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July 1990

Vol. 132 / No. 1048

The Warburg and Courtauld Institutes

SIXTY years after the endowment of a chair in History of Art at London University by Samuel Courtauld was wel- comed by Roger Fry in this Magazine as the 'unexpected realisation of a long cherished hope', the Courtauld Insti- tute of Art and its collections have at last been united- not, as had always been intended, in Bloomsbury, but in the palatial setting of Somerset House. For those who were sceptical about the suitability of Chambers's masterpiece for this purpose, perhaps the greatest surprise has been the brilliant conversion (by Green Lloyd Architects) of the Institute's side of the Strand wing, where elegant brick enfilades and light-filled courtyards have been conjured out of the basements to provide a cheering environment for eye and spirit. The Witt and Conway photographic libraries (whose nucleus was part of the original foundation of the Institute) are particularly resplendent in their new surroundings. Although staff and students have had to live in a building site for nine months - since the work was far from finished when the move was made last October- as the dust clears, the long-term success of the enterprise is evident.

The task of rehabilitating Chambers's 'fine rooms' to receive the collections was a more delicate, if less radical one, given the historic importance of the spaces that once housed the learned societies and the Royal Academy exhi- bitions. Here a separate design team under Christopher Firmstone has been at work, with less happy results. While it is an unalloyed pleasure to see the full range of the Institute's holdings at last on view, so far the match with the building is not entirely harmonious.

The fine rooms on the first floor have been chosen to house mostly the larger pictures and pieces of furniture (although Chambers's recently acquired medal cabinet is installed in the vestibule upstairs). Here Rubens and Polidoro, Botticelli and the large cassoni, look well against panelled walls under Cipriani's ceiling grisailles. But prob- lems remain with what for many must be the heart of the collections, the impressionist and post-impressionist pic- tures, hung in the ex-Royal Society meeting room. Here attempts at 'original' colour schemes in the vast pink ceiling oval and its lilac and green surrounding mouldings are not sufficiently 'authentic' to justify the cost in distrac- tion from the paintings. As was observed in these pages in 1958 when the newly-opened Woburn Square galleries were praised, the Courtauld pictures 'are too imperious to need to be helped out by decorative frills around them'.

The decision upstairs to divide up the walls 'below the line' in the Great Room into a series of smaller spaces for didactic displays must, we hope, be a provisional one. The projecting panels topped by curving light fittings sug- gest nothing so much as a hairdressing salon, and it is de- pressing to find Gauguin's Nevermore in a booth entitled 'Impressionism and its discontents'. The later nineteenth- and twentieth-century English rooms, including the Fry bequest and Lilian Browse's generous gift, are well installed and hold many surprises, but the Italian and Flemish 'primitives' gallery, which contains so many gems from the Lee and Gambier Parry collections, not to mention Count Seilern's happily recovered Bruegel grisaille, is crammed with small pictures hung vulnerably low on a mass of screens which will baffle invigilation.

If adjustments will need to be made in detail, nonetheless Samuel Courtauld's vision of art history integrated with its objects of study has now at last largely been realised. Not the least advantage of the new arrangements is the proper and adjacent housing off the courtyard of the Technology Department, the Institute's conservation arm. In the Great Room an exemplary display of the relationship revealed by technical examination between the Lee and National Gallery versions of Bellini's Death of St Peter Martyr is eloquent testimony to the benefits of collaboration be- tween art historians and conservators.

The Courtauld's move was made possible by the remark- able response of individuals and companies to its ?6 million appeal. Now its sister Institute in Woburn Square, the Warburg, is in need of similar generosity, if on a smaller scale. There is no need to remind readers of this Magazine of the contribution to British intellectual life, and not least to art history, made by this peerless institution, whose heart is its library. None of the articles published in this issue would have been possible without it, and at least two stem directly from the interests of its founder. Chronic university underfunding has gnawed steadily at its pur- chase budget, to the extent that the Institute has been forced to launch an appeal for funds to buy books and photographs.* Grateful readers will rally, and have already rallied, to this cause, but it would be splendid if a major benefactor would once more step forward. It is a little known fact that Samuel Courtauld, in addition to endow- ing his own institute, housed the Warburg for its first ten years in England (1933-43), before it was finally incorpor- ated into London University. Supporting a library may seem less glamorous than sponsoring a picture collection; but it may, as the newly housed Witt and Conway and book libraries at Somerset House demonstrate, have equally rewarding results.