the Watts’s plight. A few weeks after the series ended, HLF announced it was giving £4.3m to the appeal.

But the struggle did not diminish, despite considerable generosity, as the roof continued to leak in the heavy rains of that winter, and the next ploy was controversial. It was to sell two pictures in the collection – one by the Pre-Raphaelite Burne-Jones and one by Albert Moore a 19th-century neo-classical painter – given to the gallery in 1954. The initial storm was calmed by the Restoration Village excitement, and later the Museums Association’s strictures on deaccessioning by its members were relaxed. In June 2008 the two pictures were sent for sale at Christie’s. They raised a vital £2.8m, twice the estimate.

The gallery has undergone deep research to establish the colours and the hanging as it would have been, and in the restoration other discoveries were made, such as the green ceramic picture rail that runs around the walls.

The Sunken Gallery that Mrs Watts installed in 1922 is now devoted to the Watts circle, his wife and their circle – his paintings of friends and family, the skull cap he always wore when working, his Order of Merit, his death mask, Mary’s designs for the chapel they built nearby, and a George V coronation mug made in the pottery she established here.

The picture galleries now have the rich flock paper once again: the red gallery has his stark images, such as Found Drowned and The Good Samaritan; the green gallery has the gentler pieces, like his portrait of Lily Langtry with her odd-looking hat – Watts, a founder of the RSPB, had made her remove the feather from it – his sculpture of Clytie and his own self-portrait at the age of 17.

local focus


nH deBaTe

Watts GalleryDown LaneComptonSurrey GU3 1DQTel: 01483 810235www.wattsgallery.org.ukOpen Tues-Sat 11 – 5, Sun & bank holidays 1 – 5. Admission: Adults £7.50 (£6.50 without donation for Gift Aid), children under 16 free, students £3.50, Friends of Watts Gallery, Art Fund members and Carers free; £2 every Tuesday; no group bookings on Tuesdays.

Ancestor Worship and the future of museums

It is the summer of cuts. All museum conversation, correspondence, blogging and tweeting is consumed by the big questions. How much less money will we have this winter than we had last winter? Will we be able to retain all our staff? Will we be able to stay open?

Of course, there are exceptions. The Association of Independent Museums’ conference in June was entitled “Crisis, what crisis?” Unfortunately, their smugness does not reflect what is happening to their members on the ground. It is tough out there.

Is anything Cameron-proof? Well, yes. Anything that involves little expenditure, volunteerism or a hobby in later life. You may know of it as “The Big Society”, but many museums already do that and are wondering where to go next.

Developing new income streams is one possibility, although many involve investment in people, time, equipment or facilities. It probably pays to keep ideas as simple as possible. Can we raise income from what we already do or from the skills and resources we already have? It is a lot easier to charge for exclusive tours behind the scenes led by a personable curator who knows his or her stuff, than to start thinking up more ambitious and costly events which require the co-operation of others outside the museum.

Competition is going to be intense in many cases. Everybody is looking to bring in more money and attract philanthropists (the Coalition’s solution to the problem of arts funding). The most determined, the best organised and those with the wealthiest connections will be the winners.

Are there lessons to be learned from other sectors? What about from the world of archives? Not perhaps the first place you might think to look.

But there has been something significant going on there for several years. Ancestor worship. It’s the new Christianity. Go to the National Archives at Kew and watch the family history buffs flood in from their coaches. See the number of television programmes that are built around ancestry. It is quite big business. How can museums contribute and benefit?

One consequence of downsizing is that many museums will still have skilled curatorial staff but no budgets to do exhibitions and run learning activities. That makes a resource that can be utilised in a different way. Using it to identify and brigade information relating to the names of people associated with pictures and objects could form the nucleus of a marketable genealogical source. This is may be a medium or even long term project, but it needs to accompany the short term ‘quick wins’ in order to mean that today’s survival can also be the foundation of a longer term sustainability.

Whatever the financial benefits, thinking about the ancestor business will help museums make themselves more and more people-orientated. And most potential visitors may well be more interested in people and their stories than just the naked stuff.

There are 103 Watts paintings in the collection, most of them on show now, but the refurbishment with the latest environmental control system means that loans can for the first time be made from national collections, and a temporary exhibition has important paintings from the Tate.

In his sculpture gallery are his full-size gesso maquettes of his equestrian sculpture, Physical Energy, and his gigantic full-body portrait of Tennyson.

More remains to be done: the house that Watts built next to the gallery, Limnerslease, is for sale and Hunt is hoping to raise enough funds to buy it and restore it (see page 1).

But what she is mostly hoping for is the rehabilitation of G F Watts and his place in the history of British art, expecting visitor numbers to start at 25,000 a year and grow. In the spirit of Mary Seton Watts she has established an outreach programme with a nearby women’s prison, HMP Send, and a working relationship with the City and Guilds School of Art.

“I think he now has a real chance of being reappraised” Perdita Hunt says as she gazes about the gallery. “I think we’ve put the heart back into his concept of ‘art for all’.”

Above: G F Watts, The Minotaur, 1885 (c) Tate, London, 2011, part of an exhibition, Painting for the Nation: G F Watts at the Tate, at The Watts until 1 Jan 2012; left: G F Watts, Hope, 1885-6 Private Collection.

Stuart Davies

Research at National Archives, Kew. Image courtesy of A K Noey.

MuseuM in THe neWs


The Sir John Soane Museum

It is not so much its physical obscurity in a terrace on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields that makes Sir John Soane’s Museum “London’s best kept secret” any longer – 120,000 find it each year – as the mysteries within, and the £7m renovation which started in February and will take three years will unravel many more.

We know Soane through his home now, but he was the pre-eminent architect of his day and enormously influential, taking his role as professor of architecture at the Royal Academy with great punctilio. He continued to be an influence long after his death, and his own tomb at St Pancras was the inspiration for Giles Gilbert Scott’s red telephone box of the 1920s.

Soane was also a fanatical collector, of architectural drawings for the benefit of his students but also the nick-nacks of art and curiosity that tickled his insatiably inquisitive fancy. He created a drawing studio for his students in such a way as to make it either visible or audible from any part of the establishment, forestalling mischief, and they were expected to stay diligently at their drawing boards for at least 12 hours a day.

He had bought antique marble sculptures, Hogarth’s series The Rake’s Progress, Canaletto’s The Grand Canal, a Roubiliac medallion portrait of Handel, Sir Robert Walpole’s desk, a Turner, a Reynolds, and the entire architectural library of his hero Robert Adam. Everywhere are the wildly extravagant architectural fantasy drawings Soane got Joseph Gandy to draw. In 1823, when the British Museum unaccountably turned it down, he had snapped up the Belzoni Sarcophagus,

the coffin of the Egyptian King Seti I. When he died in 1837 he left the three

houses - because by that time he had added Nos 13 and 14 Lincoln’s Inn Fields to No 12 – to us with the proviso of free access “to Amateurs and Students in Painting, Sculpture and Architecture”, and the trustees have kept everything that Soane collected. “We’re cleaning, restoring and redisplaying hundreds of objects left to the nation, and we’ll recreate the rooms and spaces that Soane carefully designed” the director, Tim Knox, said.

One of the first acts of the trustees after his death was to strip out the private apartments at the top of the house, including Soane’s bedroom and bathroom, his wife’s drawing room and their private oratory, to become offices. Working to paintings Soane had had done in the 1820s, these rooms are all being restored to the way he knew them, the colours and fabrics all exhaustively researched. Added to that Tim Knox is installing a new exhibition gallery and conservation studios, a lift to allow full disabled access at last. The work will be completed in 2014, the bicentenary of the building of No 13.

Over the last 160 years successive curators have added elements and made mostly discreet alterations, and at one point No 14 was sold and let. Seven years ago the museum was able to buy it back, then four years later a lease ran out so that it came under the director’s control, and now it gives the museum the space to return to Soane’s vision once again.

In legend there had been a hermitage on the site and so in one of the tiny courtyards Soane built a folly, “Monk’s Yard”, its floor decorated with the bottoms and tops of the port bottles

the hermit was supposed to have comforted himself with, and an elaborate monument to the Soane family dog, Fanny. In the other courtyard he built a “pasticcio”, an extraordinary 30 foot monument to “Architecture ancient and modern”, but in a lack of attention to the site’s past that he would have found outrageous had he known, he built it over what had been a well and in 1896 it collapsed, with a third of it smashed beyond salvation. That has already been restored, and this time a toilet is being returned to the use Soane had given it, as a small sculpture gallery; a room added in the later 19th- century is to become a “cabinet of curiosities” with some of the oddities Soane had, such as the brooch Charles I wore at Naseby, Mrs Soane’s jewelled gloves, and a mummy’s head.

