James White and the National Gallery

James White has been director of the National Gallery of Ireland for fifteen years. His successor is to be appointed this autumn. If the right person is to be appointed to do the right job, he and those who choose him will need to know about some of the things that went wrong in the past.

James White was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland on June 1, 1964. It was the centenary year of the gallery, and some kind of special centenary exhibition was planned. Well, planned is not quite the word. It had been talked about, and the worthy ladies and gentlemen who then made up the Board of Governors and Guardians of the gallery had deliberated on its form and content. But little had actually been done.

This is hardly surprising. Even now, the gallery is grossly understaffed and under-financed. It was much worse then. The previous director, Thomas MacGreevy, had retired a year earlier and at 71 had even then been somewhat beyond the Years appropriate to the task of running a major public gallery. Gifted, eccentric, witty, he had been an intelligent but cautious director, well aware of the sad pitfalls into which some of his predecessors had slipped. Although he had successfully recommended a number of good purchases to the Board, it is probably fair to say that, in the depressed fifties and early sixties, lacking any vital sense of direction for the gallery, he missed opportunities which are now regretted.

With characteristic vitality, James White stepped in and rescued the situation. He produced a centenary exhibition of over 200 works which opened in early October 1964, four months after his appointment. The works were mainly from the gallery's own collection. The Dolmen Press printed the catalogue, and the entries were simply taken out of Thomas Bodkip's 1932 catalogue of the collection of paintings, with a little later dressing added. In addition, some works were borrowed from abroad. Just how hastily this was done can be gauged from the fact that the national galleries in London and Edinburgh could not oblige because their boards were on holiday.

At the end of the Preface to that catalogue, James White wrote: "A Director has the responsibility of putting on the walls of the Gallery the works which he thinks represent what is best in art. Of course the changes he makes are only temporary. Soon his taste will be forgotten - but the works of art will remain to make their appeal to a new generation of people whose eyes will have been reconditioned by the changes which society has undergone in the interim and the way in which the human consciousness has evolved."

In itself it is a clumsy definition of what a director does in a public gallery, and, on countless occasions since, James White has added to it, and qualified it. He is, after all, a very talkative man. But in essence it contains the main thrust of any director's activity: he is there to hang pictures on the walls of his gallery, and to get people in to look at them. He is there for a host of other reasons as well. But the central fusion is very simple - the cultural event that happens when people and works of art are brought face to face.

That James White realised this, and that he dedicated all his energies for fifteen years to bringing it about in the best way that he could manage, will always redeem his directorship, in my eyes, from other, and lesser faults. Enthusiastic, energetic, vulgar, not very knowledgeable about art, he has always had his heart in the right place, and he has almost always been able to back his judgements and instincts with action. He belongs to that breed of men, always present in any society, but a particularly notable phenomenon of the sixties and seventies, who recognise the value of being supported by the popular perception, and who spend a good deal of time making sure that it is favourable to them. There are some people in public life who simply get on and do what they think is the right thing. There are others who may or may not do the same, but who also endeavour to ensure that they are seen to be doing the right thing. As we all know, it is called pu blic or press relations, and James White has always been extremely good at it.

This is not to say that behind the structuring of public perception inherent in such a capacity he has been either idle or misdirected in what he has done. Quite the opposite. But what it does mean is a degree of oversell all the time. Brian Fallon, the Irish Times art critic, spotted all this as early as October 1964, when he was reviewing that first exhibition. In an article in his paper headed "New Broom for the National Gallery", he referred to James White's "special combination of attack, idealism and publicity sense", and he went on to outline and praise the vigorous pragmatism: light and air had been let in, glass removed from canvases so that they could be seen, and people were being encouraged to come in.

Three years later Fallon wrote in Ireland of the Welcomes (December 1969) that the National Gallery is "a public centre and focus of interest, as well as a strong tourist attraction". He also said that James White's "publicity flair is sllch that since he took over the directorship of the gallery in 1964, he and it have rarely been out of the news ... The Director sees a gallery as a major influence in forming public taste and opinion. He believes that everyone in the country should see the pictures it displays." And Fallon went on to quote White himself: "It is absolutely necessary that we use every means possible to remind the public of our existence."

James White's actual Success was phenomenal. From an average annual attendance of around 50,000 when he took over, he brought people in as though the National Gallery were Croke Park. In 1967 the attendance was 93,000; in 1968 it jumped to 199,000; in 1969 it was 324,000, and from then on he kept it at that. He was greatly helped by the opening of the new extension in 1968, and by the active promotion of the arts generally. The Minister for Finance at the time, Charles Haughey, was a notable supporter of a wide variety of artistic ventures.

