The Burlington Magazine

MICHAEL LEVEY, who died aged eighty-one on 28th December last year, was first and foremost a writer. Of course, he was well known for his long association with the National Gallery where, in 1951, he became an Assistant Keeper at the age of twenty-four; in 1986 he retired as its Director after thirteen years of great achievements. Martin Wyld, who worked with him at Trafalgar Square, details below Levey’s legacy, which includes many notable acquisitions, the development of an education department, the establishing of an artist-in-residence programme and the touring of the Gallery’s pictures in museums outside London. All through this period Levey published many wide-ranging books, to much acclaim. But some of his first published writings were for this Magazine, as well as his last review, which appeared posthumously in the January issue this year. While most of Levey’s obituarists gave full accounts of his books and his work at the National Gallery, almost none mentioned his long connection with the Burlington which, as he mentioned in a letter to the present writer last year, had lasted fifty-five years. What follows is an impression of this long connection drawn from personal experience and from the extensive file of correspondence with a succession of five Editors.1

Levey was not a distant contributor; there was much foreplay through letters and telephone calls before a review was finally commissioned from him or an article accepted. Doubts and hesitances had to be talked through and vanquished before the deal was clinched. He did not use a computer and neat scripts appeared from a firm of typists in Lincoln or a secretarial college in Louth, where Levey lived. But woe betide the editorial removal or insertion of a comma or a change in the order of words. ‘I don’t think you or your staff should tinker with somebody’s copy without at least consulting them’, he wrote to one Editor. ‘At least, please don’t do it to me if I am ever to have the privilege of being published again by you.’ Indeed, any editorial alterations were made the more glaring because there were so few.

But from the start there were other kinds of skirmish and misunderstanding. There was a sharp if brief exchange with Benedict Nicolson in 1959 over an article offered by John Sparrow on the chapel altarpiece at All Souls, Oxford; Levey had been led to believe that he himself was to have written about the painting and was very considerably ‘upset’. More serious was Levey’s resignation in 1972 as a director of the Burlington after he greatly disapproved of the way in which a new director, Francis Haskell, had been appointed in Levey’s absence from a meeting and without prior discussion with him. It was a question of form and conduct (nothing to do with the new director himself, a friend of Levey’s) that occasioned this breach; he accused Nicolson of a ‘set-up’ and personal relations remained cool throughout the 1970s. Fortunately Levey remained on the Consultative Committee and soon began to write frequently again for the magazine he loved. But a clutch of letters from 1984 show the claws once more emerging from the usual epistolary warmth and politesse. Two slips in an Editorial on the National Gallery were ‘careless, misleading, unjustified and unpleasant’, redolent of the Editor’s ‘fondness for a “crack”’ at the institution Levey directed. But no one was more aware than Levey himself of these exacting traits in his character (‘I really am very tired of my personality and mean to trade it in for a new one’). Huge branches of olives were effusively received and the correspondence continued – deeply appreciative comments on Oliver Millar and David Wilson; on the beauty of Prague (although on a visit years before ‘I thought we’d never leave the station, as I couldn’t guess the Czech for exit. It sounds rather too apt a symbol of my life . . .’); on his new passion for the novels of Trollope (after reading Phineas Finn he had ‘no idea T. could be so good – at dialogue, at women, at everything – except Phineas, I thought’). His tastes were catholic, dotted with blind spots – G.B. Tiepolo was a god, Watteau and Claude not far behind; but Sebastiano Ricci was ‘no favourite of mine’; for years his ‘excessively Italophile eyes’, as he wrote, were closed to painting in Holland, but his National Gallery colleague, Neil MacLaren, gave him ‘a wonderful Dutch baptism’ and a slow appreciation of Rembrandt developed (which led to the National Gallery’s acquisition of the Portrait of Hendrickje Stoffels). Beethoven was out but Mozart very much in (and the subject of his extremely good biography published in 1971). He loved showbiz biographies and memoirs; continued to think Wuthering Heights absurdly overrated; and, rather like George Moore, thought Anne Brontë the best of the trio. He saw merits in obscure eighteenth-century French sculpture not vouchsafed to many other scholars of the period; and with his wife, Brigid Brophy, he shared in the 1960s passion for Aubrey Beardsley.

As time went by, Levey became a notable writer of obituaries rather in the manner of Strachey’s Portraits in Miniature. In these, having done his duty by the biographical facts, he would add a pithy and closely observed personal impression – his National Gallery colleague Martin Davies with his string bag of oranges or Cecil Gould whose metaphorical hand was encased in ‘glacé kid’ though warmly lined within. His last contribution of this nature was a full-length portrait of Ellis Waterhouse on the centenary of his birth in 2005.