One of Soane’s greatest delights was his picture gallery, an ingenious small salon which is enlarged by screens folding out of the walls revealing more and more pictures, of varying quality. The Rakes’s Progress, all 12 paintings, are concealed under one fold; on the opposite wall the screens fold out twice to reveal a recess which contains the model of the building Soane considered his masterpiece, the Bank of England, demolished in 1937. Pride of place goes to the Canaletto, and above it, barely visible, is a small undistinguished painting of A Hen Defending Her Chickens. The artist is Sir Francis Bourgeois who commissioned Soane to build the Dulwich Picture Gallery, and the genial Sir John would have acquired it as a gesture to his friend rather than an example of fine painting. “Some of them are works of art, some of them are just curiosities, some of them are really rather dull,” says Simon Jervis, chairman of the Soane and former director of the Fitzwilliam Museum. “But they’re all Soane”.

Sir John Soane’s Museum13 Lincoln’s Inn FieldsLondon WC2A 3BPwww.soane.orgTues-Sat 10-5, last entry 4.30.Admission Free. Tickets for guided tours are on sale from 10.30 each Saturday, £5 and free for students and the unemployed. The main house and Museum collection in No 13 will remain open throughout the restoration project.

Top: Soane’s Bedroom, 1825 and above Soane’s Bathroom

The Museum of Lakeland Life


MuseuM of THe year revisiTed 1973

In each issue we look at winners of National Heritage’s Museum of the Year Award and what has happened to them since.

It is the way that when people develop an affection of an inanimate object that has become a permanent feature of their lives, they give it a nickname. How many cars have taken on a personality after acquiring a name like “Phoebe”, “Genevieve” or “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang”?

But there is nothing inanimate about “Molly”, who celebrates her 40th birthday this year. She was the Museum of the Year in 1973 and the first winner of the title, and for Molly activity has itself become a characteristic.

“Molly has established herself as a firm favourite, especially with children, and people still want to see her for what she has always been,” says Helen Watson, artistic director of the Lakeland Arts Trust, the Lake District Art Gallery Trust when the museum was founded. “We haven’t gone in for modernisations, there are still mannequins in the chemists’ shop for instance, but it’s very much a museum for the modern audience even so.”

Molly is the Museum of Lakeland Life which is set in the stable block of the Georgian mansion built on the site in Kendal of the Abbot’s Hall. The building had been acquired by the trust in the 1960s to convert into an art gallery, and Molly opened in 1971. Objects to help the museum tell the region’s story came from all over Cumbria, ranging from an exquisite 18th- century court dress and a Barber grandfather clock to bobbin-making and threshing machines.

The museum tells of the importance of home life at different social levels and marks the value of industry to local life. Rag-rugs and quilts, examples of 19th-century craft and folk art, were housed in the same building as industrial machinery to demonstrate the diverse nature of the Lakeland economy. In effect, industries of two kinds were pursued: those at home, such as the cottage industries of the Arts and Crafts movement, and the ones established on purpose-built sites, using the raw material from the mountainous terrain.

Molly stands as a sort of kindly old sentinel just outside the Lake District National Park in the oldest part of Kendal, known as Kirkland, which is often referred to as the “gateway to the Lakes”. Curators have developed period rooms - a bedroom, parlour and kitchen - which offer a chance to experience the surroundings and atmosphere of a 19th-century farmer’s Lakeland home. Object handling is a large part of the education process here, with children

experiencing the hard labour of washing clothes in a dolly tub or wearing stiff corsets and tight collars. There are demonstrations of rag-rugging which visitors can have a go at, and demonstrations of the intrinsic Lake District craft of making oaken swill baskets, the multi-purpose panniers once ubiquitous in Cumbrian mines, mills, arms and factories.

The museum is now a part of a cultural community, with Abbot Hall itself developing an international reputation for its exhibitions. Helen and her colleagues have been able to secure unique loans for past exhibitions devoted to Lucien Freud and L S Lowry, and this summer the family of R B Kitaj have made rarely seen works available for Kitaj: Portraits and Reflections (see page 14).

Recently the trust were able to reunite a 17th-century triptych commissioned by Lady Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke and one of the great magnates of the Lake District then. Known as The Great Picture, it was acquired in 1981, but only the two outer panels of the triptych could be got through the door. Then in June, a solution was found by manoeuvring

the huge canvas in through a window, and the reunited ensemble has become an extra draw.

The great Arts and Crafts house Blackwell was added in 1997, restored, furnished with pieces by the likes of Morris, Voysey and Gimson, and opened in 2001.

Now the trust has plans for a new steamship museum that will open on Lake Windermere in 2015, at a cost of £10m.

Meanwhile, Molly, as she enters her fifth decade, continues to entertain and educate new generations who come to enquire about the Lake District.

Museum of Lakeland Life and IndustryAbbot HallKendalCumbria LA9 5AL01539 722464www.lakelandmuseum.org.ukMon-Sat 10.30-5 (4 Nov-Mar)Admission adults £5, children £3.50, Family £14, Friends free.

Hogarth’s social message to today’s artists, at the Foundling Museum

MuseuM feaTured


The recent history of the Foundling Museum is almost as remarkable as the more ancient history of its parent, the Coram Foundation. The foundation is what remains of the Coram Foundling Hospital created in the early 18th- century by a merchant sea captain, Thomas Coram, who had made his fortune in the New World and on return had found himself stepping over an abandoned baby lying in the gutter.

He built the hospital in Bloomsbury, though more as a haven than hospital, “for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children”. Coram was a social creature who liked to rub shoulders with artists and musicians, and one of his best friends was William Hogarth, a social reformer through his, for the times, outrageous narrative paintings.

Hogarth, who became a founding governor of the hospital, devised a lottery system whereby he created two paintings and sold engravings of them for £10 each, with each engraving numbered. The holders of the winning numbers would win the actual paintings, and by a remarkable act of providence, or possibly sleight of Hogarth’s hand, the hospital had been given the winning numbers, so got not only the sales proceeds but also the paintings themselves.

Hogarth encouraged his own acquaintances to help, including George Frederick Handel who became a governor and, for the rest of his life, gave an annual Easter concert of the Messiah for the hospital to raise funds.

But Hogarth’s idea was to make an attraction of the hospital by creating an art gallery within it, arguably the first in London, and the likes of Allan Ramsay, Joshua Reynolds, Louis-Francois Roubiliac and Thomas Gainsborough all contributed works.

For the Foundling Museum’s new director, Caro Howell, this place is where the horrific past of British society’s relationship with children meets the equally horrific present. Long before she arrived she had done an education project with 90 London secondary school students who made an opera based on Hogarth’s narrative series Marriage a la Mode. Summing up what she had learned from the project, a student told Howell, “We are all Hogarth now”.

“Some things just don’t change, there are still children discarded as they were three centuries ago, stories just as terrible, some much worse” Howell says.

The star exhibit of the museum’s permanent

galleries is of the tokens left by mothers with the children they had been forced to part with, sometimes nothing more than a bottle top.

The temporary exhibition that runs until the autumn, Foundling Voices, is the testimonies of 74 former abandoned children. Having been fostered out after their mothers had discarded them, they were sent at the age of five to the Foundling School. “I think we did understand that we were lost children, given up children. I think we realised we were unwanted, wounded beings discarded on a garbage heap” according to Henry Grainger. “I shall always be grateful to the Foundling Hospital, whatever others might say, because if it’s made me anything it’s made me the person I am”.

The hospital itself was demolished in the 1930s, but the museum continued in a house next to the site in Brunswick Square from which the Coram Foundation, now a social welfare charity, also operated.

In the 1990s, though, the Coram Foundation became Coram Family, with a new practical building erected next to the museum, which itself got a £4.2m refurbishment, and the story has come full circle, with artists once more pivotal to its future.

Caro Howell has learned that art, and artists, can help heal some of the grievous damage that society can deal young lives, and bring them back into the national family. She has seen it and done it, having run education and outreach programmes for the Tate and, in the East End, for the Whitechapel Gallery. The social importance of education, of museums and of art had become more and more clear to Howell, and she sees the Foundling as an art museum.

“There’s enormous potential here” she says. “What I think is fascinating about it is that it talks to us as a society on a number of different fronts - eloquently on social level, on an historical level.”

“But for me what is so exciting, it also speaks to artists as agents for social change. Artists who are outwards facing, engaged, interested in tackling head on the issues they see around them in society, and Hogarth was the grand-daddy of them all.”

The Foundling Museum40 Brunswick SquareLondon WC1N 1AZ020 7841 3600www.foundlingmuseum.org.ukTues-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5Admission £7.50, concessions £5, children freeFoundling Voices exhibition, see page 15

Top: Coram’s Children Gallery explors the Hospital’s social history; below: Caro Howell, Director

MuseuM in THe neWs


Local uplift, international inspirationThe Hepworth Wakefield Gallery

Wakefield is a city that had lost its way, with the death of both the coal and woollen industries that had been the staples of this part of Yorkshire, and the city council was anxious to find a vehicle to help it not only survive but to rise again. Under council leader Peter Box, Wakefield hitched itself to a surprising choice as locomotive: art.

“The council is investing in the future” Councillor Peter Box said, “and we’re investing in the future with confidence”. The future Councillor Box sees flows from the gallery that was opened in May this year in honour of Dame Barbara Hepworth, the sculptor born in Wakefield in 1903 and whose work owes much to her formative years in Yorkshire.