The Director's annual report began to read like that of a successful Irish business venture, and this fitted in with the economic climate of the times. We are doing well, but next year will do even better. We have shown a profit of 300,000 people this year; next year our profit predictions are higher still! Our growth rate is good, our production is good, and there is no sign of any falling off in the people. Of course, though we did not know it at the time, there were more people around than we knew. Like money, the secret hoards were flowing, emigration was on the decline, and the high profile of the gallery, together with the good quality of the goods it had on offer, was having an excellent public impact. In common with trade and business, the disturbances in Northern Ireland had a temporarily adverse impact in 1972, and profit fell to 291,000 people in that year, but it picked up afterwards. In the annual report that year the director referred to "the depression caused by the Northern disturbances". On a percentage basis, our attendance figures were as high as anywhere in the world.

The Director was not satisfied. In an article in The Arts in Ire- land, in the autumn of 1972, James White put to himself the rhetorical question: "We must still ask ourselves if the Gallery succeeds as an institution in playing its full part in the life of the community. The answer to this is clear. We fail to exert the influence we ought. The place of the Gallery in the life of the country has always brought forth a puzzled reaction from people. In general the man in the street seems to feel that its only function is to be an exhibition hall for those interested. In fact the main function of the Gallery is to act as a front line in the effort to raise the quality of life."

It was beginning to seem as if James White, as well as recording continually rising profits in people, wanted also to make the National Gallery the seat of government and the meeting place for the Hierarchy as well. If power and influence could be concentrated there, then the really serious business of tackling this "quality of life" thing could be undertaken without the irritating handicap of not being in complete control of everything.

If his predecessor, Thomas MacGreevy, had still been alive, he would probably have scratched the shiny seat of his pepper-and-salt trousers, and given it as his opinion that the "front line in the effort to raise the quality of life" in Ireland still ran, as it always has done, in a crooked, drunken line, from pub to pub, and that, if the National Gallery's profit growth in people reflected the general affluence of the period, the pubs did it even more so.

In other words, in flat, Dublin, sceptical language, he would have questioned the doctrine of culture spreading its ever stronger and brighter light of education and discernment over more and more lives. In reality, more people have more time and more money, as well as more motor cars, by which they can indulge a natural curiosity. If a higher public profile is given to the National Gallery, and if more things appear to be happening there, then it is very natural that people will go there. At the same time it is questionable whether this elusive quality of life will improve by a single percentage point. Will more men stop beating their wives as a result of seeing Fra Angelico's painting of Saint Cosmos and Saint Damien being burnt alive? Will the quantity of love witllin a given family rise as a result of attention being focused on Murillo's tender painting of the Holy Family, or Gerard's more formal one of Queen Julie Napoleon and her two daughters? Does art make people better? In the fifteen years during which James White has brought more and more people into the National Gallery, and has asserted a greater and greater degree of relevance for it in the nation's affairs, has either art or life improved? And if it has, which I genuinely doubt, to what extent has the gallery been responsible?

This is not to suggest that people should be kept out but only to question the advisability of them being got in under false pretences. Good public relations so easily become false pretences. If we set ever greater targets for growth in the numbers of people, and make ever larger claims about the impact of works of art on the most profound elements in the texture of a nation's life, at some point the fundamental absurdity of what we do must emerge. There will be too many people striving to see the pictures and improve the quality of their lives for anyone to see the pictures at all, or to see them in that quiet stillness that so much affected George Bernard Shaw and Samuel Beckett, and just possibly made them better artists.

I said earlier that James White was vulgar, and not very knowledgeable about art. I regard these two things as assets. I both like and admire vulgarity. The common touch is critical in certain activities, and has been of value in many of the good things achieved by James White during his tenure as Director of the National Gallery. And as to the question of knowledge about art, in its more arcane and detailed forms it can be comfortably left to the pedants, the researchers, the academics. Much of the time they will get it wrong; and they will do so with a relentless stubbornness, an arrogance, even an actual blindness, that is at times quite breath-taking. A larger focus, a greater dependence on human capacities, like instinct, a general sense of culture and history and literature, are all necessary components in the director of a national gallery; he must at all times be able to see himself and the gallery from outside, and to act upon that perception. James White has successfully done that.

But the time for reassessment is overdue. The style and shape of his direction needs to be questioned, and some of the faults looked into. For there have been faults. The lively, active, ever-expanding National Gallery has, in several respects, gone away. Its programme of exhibitions has been, on the whole, threadbare. The pattern of acquisitions has been uneven, often lurching from one dramatic purchase to another, and missing out on more modest opportunities for expansion. There is a great deal of elitism in the approach to people and publicity. The restaurant is a monstrous affront to the very foundation of James White's declared aims. The gallery is understaffed still. Salaries are low. Terms of employment are inexcusably uncertain, and they trade on a more or less inexhaustible supply of willing workers who desperately want experience, and demean themselves in order to get it.

