Lunatics. Asylum.
February 23 2012
I've tried to resist the temptation to write about Charles Saatchi's bonkers piece in The Guardian on selling Turners. Briefly, the contemporary art guru says we should sell many of the Turners in the Turner Bequest at Tate Britain, and use the money to buy modern and contemporary art.
Saatchi's main gripe is that most of 30,000 watercolours and drawings by Turner in the Bequest are kept in storage...
...inaccessible to anyone but scholars.
If we were able to ask Turner if he would prefer to have, say, 25,000 of the watercolours and drawings spread around the world's great museums, with large archive centres in Paris, New York, Washington, Berlin, Rome, and the major museums in China, India, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, Russia – don't you think he would prefer it?
Perhaps even 50 or so of his great paintings shared out for each museum to display in their own collection?
I don't know any artist who wouldn't prefer to have his work visible, and available around the globe; a dozen archives in the world's leading museums for students, critics, writers, anyone, able to study his work, rather than in one largely invisible one.
I'd go further.
How would Turner feel if we parted with some of those 30,000 works to be apportioned among the world's great institutions, enabling us to build a war chest to strengthen the nation's core collection of art of the past 100 years?
Purr-lease. I'll leave you to decide on the wisdom of selling works by an undeniably great artist to buy contemporary works that we, in our generation, think are great, but which in a hundred years time may well be considered worthless. Instead, let me concentrate on the factual ineptitude of Saatchi's case.
First, Saatchi is wrong about Turner preferring to spread his art across the world. Turner was obsessed with keeping his works as a single collection. He said that the primary aim of his Bequest was "to keep my pictures together". And Ruskin later said, "The only thing he would say sometimes [about his bequest] was, 'keep them together'".
Second, the works are not 'inaccessible to anyone but scholars'. If you want to see them, all you have to do is amble along to the Tate study room, and the excellent staff will bring out whatever you want in a jiffy. I did just that earlier this week. The system works perfectly, and you can learn far more about a Turner drawing in the study room than if it were glazed and hung in a dim gallery.
Third, there is a good reason many of the drawings and watercolours are kept in storage: sadly, displaying them permanently can lead to deterioration. Even if we sold them to China, as Saatchi suggests, they would still have to spend most of their time in storage. (That said, the Tate are currently testing new highly technical frames and mounts that may overcome this).
I could go on, but that's enough rebutting for now.