She was a contemporary of Henry Moore, who was born in nearby Castleford five years earlier. Her father was a civil engineer for the West Riding County Council, and with him she travelled the landscape that was to have a lasting effect on her work.

“I remember moving through the landscape with my father in his car and the hills were sculptures, the roads defined the forms” she said in 1961. “This sensation has never left me. I, the sculptor, am the landscape.”

She and Moore both attended Leeds School of Art in 1920-21, and she won a bursary to travel abroad for a year, basing herself in Tuscany where she studied Romanesque and early Renaissance art. But it was nearer home that she had her first retrospective solo exhibition, at Temple Newsam in Leeds, followed by an exhibition at Wakefield City Art Gallery in 1944. She opened her St Ives studio in 1949, her artistic base for the rest of her life.

The Hepworth Wakefield, as the new gallery, designed by the award-winning architect Sir David Chipperfield, is called, has cost £35m and is Britain’s largest purpose-built art gallery for 50 years.

Box’s belief is that the gallery will act as

a tourist draw, and it has already attracted inward investment of £350m for the historic River Calder waterfront on which the gallery stands, alongside listed mills and warehouses that are being restored for a new commercial life. Elsewhere in Wakefield, David Adjaye has designed a new market hall and shopping centre, called Trinity Walk, and the new business quarter at Merchant Gate. Together the three developments are worth more than £1 billion.

But the gallery is the vanguard for Wakefield’s brave future, and after five weeks it had already notched up its 100,000th visitor. The target had been 150,000 after a full year.

The building itself is characteristic of a Chipperfield design: distinctive but designed for the art rather than as a work of art. It appears at first like a series of different size boxes tumbled together, but from the inside the galleries are contiguous and characterized by the fact that most of the light is natural, brought to the spaces by high windows.

“The Hepworth Wakefield is a museum, it’s a permanent collection” Chipperfield explained. “So I said that I was interested in bringing light in higher up in the room where it could not do any damage, so you wouldn’t have to filter it that much, but it would give the visitor a sense of what’s going on in the sky. That, combined with windows, might be a strategy for bringing daylight into the building.”

The city had a large collection of Hepworth’s work, as well as other contemporary artists (including Moore), and it has been augmented by a gift from her family of works that show the artist’s development and are the core of the display. There is a gallery devoted to the St Ives school of painters of which she was a leading member - the likes of Ben Nicholson, Peter Lanyon and Terry Frost are represented - with important loans from the Arts Council, the British Council and other collections. She died in St Ives in 1975, in a fire in her studio. But

The Hepworth WakefieldGallery WalkWakefieldW Yorks WF1 5AW01924 247360www.hepworthwakefield.orgTues-Sat 10-6Sun, bank holiday and school holiday Mondays 11-5. Admission Free.

Hepworth is internationally renowned, too, and there are also works by such contemporaries as Mondrian, Brancusi, Gaudier-Brzeska and Gabo with whom she was associated.

The Hepworth family gift is not only the artist’s early work, 44 of the surviving models for her bronzes and fascinating details of family history, but also there are works by Barbara’s friends, such as the painters John Wells and Breon O’Casey, and the ceramicist Janet Leach.

With the Hepworth and Moore connections and the closeness of Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield is being seen as the hub of a West Yorkshire regional sculpture theme.

David Liddiment, chairman of the Hepworth Trust, believes the gallery will be an inspiration to the county and the country. “It’s an international standard gallery” he said. “It’s showing things that are unique and it’s bringing Barbara Hepworth back to Yorkshire where she was born and which shaped her influences”.

“People are coming not just from London, not just from Scotland not just from the United Kingdom, they’re coming from all over Europe to see this place. Who else might be a talent waiting to be inspired when they walk into this gallery to see what can happen?”

£42 million sale boosts marine archaeology charitable trustThe Honor Frost Charitable Trust, set up for the advancement of research in marine archaeology and its publication, is to receive the proceeds of the Evill/Frost Collection of 20th-century British Art, which was sold at Sotheby’s for £42 million in June.

Honor Frost who died last year aged 92, was a pioneer in the field of underwater archaeology. She first became a diver soon after Cousteau


MuseuM neWs

British Library launches appeal to save St Cuthbert’s gospel

Ten years ago the government allocated £50 million under a New Opportunities Fund scheme to help museums, libraries and archives kick start the digitisation of this country’s cultural heritage and, over the next few years, many websites were launched all over the country to much acclaim. The funding was spread over 150 projects and nearly 500 diverse organisations throughout the UK. Whilst a number of organisations have excellent websites displaying the images, a lot do not.

In 2003 a search service, developed by Pete Dowdell at UKOLN, the centre for digital information management, was launched to provide a user-friendly single point of contact. Responsibility for providing this kind of collective information probably devolved to the MLA, but who keeps track now that the MLA has been disbanded? I understand that JISC (formerly known as the Joint Information

Systems Committee) carried out some research.However, it doesn’t now seem possible to

get an accurate picture of what those many digitisation projects actually achieved. We’re told that many thousands of high resolution images were produced but, if you search online, what you often find are thousands of tiny thumbnail images with varying amounts of information attached to them. In addition, you will find that very few of them make it easy for users to search their photographic collections online.

First of all, few of them have much in the way of keywords or search terms so, if it’s a general subject you want to see, you are reduced to browsing page after page of the online collections on the off-chance the subject you want will be there. On the other hand, if you choose to browse images of places, you will often be faced by long alphabetical lists that extend off the bottom of the page. Often

these thumbnails images will be accompanied by requests to website visitors to help in the identification of the places and people within them. But most are too small to assist this process.

One argument for hiding these wonderful resources is that high resolution images have the potential to raise income and must be protected, but there is precious little evidence that this is actually the case, except in the case of fine art.

I would like to see libraries and archives being a lot more open about these resources. If they are generating income, let’s hear about it and let’s hear about how that income is being used to grow the resources. If they are not, let’s display them properly so that local historians can get some real value out of them and, conversely, let’s encourage local historians to feed information back into the collections.

Letter to the Editor

From a researcher (name & address supplied)

Mystery of hidden local history collections

Jerwood Gallery Hastings to open in 2012

The £4m Jerwood Gallery will open on Hastings historic Stade seafront in April 2012. It will show for the first time the Jerwood Foundation’s own collection of 20th and 21st century British art.

The Foundation’s chairman, Alan Grieve, said they had wanted to establish the gallery in a regenerative regional centre where it could create links with a strong local arts community.

Director of Tate Liverpool to leaveChristoph Grunenberg, director of Tate Liverpool since 2001, is leaving after being appointed director of the Kunsthalle Bremen art museum in Germany.

The news comes as Tate Liverpool confirm that an unspecified number of redundancies are being sought, through redeployment and voluntary redundancies.

The British Library has launched an appeal to save the earliest surviving intact European book. The manuscript copy of the Gospel of St John produced in the North of England in the late 7th century and was buried alongside St Cuthbert on Lindisfarne, apparently in 698, and later found in the saint’s coffin at Durham Cathedral in 1104.

The St Cuthbert Gospel, formerly known as the Stonyhurst Gospel, has been on long-term loan to the British Library since 1979. The library was approached last year by Christie’s, acting on behalf of the Society of Jesus, and was given first option to acquire the gospel.

At present the fund is still in need of £2.75 million after receiving a grant of £4.5 million from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, £250,000 each has been pledged by The Art Fund and The Garfield Weston Foundation. The deadline is 31 March 2012.

invented the scuba in the 1950s. In 1968 she led an expedition to survey the Pharos site in Alexandria and in 1971 she led the investigation of the Marsala Punic warship in Sicily. “Honor Frost was an esteemed marine archaeologist, and the trust was established to benefit charitable causes relating to marine archaeology” a spokesman for the trust said.

Dame Beryl opens Edenbridge show

The Topfoto Gallery1 Fircroft WayEdenbridge, Kent TN8 6EL01732 863939www.topfotogallery.comMon-Fri 9.30-5, Sat 9.30-1Admission freeThe Glory of English Ballet until 26 Aug 2011


A small venue in Edenbridge, Kent, is hosting a major exhibition of the work of one of our finest dance photographers, Colin Jones, and it was opened at the Topfoto Gallery by one of Britain’s finest ballerinas, Dame Beryl Grey. The exhibition, The Glory of English Ballet, records a lifetime of photographing the English National Ballet and other companies.

As a young dancer in the Royal Ballet, Colin Jones bought his first camera in Japan while running an errand for Margot Fonteyn. He had just renewed a conract with the Royal Ballet when he was offered a job as a photographer by The Observer newspaper, and was released from his dancing contract.

The portraits are not only of the earlier greats such as Nureyev, Grey and Fonteyn, but also of contemporary dancers including Tamara Rojo, who has just electrified 10,000 people at the O2 arena dancing Juliet to Carlos Acosta’s Romeo. “They’re terrific photographs” Dame Beryl said. “They give you a feeling of being backstage; all the agonies and the nerves before a performance and the relief.... he’s captured every emotion a dancer has.”