On exhibitions it is ironic that the same clambering rush that characterised James White's first event in the gallery, in 1964, to celebrate the centenary, also characterised his last, the Orpen Centenary Exhibition in 1978. From the fifteen years of his directorship of the gallery one should be able to assemble between thirty and forty first-class catalogues of exhibitions, perhaps half of them assembled from within the gallery, the other half made up of exhibitions brought to Ireland from outside. The standard of scholarship one would expect would be even and reliable, rather than exceptional, and the quality of printing and design good. And a certain evenness of style, and educational flavouring, would characterise the exhibitions culled from an in terna'tional choice that has been enormous.

The reality has been a woeful parody of this ideal. We have lurched in stops and starts, with no clear programme, and no policy. There have been good exhibitions, like the Irish Portraits and the Daniel Maclise, with well researched catalogues, and comprehensive treatment of their subjects; but they have been isolated, and rare phenomena. There have been stops and starts in respect of visiting exhibitions, like the Anger drawings and the Armand Hammer Collection. There have been dreadful lapses, like the failure to hold a bicentenary exhibition of George Chinnery's birth, in 1974 when even the little museum of Macao, where he died, did him proud. And in general there has been indifference about this prime activity in any self-respecting public gallery.

The question of acquisitions is an essay in itself. Whatever may be the value of a work of art, once it is bought by a public gallery its monetary value falls below zero; it actually becomes a burden in insurance and maintenance. In such circumstances, the general, well-publicised consensus approach which has attended many of the most important public purchases in Britain, America, and on the continent in past decades, has been not just acceptable, but desirable; it is far better to air controversy before the cash is paid over, rather than after.

Circumstances have not always allowed this in respect of a number of the National Gallery's acquisitions, but this is even greater reason for restraint and caution. Some gross errors have been made, such as the de la Tour, and, most recently, the purchase in 1976 of the crude and clumsy frescoes from Camp Public, near Avignon, whose superficial visual link with Celtic art is no real excuse for their distorting impact on the gallery's collection. They are simply bad, and should not have been bought.

There have been other, less obvious mistakes. While it is a fascinating work in its relationship to Goya's output more generally, the possession of The Dreamer by our own gallery, where there is so little else of the artist's work against which to compare, must be regarded as a questionable purchase. By the same token, one is justified in raising some doubts about the £250,000 spent in 1973 on Jacques-Louis David's The Funeral of Patroclus. On balance I come down in favour, because it extends one of the Gallery's best collections, the French, and because the rarity of David's work would suggest that we are unlikely to be able to acquire something more typical, and less associated with his apprentice years. But it gives only a limited idea of the compass of his genius.

To too great an extent there has been too wide a gap between the large and dramatic purchases on which the generous Shaw Bequest has been used up, and the mundane filling process that has gone on, with purchases now and again of Irish works, and other odds and ends. In intelligent, policy terms, during a period of a steady climb of prices on the art market, the recognition should have been there of at least one glaring area of opportunity, that of the English School, particularly of the early part of this century. The English collection is basically sound, and already very substantial. But it does not really move into the twentieth century. In terms of opportunity, and value for money, it has consistently offered the best buys over the past fifteen years, and still does. Yet we have made no significant purchases during a time when stunningly good paintings by Sickert, Steer, Spencer Gore, Gilman, Bevin, and hosts of others have gone through the market, and modestly priced in world terms. Culturally, whether we like it or not, they are close. Yeats, and every other great twentieth century Irish artist, grew up under their shadows, and any serious director of the National Gallery should be giving time and thought to the prudent development of our limited buying resources to such areas of acquisition as this.

As to the restaurant, its presence in its current form is an affront to the general public, and turns many of the rooms in the gallery into smelly corridors down which expense account groups of overweight Dublin business people; with little interest in art, lead their commercial guests in order to impress them. The gallery should have a simple and unobtrusive canteen, entirely functional, and allowing a straightforward range of food and drink, from coffee, wine and milk up to proper food, sensibly and cheaply prepared. For choice, it should be in the basement, adding to the functionally advantageous speed with which people would go in, through, and out again. Of the thousand people each day who visit the gallery, chalking themselves up as profits in the annual report, ten per cent are going there to eat, many regularly, and their glance at the pictures is at best casual.

Within these criticisms there lie certain prescriptions for the next director, and more importantly for those who will choose him. He is being offered a miserable salary, and general conditions of employment that would be intolerable to any captain of industry with a turnover comparable to the 300,000 people who visit the gallery each year. He should be given a stricter contract than the one under which previous directors have worked, perhaps five years, with a further three-year option. (The present arrangement is until resignation, death, or the age of 65, whichever comes first.)

Of course he or she needs to be a genius; witty, intelligent, scholarly, with the common touch, with academic achievement, a knowledge of the art market, a sense of vision, prudence, judgement and love of people. And of course I could do it. But who, in his right mind, and after reading this essay, would want to be Director of the National Gallery of Ireland?