Acquiring New Tastes

Date: 07-09-1989
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999                    
Subject:   18th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Now            

As art prices mount Andrew Graham-Dixon asks whether museums can afford not to add to their collections.

THIS MAY be remembered as the decade when the world's great art institutions finally found themselves priced out of the art market. When Van Gogh sunflowers come at a million bucks a petal, when a work barely 30 years old, by a living artist, can fetch dollars 17 million at auction (Jasper Johns' False Start), who can blame the major museums for what has come to seem a collective mood of resignation in the face of market forces? Even the Americans have admitted to feeling the squeeze; The Chicago Museum of Con-temporary Art's director recently admitted that 'We are a collecting institution that finds itself unable to col-lect', while his opposite number at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston has conceded that 'We are coming face to face with the fact that we are no longer major players in the art market'. It would seem that significant works of art are now considered affordable only by the massively rich private collector and by the Japanese, used to life in the land of the rising sum.
 
In this country, where financial crisis has become a way of life for most major art institutions, an adven-turous acquisitions policy is increasingly regarded as an unaffordable luxury. The government has actively encouraged museums to consider selling off parts of their collections to make ends meet, by giving their boards of trustees 'powers of disposal'. Acquisitions grants have been frozen. The message from above has been straightforward: be content with what you have, and concentrate on survival. Government pressure and spiralling prices in the auction rooms pose an equally straightforward question to those who run our major museums: should they, as they always have done, seek to add to their collections, or has the time come, finally, to call it a day?
 
The National Gallery has made its own answer to that question abundantly clear. Its recent record in the field of acquisitions is little short of miraculous. The museum's government grant for new purchases was reduced from pounds 3.3 million in 1984-5 to pounds 2.75 million in 1985-6, a level at which it has remained. Yet in that time the National Gallery has bought, among other things, a major Poussin (The Finding of Moses), Robert Campin's magnificent 15th-century The Virgin and Child in an Interior, John Constable's great six-footer Stratford Mill and one of the unquestioned masterpieces of 17th-century portraiture, Van Dyck's Lord John Stuart and his Brother, Lord Bernard Stuart. Many of these purchases have been made with considerable outside assistance. The National Gallery has clearly strained its resources and goodwill to the limit - not just to acquire, but to make the case for continuing acquisition, to demonstrate how the mu-seum can be enhanced by the addition of new works to its permanent collection.
 
In the past year, two major landscape paintings have entered the collections of the National Gallery. Caspar David Friedrich's Winter Landscape has been hanging in Room 43 since July 1988; Aelbert Cuyp's River Landscape with Horsemen and Peasants went on display in Room 19 just over a month ago. Neither painting has received much in the way of advance or subsequent publicity, yet between them they have qui-etly altered the nature of the collection, transforming the National Gallery's presentation of the Western landscape tradition. Their presence rousingly defends its refusal to view its own collections as a closed book.
 
Cuyp painted the River Landscape with Horsemen and Peasants in the late 1650s. Commissioned for one of Dordrecht's patrician houses, it pictures an Arcadia for the Dutch aristocracy: an elegantly dressed horseman pauses on an idyllic riverbank, where he encounters sleek cattle, a flock of sheep herded by suitably deferential peasants and gazes across the waters to a group of turreted and castellated buildings doubtless designed to evoke the glories of the feudal past. The whole is lit by the ethereal glow of a sunset that recalls the splendours of Claude; it is a triumphant marriage of the Dutch landscape tradition and Italian-ate influence, a windless, unruffled image of worldly contentment.
 
The Cuyp would have been worth buying for the simple fact that it is his finest work, and therefore one of the greatest landscapes of the golden age of Dutch painting. It reveals Cuyp as the undoubted master that he was, and - literally - puts the National Gallery's existing Cuyps in the shade. But beyond that, it is a picture that has exerted a major influence on the course of British art since its arrival in this country - purchased by the Marquess of Bute - more than 200 years ago.
 
Benjamin West, Sir Joshua Reynolds' successor as President of the Royal Academy, held the painting directly responsible for the rage for Cuyp among British collectors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Without its influence, Hazlitt would have been unlikely to write his great appreciation of the Dutch artist ('The tender green of the valleys beyond, the gleaming lake, the purple light of the hills, have an effect like the down on an unripe nectarine'). Without it, Turner's attempts at sunlit pastoral - Petworth's The Forest of Bere, for example, or his direct tribute to Cuyp, the great Dort, or Dordrecht - would surely have looked very different.
 