MuseuM neWs

The National Maritime Museum’s new £35m Sammy Ofer Wing has opened, with a new entrance onto Greenwich Park and a new restaurant. But it also allows important objects to be seen that the museum has seldom had space to exhibit before, and it incorporates a new Voyagers gallery that includes treasures from the Titanic which have had to remain in store until now, Captain Cook’s handwritten journals, the pigtail from the last survivor of the Mutiny on the Bounty and Shackleton’s copy of Browning’s poems.

It also houses a new library and archive with 100,000 books and nearly two miles of shelved manuscripts available to researchers for the first time. The wing is named after the Romanian-

Maritime Museum’s Ofer wing opens

born businessman who gave £20m to the project, but who died before he could see its completion.

Kevin Fewster, National Maritime Museum Director said: “The opening of this new wing is only the start of our five-year programme to revitalise and refresh our permanent galleries and exhibitions” said Kevin Fewster, director of the National maritime Museum. “Through this, we will be able to transform the experience we offer to the two million visitors from Britain and overseas who visit us each year. It will help to ensure that current and future generations from all over the world understand the rich and complex story of these islands and the crucial role played by the sea in our history and the lives of those who depended upon it.”


ABBEY CHURCH YARD BATHAbbey Church Yard & Kingston Parade, Bath BA1 1LYTel: 020 7942 5000www.wildplanetexhibition.co.uk Open at all times. Admission free. Wild Planet—Bath (until 25 Sept 2011) An outdoor touring exhibition from London’s Natural History Museum brings international wildlife photography to cities across the UK. It features 80 of the most spectacular images from past years of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, blown up to giant dimensions.

ABBOT HALL ART GALLERY Kirkland, Kendal, Cumbria LA9 5ALTel: 01539 722464www.abbothall.org.ukMon-Sat 10.30-5. Admission £6, students & children free.Kitaj: Portraits & Reflections (9 July-8 Oct 2011)A major UK exhibition of American artist RB Kitaj (1932-2007) features around 50 paintings & works on paper, including self-portraits & portraits of some of the leading thinkers, poets & artists of the 19th & 20th centuries, such as Isaiah Berlin, Robert Creeley & David Hockney.

ASHMOLEAN MUSEUM Tel: 01865 278002www.ashmolean.orgTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-6 (15 Oct & 10 Dec until 5). Admission free. Claude Lorrain: The poetry of landscape (6 Oct 2011-8 Jan 2012)More than 140 drawings, prints & paintings from collections in England, France & Germany cast new light on the life & work of the father of European landscape painting. Held in partnership with the Städel Museum, Frankfurt, where the exhibition will be seen in spring 2012.

ATTINGHAM PARK Atcham, near Shrewsbury, Salop SY4 4TPTel: 01743 708123 www.nationaltrust.org.uk/attinghampark Daily 1-5.30; guided tours from 11. (From 31 Oct ring to check winter opening schedule.) Admission £9, children £5.80 (National Trust members free).House of Beasts (2 July 2011-July 2012)Contemporary art exhibition with animals as the focus of more than 30 works on show throughout the mansion, stables & parkland of a grand country property. The exhibition explores evolving human relationships with animals, such as emotional ties to pets, antagonism to pests, & our fascination with birds & butterflies.

BARBICAN ART GALLERY Barbican Centre, Silk St, London EC2Y 8DSTel: 0845 1207550www.barbican.org.uk/artgallery

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until 6, Thurs until 10). Admission charges vary.Watch Me Move: The Animation Show (until 11 Sept 2011)Presenting animation as a highly individual force in the development of global visual culture, this exhibition explores the relationship between animation & film. Looking across generations & cultures, it ranges from early scientific experiments with photography to the computer-generated imagery of today. Admission £12, concessions £8, children under 12 free.

BIRMINGHAM MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Chamberlain Sq, Birmingham B3 3DHTel: 0121 303 2834www.bmag.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5 (Fri from 10.30), Sun 12.30-5. Admission to museum free.Lost In Lace (29 Oct 2011-19 Feb 2012)A major contemporary craft exhibition, presented in association with the Crafts Council, featuring large-scale, theatrical & visually stimulating work by international artists who have been inspired by the language of lace. Site-specific installations explore the relationship between textiles & space, allowing visitors to walk through, between & beneath them.

BOWES MUSEUM Newgate, Barnard Castle, Co Durham DL12 8NPTel: 01833 690606www.thebowesmuseum.org.uk

Daily 10-5. Admission £9, concessions £8, students £4.50, children free.Painting Flowers: Fantin-Latour & the Impressionists (until 9 Oct 2011)A floral extravaganza celebrates the still-life paintings of 19th-century French artist Henri Fantin-Latour, a contemporary of Manet & Whistler. The increasing diversity of plants available to the domestic gardener during his time provided the artist with an extensive choice of subject-matter, & he refined his skills in representing textures & the tactile qualities of flowers, the delicate nature of their blooms & the structure of their stems.

BRIGHTON MUSEUM & ART GALLERY Royal Pavilion Gardens, Brighton, E Sussex BN1 1EETel: 03000 290900www.virtualmuseum.infoTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Admission to museum free. Radical Bloomsbury: The art of Duncan Grant & Vanessa Bell, 1905-25 (until 9 Oct 2011)The exhibition looks at the contribution of Bell & Grant to the development of 20th-century British painting. It explores the relationship between the Bloomsbury artists & avant-garde art from 1905 to 1925, showing how they were influenced by new trends in European art. The exhibition focuses on painting, but also includes painted room panels & screens, & some textiles. Admission £6, concessions £4, children free.

A selective list

of current &

forthcoming

museum

& gallery

exhibitions.From British Museum: Holy Thorn Reliquary

experiences of 74 former foundlings whose memories of their childhoods in the first half of the 20th-century are graphically preserved in audio interviews, photographs & film. Tales of family separation, the stigma of illegitimacy, a spartan school education, wartime heroism & the search for birth mothers are all part of this rich social history, presented under five themes, including early life, school, & finding work.

GAINSBOROUGH’S HOUSE 46 Gainsborough St, Sudbury, Suffolk CO10 2EUTel: 01787 372958www.gainsborough.orgMon-Sat 10-5. Admission £4.50, seniors £3.60, students & children £2; free on Tues 1-5. Gainsborough’s Diana & Actaeon Revealed (until 17 Sept 2011)Thomas Gainsborough’s famous painting, on loan from the Royal Collection, is the artist’s only mythological subject. Shown alongside are preparatory drawings, works on the same topic by Rowlandson, Turner & Hayman, & transpositions of the theme by Pissarro, Manet & Cézanne.

GALLERIES 27 & 28 CORK STREET27 & 28 Cork St, London W1S 3NGTel: 07939 166148www.tribalperspectives.comTues 6.30-9.30, Wed-Sat 11-7. Admission free.Tribal Perspectives (27 Sept-1 Oct 2011)Eight leading galleries present art & artifacts of tribal cultures from around the world, from Africa to Oceania. A programme of lectures accompanies the show.

HATFIELD HOUSEHatfield, Herts AL9 5NQTel: 01707 287010www.hatfield-house.co.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5 (until 31 Aug, Thurs until 8). Admission to West Garden & Park £12.50, seniors £11.50, children £8.Moore at Hatfield (until 30 Sept 2011)A large collection of Henry Moore’s

Tel: 020 7848 2526www.courtauld.ac.ukDaily 10-6. Admission £6, concessions £4.50, students & children (& everyone Mon 10-2, except public holidays) free.Toulouse-Lautrec & Jane Avril: Beyond the Moulin Rouge (until 18 Sept 2011)Paintings, posters & prints from international collections give an insight into the world of Jane Avril, daughter of a courtesan, who spent time as a mental patient before becoming an inspired cabaret dancer who caught the eye of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

DULWICH PICTURE GALLERY Gallery Rd, London SE21 7ADTel: 020 8693 5254www.dulwichpicturegallery.org.ukTues-Fri 10-5; Sat, Sun & bank-holiday Mons 11-5. Admission to gallery £5, seniors £4, other concessions & children free.Twombly & Poussin: Arcadian Painters (until 25 Sept 2011)In celebration of the Gallery’s bicentenary, a major show explores the parallels & affinities between these two artists. Both Nicolas Poussin & Cy Twombly found in the classical heritage of Rome a life-long subject. At the age of about 30—in 1624 & 1957, respectively—both artists moved to the Eternal City where each subsequently spent the majority of his life. The show juxtaposes works radically disparate in style, yet sharing deep & timeless interests. Admission £9 (includes gallery admission), seniors £8, other concessions £4, children free.

