The opening of the Courtauld Institute Galleries in their new home in Somerset House in summer 1990 was not a happy occasion. The Great Room on the top floor, site of the eighteenth-century Royal Academy exhibitions, was the divided up into ill-designed booths, Samuel Courtauld’s great collection of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings was crammed on to the panelling in the refurbished “fine rooms” on the piano nobile, and the early Italian and northern pictures were perilously hung on rows of screens. Worst of all, it soon became apparent that rapid changes in temperature and relative humidity were endangering the early panels, and this room had to be closed.  After the initial excitement of the opening, Somerset House proved not to be a draw for tourists, and the numbers of visitors declined. Loan exhibitions held in the Prints and Drawings gallery located on the opposite side of the entrance vestibule from the gallery were expensive and unsuccessful. This chapter of errors would make an instructive research project in the institutes’ newly founded M.A. in “Museology”

With a change of Directorship in the Galleries and a re-thinking of the whole problem of the building, some progress is now being made to redress things. The public was lured back to the galleries this summer by an “exhibition” of the Samuel Courtauld Collection on the top floor. Here the pictures given to the University of London in 1931 were supplemented with loans of privately-owned works from Courtaulds’s collection and a few of the paintings acquired for the nation from the £50,000 Samuel Courtuald gave in 1923 specifically for the purchase of works of the “modern movement”- defined as French art from Manet to Gauguin.  The exhibition was accompanied by a catalogue with introductory essays on Samuel Courtauld’s public and private collecting placed in the context of attitudes to “modern foreign” art in Britain between the wars. This is the first of a projected series of exhibitions on key figures in the history of the Courtauld Galleries and its building. The next, scheduled for 1996, will be devoted to the architect William Chambers, and subsequent shows might focus on such diverse personalities as Lord Lee of Fareham, Roger Fry and the as yet unnameable but well-known donor of the Princes Gate Collection. 

The 1994 exhibition demonstrated that Samuel Courtauld’s pictures could be hung to advantage in the Great Room, despite its size and height in relation to the predominantly domestic scale of the works, and the intractable problem of the “line”. Modest but fundamental changes were necessary to bring this about. A problem throughout the building is the glare from side windows combined with difficulty of inserting modern lighting fixtures into the eighteenth-century interiors. On the upper storey, the windows in both the Great Room and the adjoining Painting School room have been blocked with removeable panels, as they would have been for the R.A. summer exhibitions, increasing the hanging space and eliminating lighting from the side. An even more important issue was ventilation. During the initial conversion the ceiling of the Great Room had been sealed, preventing air from leaving the building, and air-conditioning had not been installed. Now the removal of the glass doors and the insertion of a perforated central fixture in the ceiling (which also contains new spot lights to light the walls) means that air can once more circulate. 

Although the results are by no means perfect visually, they are a vast improvement on the previous arrangements. The hang in the Great Room- in which the row of Cézanne’s on the wall opposite the entrance is outstandingly beautiful- can be enjoyed until the end of the year, when this group of Courtauld pictures will return to the Wolfson Gallery downstairs, and the exhibition of sculpture by Frank Dobson now at Leeds will be installed (see the Calendar, below). This year’s experiment suggests a possible future pattern: the Samuel Courtauld pictures, which will always be the greatest attraction for visitors to London, could be the hung in the Great Room in the summer months, and return downstairs for the rest of the year, while winter exhibitions take place on the upper floor.

Meanwhile, a second phase of remedial building works is now at the planning stage. The most urgent need is for climate control, for a system which both purifies and circulates the air. A means to produce this without disfiguring trunking has been devised- refining on Chamber’s original intention to use the staircase for ventilation. Modification to the roofing above the gallery containing the early pictures will also be necessary to mitigate the greenhouse effect of sun beating through the skylights. Better lighting is needed for the “fine rooms”, and the possibility of attaching lights to the picture frames, in the manner of an old-fashioned private collection, is being explored. Since the Courtauld Galleries’ holdings largely derive from private collections, this could at a pinch be justified on historical grounds.

The problems at the Courtauld Galleries are to some extent endemic in any attempt to reconcile the needs of. Public art collection with the constraints of an important historic building. Many people will remain nostalgic for the old purpose-built galleries at Woburn Square, whose top-lit rooms and undistracting architecture allowed unimpeded study of each individual painting. Perhaps this will be regarded as the last grasp of the much-derided Bloomsbury aesthetic, of a now-discredited belief in the autonomy of the work of art. Interestingly, however, a more scrupulous regard for the building’s conservation needs may point the way forward for Somerset house. Fake Chandeliers, pseudo-historic wall-colours and fitted carpets jar as much with the articulation as with the collection. Chambers was an austere architect, and some austerity becomes an art gallery.