Turner commented of Cuyp that 'he knew where to blend minutiae in all the golden colour of ambient vapour', and comparing Cuyp's River Landscape with the Turners in the Clore Gallery it is tempting to sus-pect that what the English painter envied in Cuyp was, precisely, his sense of equilibrium - the harmonious marriage of atmospherics and clarity of foreground detail that Turner himself rarely managed. Turner's at-mospherics, his fires and mists, tend to take over his pictures, to make the discernible figures and details seem curiously over-realised. It was not so much a fault in Turner as an integral part of his genius, clarified by the presence of this great Cuyp in the National Gallery. The River Landscape is not just a self-contained masterpiece; it performs the function of all great acquisitions, by changing your perceptions of other art in the national collections.
 
Caspar David Friedrich was the greatest of German Romantic landscape painters, yet Winter Land-scape is the only work of his to hang in a British public collection. On a barren, snow- covered plain, you find a cripple who has cast aside his crutches. He sits propped against a rock and offers prayer to a wooden crucifix that has been erected under a stand of pine trees which offers the landscape's only refuge. In the background, glimpsed through thick mist, the fantastic spires of a Gothic cathedral reach for the heavens.
 
Winter Landscape has been hung to break a procession of Corots which includes the French master's Avignon from the West. This is a mischievous and doubtless symbolic hang. The Friedrich interrupts Corot's flow to suggest the existence of a radical 19th-century alternative, in Germany, to the naturalistic, plein-air tradition of French landscape painting which is so strongly represented in the National Gallery and which would culminate in the art of the Impressionists.
 
Beside Friedrich's visionary, invented landscape, Corot's Avignon from the West seems all the more remarkable for its detached, dispassionate record of the old Roman city and its modern additions. Corot's long, thin painting presents Avignon as it might have been seen from a panoramic observatory: the city pe-ters out into the plain that surrounds it, dotted with modern buildings. Corot pictures the death of the classical past, its absorption and dilution by time and nature, but he does so with exemplary objectivity. If his painting is tinged with sadness, it is the melancholy of the naturalist, one who knows it would be dishonest to alter what he sees.
 
Friedrich's painting is also coloured by nostalgia for the past - in this case the Gothic, mediaeval past - but his takes a different and altogether more intense form. Born into an age suffering from a collective crisis of faith, Friedrich attempted to fill the spiritual void of his times by finding secular equivalents to the great experiences of religion. His figures - most famously the Monk by the Sea in West Berlin, a lone figure en-countering a void of sea and sky - wander the world in search of revelation. Winter Landscape is an allegory of redemption, a blend of sacred and secular imagery which seeks to marry modern and mediaeval types of religious experience.
 
Friedrich's traveller, miraculously healed (hence the discarded crutches), is at peace with a landscape whose central feature, the stand of pines, has become a natural cathedral: Friedrich has carefully ensured that the trees' branches echo the form of the Gothic cathedral behind. From here he can complete his jour-ney, to the church in the mists, beckoned by the dark outline of the stone archway that leads towards it - a journey which will also, it is implied, lead him back to the unshaken faith of his mediaeval forebears. Friedrich finds a possibility of salvation, a transcendental significance in landscape which is entirely absent from the French naturalist tradition. The painting adds a completely new spiritual dimension to the National Gallery's nineteenth century collections.
 
Museums are not merely collections of objects, accumulations of capital that happens to take the form of oil paint on canvas, ripe for the asset-stripper. The National Gallery offers an account (a partial account, inevitably) of the history of Western art, an argument - about what is and is not important, about who influ-enced whom, and why - given physical manifestation. As time passes, new arguments are advanced. A mu-seum that lacks the money or will to acquire is, by definition, excluded from such arguments. It will fail to register the increasing esteem in which the work of a certain artist (Friedrich is a good example) has come to be held. Its walls will not reflect the shifts in taste, the advances in art historical knowledge, the revisions of received opinion, that have marked the later twentieth century. It will, in a sense, have died.
 
In an interview he gave to The Independent last summer the National Gallery's director, Neil MacGregor, defended his acquisitions policy with the comment that 'You're not just buying an object; art reacts to other art.' Visit Rooms 19 and 43 for a demonstration, the argument put into practice.