ESTORICK COLLECTION 39A Canonbury Sq, London N1 2AN Tel: 020 7704 9522www.estorickcollection.comWed-Sat 11-6 (Thurs until 8), Sun 12-5. Admission £5, concessions £3.50, students & children freeUnited Artists of Italy (22 June-4 Sept 2011) Photographic portraits of some of the 20th century’s best-known artists—including De Chirico, Fontana & Morandi—& important writers & gallery-owners, taken by 22 leading Italian photographers

FALMOUTH ART GALLERYMunicipal Buildings, The Moor, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 2RTTel: 01326 313863www.falmouthartgallery.comMon-Sat 10-5. Admission freeBritish Impressionists...& some automata (until 10 Sept 2011)Cornwall played a major role in 20th-century British Impressionism. Loans from Cornish collections juxtaposing works by John Arnesby Brown, Laura Knight, Alfred Munnings, Henry Scott Tuke, & John T Richardson with more recent paintings by contemporary Cornwall-based artists such as Ted Dyer, Robert Jones, Andrew Tozer & Ben Warner show that the tradition is still strong today. Alongside are quirky creations by Falmouth’s automata makers.

Historic Falmouth: Artists’ views (24 Sept-8 Oct 2011)An exhibition of watercolours, drawings & prints showing Falmouth from 1734 to the 20th-century marks the 350th anniversary of King Charles II granting the Royal Charter to the town.

FERENS ART GALLERYQueen Victoria Sq, Kingston upon Hull HU1 3RATel: 01482 613902www.hullcc.gov.uk/museums/ferensMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 1.30-4.30. Admission free.David Hockney: Bigger Trees near Warter (until 18 Sept 2011)Measuring 12 metres by 4 metres, Hockney’s vast painting is made from 50 canvases that fit together to show an early spring landscape near the East Yorkshire village of Warter. Hockney painted it en plein air in six weeks, using digital technology to create a computer mosaic of the picture to enable him to “step back” & see it as a whole.

FITZWILLIAM MUSEUM Trumpington St, Cambridge CB2 1RBTel: 01223 332900www.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.ukTues-Sat 10-5, Sun & bank-holiday Mons 12-5. Admission free. Treasure under your Feet (until 4 Sept 2011)From a Bronze Age torc & a Tudor jewel to Viking hack-silver & gold coins of the Civil War, the exhibition tells the story of various finds from the East of England that have contributed to our understanding of the life & times of our predecessors. Exhibits are from public & private collections, as well as from the Fitzwilliam’s own holdings.

FOUNDLING MUSEUM 40 Brunswick Sq London WC1N 1AZTel: 020 7841 3600www.foundlingmuseum.org.ukTues-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5, Admission £7.50, concessions £5, children free.Foundling Voices (until 30 Oct 2011)Foundling Voices features the

BRISTOL MUSEUM & ART GALLERYQueen’s Rd, Bristol BS8 1RLTel: 0117 922 3571www.bristol.gov.uk/museumsMon-Fri 10-5 (Wed until 8); Sat, Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-6. Admission free.Beryl Cook: Larger than life (until 29 Aug 2011)This major retrospective features more than 60 original paintings capturing British life with humour, affection & Cook’s characteristic streak of naughtiness. It explores the artist’s early career & her time in Bristol, & includes paintings from her family’s own collection. Also on view are some of Cook’s other creations: sculpture, needlework, & paintings on “found” objects—such as old cinema seats.

BRITISH MUSEUM Great Russell St, London WC1B 3DGTel: 020 7323 8000www.britishmuseum.orgDaily 10-5.30 (Fri until 8.30). Admission to museum free.Treasures of Heaven: Saints, relics & devotion in medieval Europe (until 9 Oct 2011)Some of the finest surviving sacred treasures of the medieval age from the British Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio, the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, & the Vatican’s Sancta Sanctorum. Valued as a bridge between heaven & earth, relics of Christ & the saints were set into ornate containers studded with precious stones. Objects on show date from the 4th century AD to the turbulent years of the Reformation & beyond. Admission £12, accompanied children free.Creative beginnings: European art in the Ice Age (27 Oct 2011-Feb 2012)In Europe art first appeared around 35,000 years ago. The exhibition shows some of the great masterpieces of the last Ice Age: sculptures & drawings of humans & animals, & images of the great paintings from caves such as Chauvet in France & Altamira in Spain. Admission charge to be arranged.

CITY ART CENTRE2 Market St, Edinburgh EH1 1DETel: 0131 529 3993 www.edinburghmuseums.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 12-5. Admission to centre free.David Mach: Precious Light (30 July-16 Oct 2011)Scottish artist David Mach, known for his dynamic large-scale collages, sculptures & installations, tackles his biggest subject yet: The Bible. Timing his show to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible, Mach reinterprets biblical scenes in a contemporary manner. Admission £5, concessions £3.50, children £2.50; family (2+2 or 1+3) £11. COURTAULD GALLERYSomerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN

museum news summeR 201117

From Courtauld Gallery: Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901) Mademoiselle Elegantine’s Troupe, 1896

monumental works is displayed in formal & natural settings throughout the garden & woodland of this magnificent Jacobean country house. HAZLITT HOLLAND-HIBBERT 38 Bury St, London SW1Y 6BBTel: 020 7839 7600www.hh-h.comMon-Fri 9-5.30, Sat 11-4. Admission free.William Nicholson: Landscapes & Still Lifes (5 Oct-4 Nov 2011)Among more than 35 important works from across Nicholson’s career, the exhibition highlights the Tate’s Plaza de Toros & Miss Jekyll’s Gardening Boots, & Nicholson’s well-known still-life The Silver Casket.

THE HEPWORTH WAKEFIELD Gallery Walk, Wakefield, W Yorks WF1 5AWTel: 01924 247360www.hepworthwakefield.orgTues-Sun 10-6. Admission free.Eva Rothschild: Hot Touch (until 9 Oct 2011)New & recent sculptures & photographs by an artist who works in a range of materials including fabric, leather & wood. Her works often combine the forms & strategies of modernist art—squares, triangles, holes & repetition—with visual associations & symbols such as totemic columns of piled heads & draped snakes.

HMS BELFAST Morgan’s Lane, Tooley St, London SE1 2JHTel: 020 7940 6300http://hmsbelfast.iwm.org.ukDaily 10-6 (from 1 Nov 10-5). Admission £12.95, seniors & students £10.40, disabled £7.80, children free.Gun Turret Experience (from 31 July 2011)Lights, audio, videos & projections recreate the experience of a gunner in one of HMS Belfast’s triple gun turrets. During military action, 26 men would have been crammed into each of these small spaces. Here, with guns trained & elevated onto a target 12.5 miles away (the London Gateway motorway services area on the M1!), the exhibition is a reminder of the awesome power of naval gunnery in World War II.

HOLBURNE MUSEUM OF ART Great Pulteney St, Bath, Somerset BA2 4DBTel: 01225 466669 www.bath.ac.uk/holburneMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5. Admission to museum free.Peter Blake: A Museum for Myself (until 4 Sept 2011)A personal collection, made since his childhood by one of the country’s most enduringly popular artists. It includes works by Blake’s artist friends, plus pop ephemera, collage, folk art, showbiz memorabilia & marching troupes of toy elephants. Alongside these are some of the artist’s own works relating to the objects he collects. Admission £6.50, seniors £5.50, students & children £3.

IDEA GENERATION GALLERY 11 Chance St, Shoreditch, London E2 7JBTel: 020 7749 6850www.ideageneration.co.uk/generationgallery.phpMon-Fri 10-6; Sat, Sun 12-5. Admission free.Duffy: A visual record of the photographic genius (8 July-28 Aug 2011)A full retrospective of British photographer Brian Duffy who quit photography in 1979 when, at the height of his career, he suddenly destroyed most of his photographic work. Featuring more than 160 images painstakingly tracked down by Duffy’s son, this newly-restored body of work made during London’s “Swinging Sixties” features Michael Caine, Brigitte Bardot, Sidney Poitier, John Lennon, David Bowie, Debbie Harry, Jean Shrimpton, Joanna Lumley & many others.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM Lambeth Rd, London SE1 6HZTel: 020 7416 5320www.iwm.org.uk Daily 10-6. Closed 24-26 Dec. Admission to museum free.Shaped by War: Photographs by Don McCullin (7 Oct 2011-15 Apr 2012)A major exhibition examines the life & work of one of Britain’s most acclaimed photographers. More than 200 images—plus films, objects, magazines & personal memorabilia—reveal how McCullin’s life & work has been forged by war, & how his output has shaped awareness of modern conflict. Admission charge to be arranged.

IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM NORTH The Quays, Trafford Wharf Rd, Manchester M17 1TZ Tel: 0161 836 4000 www.iwm.org.ukDaily 10-5 Admission free.War Correspondent: Reporting under fire since 1914 (until 2 Jan 2012)A major exhibition, in partnership with the BBC, shows the dangerous & exciting work of British war correspondents, revealing the people behind the news & the

pressures they face, as well as the changing nature of war-reporting from 1914 to the present day. Among exhibits are a bullet that deflected into Kate Adie’s leg during the Gulf War; a burka worn by John Simpson to secretly enter Afghanistan; & one of the trademark white suits worn by Martin Bell during his reports from Bosnia.

INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART The Mall, London SW1Y 5AHTel: 020 7930 3647www.ica.org.uk Wed-Sun 12-7 (Thurs until 9). Admission free.Pablo Bronstein: Sketches for Regency Living (until 25 Sept 2011)Drawing upon London’s Regency history, Argentine-born artist Bronstein uses a wide range of media to demonstrate his interest in architecture—from performance & drawing to installation & sculpture. His works will be on view throughout the building.

JERRAM GALLERYHalf Moon St, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 3LNTel: 01935 815261 www.jerramgallery.com Mon-Sat 9.30-5.Admission free.From Polar Bear to Penguin: New work by Mark Coreth & Andrew Stock (10 Sept-1 Oct 2011)Coreth & Stock share a fascination for wildlife. Coreth’s sculptures feature birds & animals from Africa, India & the Arctic; Stock’s oils & watercolours show landscapes from the Outer Hebrides & the Antarctic.

KELVINGROVE ART GALLERY & MUSEUMArgyle St, Glasgow G3 8AG

Tel: 0141 276 9599www.glasgowmuseums.comMon-Thurs & Sat 10-5; Fri & Sun 11-5. Admission free.Scottish Glass (until 2012)To celebrate the 400th anniversary of glassmaking in Scotland, this exhibition shows off more than 70 beautiful glass pieces from Glasgow Museums’ extensive collection. It includes early bottles, Venetian-inspired designs, fine engraved glass & late-20th-century art glass, as well as a selection of glass paperweights.

KETTLE’S YARD Castle St, Cambridge CB3 0AQTel: 01223 352124www.kettlesyard.co.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 11.30-5. Admission free. Von Ribbentrop in St Ives: Art & war in the last resort (16 July-18 Sept 2011)An exhibition to accompany the book by painter, author & filmmaker Andrew Lanyon, exploring the remarkable intersections of art, history & everyday life in St Ives in the years before World War II. It revolves around two apparently unrelated narratives: the story of Joachim Von Ribbentrop, German ambassador to Britain, who holidayed in Cornwall in the 1930s & gathered intelligence in preparation for a German attack on Britain; & the discovery in 1928, by Ben Nicholson & Christopher Wood, of Cornish fisherman-turned-painter Alfred Wallis. LEIGHTON HOUSE 12 Holland Park Rd, London W14 8LZTel: 020 7602 3316www.rbkc.gov.uk/museumsWed-Mon 10-5.30. Admission £5, concessions & children £3.

naTional HeriTage guide


From Manchester Art Gallery: Ford Madox Brown, Last of England, 1891

From Hepworth Wakefield: Eva Rothschild, Sunrise,Wandering Palm, Tombstone, all 2011

George Aitchison: Leighton’s Architect Revealed (until 31 July 2011)Aitchison (1825-1910), architect of this ornate building, was a respected & prominent member of his profession. Besides his work for Lord Leighton, Aitchison was responsible for some of the most beautiful interior decorative schemes of his time, characterised by a striking use of colour. This exploration of his career includes paintings by Alma-Tadema, Leighton, & GF Watts, as well as more than 20 of the architect’s interior designs.

LONDON SILVER VAULTS Chancery Lane, London WC2A 1QSTel: 020 7242 3844www.thesilvervaults.comMon-Fri 9-5.30, Sat 9-1. Admission free. Just Desserts: Silver service for a perfect summer pudding (until 24 Sept 2011)Selling exhibition of specialist silverware from the 18th & 19th centuries, including comports for fruit & nuts, berry spoons, fruit knives & forks, & cream jugs.

MANCHESTER ART GALLERY Mosley St, Manchester M2 3JLTel: 0161 235 8888www.manchestergalleries.orgTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Admission to gallery free.Ford Madox Brown: Pre-Raphaelite pioneer (24 Sept 2011-29 Jan 2012)This comprehensive survey brings together 140 of Brown’s works, including his epic paintings of Victorian life Work, & The Last of England. It looks at the pioneering role the artist played in the development of Pre-Raphaelitism (his picture Work was the first Pre-Raphaelite painting bought by the Gallery, in 1885). Brown lived in Manchester for six years, working on a series of murals for the Town Hall, studies for which are on display. Admission £8, concessions £6, children free.

mima Centre Square, Middlesbrough, N Yorks TS1 2AZTel: 01642 726720www.visitmima.comTues-Sat 10-4.30 (Thurs until 7), Sun 12-4. Admission free.Transmitter/Receiver: The persistence of collage (22 July-6 Nov 2011) Tracing the use of collage in British art, from the first influences of the Parisian avant-garde seen in the early work of Ben Nicholson & surrealists Eileen Agar & Roland Penrose through to present-day practitioners such as Steve Claydon, David Noonan & Idris Khan. Exhibits range from traditional collage on paper to painting, sculpture, film & slide projections.

MODERN ART OXFORD 30 Pembroke St, Oxford OX1 1BP

Tel: 01865 722733www.modernartoxford.org.ukTues-Wed 10-5, Thurs-Sat 10-7, Sun 12-5. Admission free.Teacher of Dance (until 4 Sept 2011)Photographs, intricately-folded cardboard sculptures & an interactive venetian-blind installation by Seoul- & Berlin-based artist Haegue Yang fill the Upper & Lower Galleries.

MUSEUM OF LONDON DOCKLANDS No 1 Warehouse, West India Quay, Canary Wharf, London E14 4ALTel: 020 7001 9844www.museumindocklands.org.ukDaily 10-6. Admission to museum free.Pirates: The Captain Kidd Story (until 30 Oct 2011)From Treasure Island to Pirates of the Caribbean, piracy has long been an inspiration for books, television & films. This major exhibition tells the stories of real pirates who ruled the seas more than 300 years ago. Original artefacts, archaeological finds & hands-on interactive displays reveal London’s links with piracy dating back to the 17th century, including the capital’s gruesome history as a place of execution for pirates (the infamous Captain Kidd met his end at Wapping’s Execution Dock). Admission £7, concessions & children £5, under-5s free; family of 3 £15, of 4 £18, of up to 6 £22.50 (all must include at least one child).

NATIONAL GALLERY Trafalgar Sq, London WC2N 5DNTel: 020 7747 2885www.nationalgallery.org.ukDaily 10-6 (Fri until 9). Admission to gallery free.Devotion by Design: Italian altarpieces before 1500 (6 July-2 Oct 2011)Using the Gallery’s own collection of altarpieces, which were created during the late Middle Ages & early Renaissance as a focus of devotion for worshippers, this exhibition investigates their stylistic & typological development. It also

looks at their evolution & their relationship to the architecture that surrounded them. Sainsbury Wing. Admission free.Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan (9 Nov 2011-5 Feb 2012)Focusing on Leonardo as an artist, & in particular on work produced during his career as court painter to Duke Lodovico Sforza in Milan, the exhibition reunites many important international loans. During this period of the late 15th century, Leonardo explored ways of perceiving & recording human proportion, expression & anatomy, & the myriad forms of plants & animals. Also on view is a full-scale copy of Leonardo’s Last Supper, alongside all his surviving preparatory drawings. Sainsbury Wing & Sunley Room. Admission £16. Seniors £14, students & children over 12 years £8; family (2+4) £32.

NATIONAL MUSEUM CARDIFF Cathays Park, Cardiff CF10 3NPTel: 029 2039 7951www.nmgw.ac.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Admission free. Artist in Focus: Graham Sutherland (until 30 Oct 2011)A broad selection of works & objects held in the Museum & its archives, a collection that was presented to the principality by Sutherland in 1976 in recognition of the wealth of inspiration he drew from the hills & valleys of west Wales.

NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERYSt Martin’s Place, London WC2H 0HETel: 020 7306 0055www.npg.org.ukDaily 10-6 (Thurs, Fri until 9). Admission to gallery free.Gilbert & Sullivan (until 4 Dec 2011)A display marking the centenary of the death of Sir William Schwenck Gilbert who, alongside Sir Arthur Sullivan, revolutionised Victorian theatre with 14 comic operas written during a 25-year collaboration. It includes portraits

of leading performers—including Rutland Barrington, George Grossmith, Jessie Bond & Rosina Brandram—& also of Gilbert & of Sullivan themselves.Only Connect (until 27 Nov 2011)A web of portraits, using a network of threads to connect singers,

composers, artists, doctors, sculptors, poets, engineers, ambassadors & many others across three centuries. For example, George Bernard Shaw corresponded with pianist Harriet Cohen, who premiered Elgar’s Piano Quintet, while Elgar made the most famous recording of his Violin Concerto with the teenage Yehudi Menuhin. NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM Cromwell Rd, London SW7 5BDTel: 020 7942 5000/5011www.nhm.ac.ukDaily 10-5.50. Admission to museum free. Sexual Nature (until 2 Oct 2011) From the eye-watering to the eye-popping, this look at the birds & the bees shows that anything goes in the animal kingdom. Visitors leave preconceptions at the door to discover the science of sex via a multi-sensory journey showing the diversity of methods exploited in seduction & reproduction. Admission £8, concessions £4, children £3.50; family (2+2) £21.

NEW WALK MUSEUM & ART GALLERY53 New Walk, Leicester LE1 7EATel: 0116 225 4900www.leicestermuseums.ac.ukMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5. Admission free.Animal Stories (25 June 2011-26 Feb 2012) Little-known gems from the Museum’s collections are on display, alongside stories about animals from around the world & across time. Visitors can tell their own stories via interactive features.

PALLANT HOUSE GALLERY9 North Pallant, Chichester, W Sussex PO19 1TJTel: 01243 774557www.pallant.org.ukTues-Sat 10-5 (Thurs until 8), Sun & bank holidays 11-5. Admission £7.50, students £4, children £2.30; family (2+2) £17. Half-price for all, Tues 10-5 & Thurs 5-8.Frida Kahlo & Diego Rivera: Masterpieces from the Gelman Collection (9 July-2 Oct 2011)The only UK showing for this major touring exhibition devoted to the two central figures of Mexican Modernism. It includes Kahlo’s Self Portrait with Monkeys, Self Portrait as a Tehuana & Diego in My Thoughts, & Rivera’s Calla Lily Vendors, alongside photographs by Kahlo’ s father, Guillermo Kahlo, depicting churches & cloisters around Mexico City & Tepotzlan.

PENLEE HOUSE GALLERY & MUSEUMPenlee Park, Penzance, Cornwall TR18 4HE Tel: 01736 363625www.penleehouse.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5. Admission £4.50, concessions £3, children (& everybody on Sat) free.Walter Langley & the Birmingham Boys (until 10 Sept 2011)


From London Docklands: Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, Capture of The Pirate Blackbeard, 1718, detail

From National Portrait Gallery: Sir Edward Elgar by Sir William Rothenstein, 1917

The acknowledged pioneer of the Newlyn School was the Birmingham-born & -trained artist Walter Langley, who first visited in 1881. The show also includes work by other West Midlands artists who were to spend time in Newlyn, such as Edwin Harris, William Wainwright, William Banks Fortescue, William Breakspeare & Frank Richards.

THE QUEEN’S GALLERYBuckingham Palace, Buckingham Palace Rd, London SW1A 1AATel: 020 7766 7301www.royalcollection.org.ukDaily 10-5.30. Admission £9, concessions £8.20, children £4.50; family (2+3) £22.50.The Heart of the Great Alone: Scott, Shackleton & Antarctic Photography (21 Oct 2011-15 Apr 2012)An exhibition of remarkable Antarctic photographs by George Herbert Ponting & Frank Hurley marks the 100th anniversary of Captain Scott’s ill-fated journey to the South Pole. Ponting recorded Scott’s Terra Nova expedition of 1910–12 that led to the tragic deaths of five of the team during their trek back from the Pole. Hurley’s dramatic icescapes were taken during Shackleton’s polar expedition in 1914–17. Both collections were presented to King George V, & are today part of the Royal Photograph Collection.

THE QUEEN’S GALLERY, EDINBURGHPalace of Holyroodhouse, Royal Mile, Edinburgh EH8 8DX Tel: 0131 556 5100www.royalcollection.org.ukDaily 9.30-6 (from 1 Nov 9.30-4.30). Admission £6, concessions £5.50, children £3; family (2+3) £15.50. The Northern Renaissance: Dürer to Holbein (until 15 Jan 2012)During a time of dramatic change in Northern Europe, as monarchs vied for territorial power & religious reformers questioned the central tenets of the church, 15th & 16th century artists produced works of extraordinarily diverse subject matter & superb technical skill. This exhibition brings together prints & drawings by Albrecht Dürer,

mythological paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, & preparatory drawings by Hans Holbein the Younger displayed alongside Holbein’s finished oil portraits.

WALTER ROTHSCHILD ZOOLOGICAL MUSEUM Akeman St, Tring, Herts HP23 6APTel: 020 7942 6171www.nhm.ac.uk/tringMon-Sat 10-5 Sun 2-5. Admission free.The Secret World of Museum Science (until 6 Nov 2011)From feather forensic examination to digging up dodos, the exhibition shows what goes on behind the scenes in the Museum’s bird-research collections, & how some specimens can spark new discoveries.

ROYAL ACADEMY Piccadilly, London W1J 0BDTel: 020 7300 8000www.royalacademy.org.ukDaily 10-6 (Fri until 10). Admission charges vary.Eyewitness: Hungarian Photography in the 20th Century (30 June-2 Oct 2011)More than 200 photographs dating from 1914 to 1989 show how Brassaï (pseudonym of Gyula Halász), Robert Capa, André Kertész, László Moholy-Nagy & Martin Munkácsi left their homeland to make their names in Europe & the US. In his own way, each was in the forefront of stylistic development & had a profound influence on modern photography. Admission £9, seniors & disabled £7, students £4, children £3.Degas & the Ballet: Picturing movement (17 Sept-11 Dec 2011)An insight into Edgar Degas’ engagement with the figure in movement, from his more documentary mode of the early 1870s to the sensuous expressiveness of his final years. Many of the artist’s pastels, drawings, prints & sculpture are shown alongside parallel advances in photography & early film. Admission £14, seniors & disabled £13, students £9, children £4 & £3.

ROYAL AIR FORCE MUSEUM Grahame Park Way, London NW9 5LL

Tel: 020 8205 2266www.rafmuseum.orgDaily 10-6. Admission free.The Face of Courage: Portraits of the British at War, 1940-45, by Eric Kennington (1888-1960)(until May 2012)The inaugural exhibition of the Museum’s newly-opened art gallery is devoted to a renowned wartime artist. Kennington was among a handful who served as official British war artists in both world wars, making portraits that captured the indomitable spirit of British & Allied Servicemen. More than 30 works, made during World War II, feature the Armed Services, the Auxiliary Services, London Transport & some notable civilians.

ROYAL BOTANIC GARDENSKew, Richmond, Surrey TW9 3ABTel: 020 8332 5655www.kew.orgDaily 9.30-6.30 (29 Aug until 7.30; from 30 Aug 9.30-5.30). Admission £13.90, concessions £11.90, children free.International Garden Photographer of the Year (until 25 Sept 2011)

Outdoor photographic exhibition featuring around 100 enlarged images from pictures submitted by amateur & professional photographers for a competition on the subject of digital garden photography. South African Botanical Art (until 16 Oct 2011)More than 60 contemporary paintings–mostly by South African artists–are on show in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery of Botanical Art. The country’s spectacular strelitzias, protea, cycads, lilies & fire ephemerals have inspired many artists, particularly in the area of the Cape–home to thousands of species, many of which have become familiar as cultivated plants in other parts of the world.

SALISBURY & SOUTH WILTSHIRE MUSEUMThe King’s House, 65 The Close, Salisbury, Wilts SP1 2ENTel: 01722 332151www.salisburymuseum.org.uk

Mon-Sat 10-5, Sun 12-5. Admission £5, concessions £3.50, children £2; family (2+3) £11.Constable & Salisbury (until 25 Sept 2011)Nearly 50 oils, watercolours & sketches made by John Constable in & around Salisbury have returned to the city for the first time since they were painted & drawn 200 years ago. Admission (includes museum admission) £8, children £4; tickets may be pre-booked via website.

SCARBOROUGH ART GALLERY The Crescent, Scarborough, N Yorks YO11 2PWTel: 01723 374753www.scarboroughartgallery.org.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Admission £2, concessions £1.80, children free.Howard Hodgkin: Prints (9 July-18 Sept 2011)Over the last 40 years Hodgkin has explored the possibilities of printmaking, producing a substantial body of work. From more than 130 editions of prints, large & small, 43 are shown in this exhibition. Landscape Revisited, Kane Cunningham & Joe Cornish(1 Oct-4 Dec 2011)Photographer Joe Cornish & artist Kane Cunningham revisit the gallery’s collection of landscape paintings. Inspired by the work of Paul Marny, HB Carter, Atkinson Grimshaw & Ivon Hitchens, the two explore in their different ways the context, tradition & future of landscape painting & photography.

SCIENCE MUSEUM Exhibition Rd, London SW7 2DDTel: 0870 870 4868www.sciencemuseum.org.ukDaily 10-6 (23 July-4 Sept 10-7). Admission to museum free.Protomodel: Conrad Shawcross (until 13 Nov 2011)Shawcross’s five small-scale artworks shown alongside the stylised displays of mathematical instruments, machines & models in the Mathematics gallery, open up a playful, questioning dialogue exploring how model-making, natural processes, cultural practices & historical circumstances play their part in mathematical thinking.

SCOTTISH NATIONAL GALLERY The Mound, Edinburgh EH2 2ELTel: 0131 624 6200www.nationalgalleries.orgDaily 10-5 (Thurs until 7). Admission to gallery free. Portrait of the Nation (until 4 Sept 2011)While the Scottish National Portrait Gallery undergoes refurbishment, this display shows how the newly renovated Gallery will look when it opens in November 2011. A taster of works on show from the SNPG’s rich collection ranges from George Jamesone’s Campbell of Glenorchy Family Tree of 1635 to contemporary favourites such as Ken Currie’s Three Oncologists.


naTional HeriTage guide

From Salisbury & South Wiltshire Museum: Stonehenge by John Constable 1836

From The Queen’s Gallery, Edinburgh: Leonardo da Vinci, A masquerader as a lansquenet

SWANSEA MUSEUM Victoria Rd, Swansea SA11SNTel: 01792 653763www.swansea.gov.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Admission free.A Copperopolis Exhibition (until 4 Sept 2011)The story of how Swansea became the copper capital of Britain, reaching out into the wider world to acquire the copper-bearing ore, & then exporting the metal across the globe. The displays tell industrial, seafaring & personal stories from the time when copper was king.

TATE BRITAIN Millbank, London SW1P 4RGTel: 020 7887 8008www.tate.org.uk/britainDaily 10-6 (first Fri of month until 10). Admission to gallery free. The Vorticists: Manifesto for a Modern World (until 4 Sept 2011)This short-lived radical art movement was based in London, but international in make-up & ambition, & shone briefly but brightly before & during World War I. This exhibition brings together more than 100 key works, including seminal pieces by Wyndham Lewis, Jacob Epstein & Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. Admission £14, concessions £12, children under 12 free.

TATE LIVERPOOL Albert Dock, Liverpool L3 4BBTel: 0151 702 7400www.tate.org.uk/liverpoolDaily 10-5.50. Admission to gallery free. René Magritte: The Pleasure Principle (until 16 Oct 2011)Renowned for his witty images playing with the idea of reality & illusion, Magritte is one of the most revered & popular artists of the 20th century. This, the largest exhibition of the Belgian surrealist’s work in England for 20 years, reveals the inspiration behind the artist’s celebrated style, focusing on the less explored aspects of Magritte’s life & artistic practice. Admission £11, concessions £9, children under 12 free.

TATE MODERNBankside, London SE1 9TGTel: 020 7887 8008www.tate.org.uk/modernDaily 10-6 (Fri, Sat until 10). Admission to gallery free.Miró (until 11 Sept 2011)First major London retrospective in nearly 50 years for this great surrealist painter. More than 150 paintings, drawings, sculptures & prints from six decades show a language of symbols that reflects Miró’s personal vision, sense of freedom, & energy. Admission £15.50, concessions £13.50, children under 12 free.

TIME AND TIDE MUSEUM OF GREAT YARMOUTH LIFEBlackfriars Rd, Great Yarmouth, Norfolk NR30 3BXTel: 01493 743930www.museums.norfolk.gov.ukDaily 10-5. Admission £4.80,

concessions £4.10, children £3.50.Secrets of the Saucy Seaside Postcard (until 4 Sept 2011)A cheery selection of cards, original drawings, sketches & paintings capture the spirit of the great British seaside holiday between the 1950s & 1970s. Produced by Bamforth & Co, these popular items were an entertaining way of sending greetings back home–with a bit of titillation thrown in. An accompanying film reveals the artists & illustrators at work in the studio.

TULLIE HOUSE MUSEUM & ART GALLERYCastle St, Carlisle, Cumbria CA3 8TP Tel: 01228 618718www.tulliehouse.co.ukMon-Sat 10-5, Sun 11-5 (from 1 Nov, Mon-Sat 10-5, Sun 12-5). Admission free.Roman Frontier Gallery (opens 25 June 2011)A new permanent gallery telling the story of the 400-year Roman occupation at the Empire’s northernmost frontier. Evidence & artefacts from Carlisle & the western parts of Hadrian’s Wall help to explain what happened at this western end of the Wall, & why.

TURNER CONTEMPORARYMargate, Kent CT9 1HBTel: 01843 294208www.turnercontemporary.orgTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-7 (Fri until 10). Admission free.Revealed: Turner Contemporary opens (until 4 Sept 2011)The inaugural exhibition of this dramatically-sited seafront gallery is centred on a painting by Turner of an 1812 volcanic eruption on the island of St Vincent, which he created from a sketch by an eye-witness. The show explores the themes of imagination, discovery, wonder & the creative spirit, & features six contemporary artists whose work illustrates the relationship between imaginings & reality.

ULSTER MUSEUM Stranmillis Rd, Botanic Gardens, Belfast BT9 5ABTel: 028 9038 3000www.ulstermuseum.org.ukTues-Sun & bank-holiday Mons 10-5. Admission free. Flower Power (until 20 Nov 2011)The beauty of flowers has inspired centuries of art & design. This exhibition celebrates the use of floral motifs in costume & dress, from the embroidered silks & printed cottons of the Victorian era to the laser-printed textiles of 21st-century fashion.

VICTORIA & ALBERT MUSEUMCromwell Rd, London SW7 2RLTel: 020 7942 2000www.vam.ac.ukDaily 10-5.45 (some galleries open Fri until 10). Admission to museum free.Power of Making (6 Sept 2011-2 Jan 2012)

A life-sized crochet bear is among the 100 beautifully made objects in this celebration of crafts of all kinds, from moulded shoes to spun-metal furniture, extreme cake decorations to dry-stone walling.Postmodernism: Style & Subversion 1970-90 (24 Sept 2011-8 Jan 2012)An in-depth survey of art, design & architecture of the 1970s & 80s, examining one of the most contentious phenomena in recent art & design history. It shows how Postmodernism evolved from a provocative architectural movement in the early 1970s, going on to influence all areas of popular culture including art, film, music, graphics & fashion. Admission charge to be arranged.

WADDESDON MANORWaddesdon, near Aylesbury, Bucks HP18 0JHTel: 01296 653226www.waddesdon.org.uk Wed-Fri 12-4; Sat, Sun & bank holidays 11-4. Admission to house & gardens £13.63, children £10 (Sat, Sun £15.45 & £11.81); National Trust members free. Andy Warhol: Ten portraits of Jews of the 20th century (until 30 Oct 2011)One of Warhol’s most important, yet lesser-known series from the 1980s, the Ten Portraits represents a powerful homage to some great figures of the last century, including Einstein, Kafka, Freud & the Marx Brothers, honouring a group of men & women recognised as leading names in science & the arts. Anish Kapoor: Mountain (until 30 Oct 2011)This special loan from a private collection is installed in the Aviary. At more than 2 metres high, the sculpture is both monumental & imposing, yet sets up contradictions: its rugged contours are truncated at a plateau rather than a peak; & the solid-looking structure turns out to be hollow.

WALLACE COLLECTIONHertford House, Manchester Sq, London W1U 3BNTel: 020 7563 9500www.wallacecollection.orgDaily 10-5. Admission free. Time Regained: Works by artist-goldsmith Kevin Coates (until 25 Sept 2011)The work of a renowned contemporary artist-goldsmith, frequently described as an

alchemist & a Renaissance man. Coates’ pieces are in public & private collections, including 10 Downing Street, Lichfield Cathedral, the V&A & the National Museum of Scotland. Here, he has been inspired by a dozen of the treasures from the Wallace Collection.

WOLVERHAMPTON ART GALLERY Lichfield St, Wolverhampton WV1 1DUTel: 01902 552055www.wolverhamptonart.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5. Closed 29 Aug. Admission free. Ed Ruscha: Artist Rooms (until 29 Oct 2011)Los Angeles-based Ruscha is one of the most inventive American artists of the last 50 years. Since the early 1960s he has channelled his fascination with language & American West Coast culture into books, print-making, photography, drawing & painting. This travelling exhibition shows early drawings, key paintings & artist books alongside other loans showing in the UK for the first time.

WRITERS’ MUSEUMLady Stairs Close, Edinburgh EH1 2PATel: 0131 529 4901www.edinburghmuseums.org.ukMon-Sat 10-5 (during Festival, 12 Aug-4 Sept, also Sun 12-5). Admission free; donations welcome.David Hume, 1711-76: Man of Letters, Scientist of Man (until 17 Sept 2011)An exhibition commemorating the 300th anniversary of the birth of David Hume, the revered Scottish philosopher & historian. On show are archive materials relating to his life & work, including rare books & original manuscripts written by him, & images of Hume & other important Enlightenment figures such as Adam Smith, Francis Hutcheson & Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The details in this guide were correct at the time of going to press, but may be subject to change.For a more comprehensive guide visit our website—www.nationalheritage.org.ukMaterial for possible inclusion in the next listings (Nov 2011-Mar 2012) may be sent to [email protected]


From the V&A: Supremely black, by Haim Steinbach, 1985

Top: The National Museum of Scotland’s natural world galleries - 7. Centre, left to right: Sculpture Gallery, The Watts - 8. Bristol’s new local museum, M Shed, opens - 4. Bottom left to right: The Hepworth Wakefield, with David Chipperfield’s unique gallery lighting - 13. Neil MacGregor for the British Museum receives the Art Fund Prize from culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, page - 5. The Museum of Lakeland Life, with Barbara Hepworth’s Trezion in the foreground - 11.

MuseuMs and galleries in THe neWs

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