From the other side of the fence, Levey’s many publications can be followed in reviews of them in the Magazine – from Painting in 18th Century Venice (1959) to his last book, a monograph on Sir Thomas Lawrence (2005). His reviewers – including W.G. Constable, Nicolson, Ettlinger and Anita Brookner – all praise his ability to express strong feelings about works of art; the elegance and concision of his style; his grasp of context and reach of reference; his scholarship that never becomes a parade of pedantry; and his ability to be speculative without taking his eye too far away from the immediate subject. They are the kind of books that would be almost impossible to publish today; their urbanity belongs to a different world; and their potential audience (great at the time) has diminished.

Levey’s later relations with the Burlington were relatively smooth; indeed his last letters to this office purr with satisfaction. In 1986 he contributed a succinct account of the Magazine’s earliest years to its thousandth issue, beautifully alert to the taste of the Edwardian period and the dying falls of the Aesthetic Movement. For its centenary in 2003 he produced an anthology of writings from the Magazine. This involved his reading every issue and the ferrying by Caroline Elam of batches of bound volumes to the Lincolnshire Wolds. His introduction to this volume is a definitive account of what the Burlington has been about, its strengths and weaknesses, its scholarship presented cogently and readably (or, as he adds with feline touch, ‘at least jargon-free’). For over half its existence, the Magazine immeasurably benefited from Michael Levey’s devotion to its pages.

In 1966 when I joined its Conservation department, the National Gallery had a slender staff, apart from the very distinguished Curatorial department. Philip Hendy was Director, Martin Davies Keeper, and Cecil Gould and Michael Levey Deputy Keepers. Michael was much the most approachable of these imposing figures, and the only one who looked and behaved as if he lived in the swinging sixties. He was also flamboyant (within vegetarian parameters) and part of the literary world as well as something of a television personality. When Hendy retired, Michael became Keeper and I saw much more of him following David Carritt’s discovery that the Tiepolo of An allegory with Venus and Time was set into the ceiling of the Egyptian Embassy in South Audley Street. Michael supervised the Gallery’s young conservators in the removal, restoration and return of the picture, which was soon afterwards acquired at auction. I experienced for the first time his extraordinary kindness and concern for others. Much though we enjoyed Martin Davies’s dry wit and Cecil Gould’s hauteur, it was Michael with whom we discussed the finer points of Carnaby Street fashions, Tiepolo or Patricia Highsmith’s latest Ripley thriller.

Michael succeeded Martin Davies as Director in 1973 after the Trustees had fought off an attempt by the Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to appoint John Pope-Hennessy. At that time, the Gallery was known for its scholarship and for having its whole collection on show, but had perhaps slipped behind comparable institutions in what it offered to the public. It was also an introspective institution, partly due to the recent and notorious cleaning controversies. Relations with the press, for instance, were managed by the simple expedient of making sure the Gallery’s spokesman had no idea of what was going on.

Then followed a period of modernisation. Michael had an exceptionally good relationship with most of his staff, as well as with the Trustees, who were ably chaired by John Hale. What the Gallery set out to do would now be known as outreach, access and so on, but was then seen simply as establishing a serious Education Department and putting on exhibitions both inside the Gallery and sending shows to regional museums. There was a remarkable change in the Gallery’s attitude to the outside world and its relationship with its visitors. The opening of the northern extension in 1975 provided more space for education and exhibitions. The Artist’s Eye and Painting in Focus series became popular, successful small-scale exhibitions.

Directors of the National Gallery are probably remembered more for their acquisitions than for any other achievement. Michael avoided the disappointment of failure for much of his directorship because pictures as expensive as Titian’s Death of Actaeon or Velázquez’s Juan de Pareja rarely came up for sale. Both were offered the year before Michael took over; the former was acquired but the latter was beyond the Gallery’s reach. Many important paintings were acquired in Michael’s first few years, including Velázquez’s Immaculate conception, Parmigianino’s Mystic marriage of St Catherine and Portrait of a man and Rembrandt’s Hendrickje Stoffels.

Gaps in the eighteenth-century French school were partly filled by Drouais’s Madame de Pompadour, Perronneau’s Portrait of Jacques Cazotte and Fragonard’s Psyche showing her sisters her gifts from Cupid. Michael’s slightly unconvincing aura of decadence was reinforced by significant acquisitions of works by Klimt, Moreau and Redon. He dipped more than a toe into the twentieth century by acquiring Matisse’s Portrait of Greta Moll and Picasso’s Cubist Fruit dish, bottle and guitar of 1914.

Michael encouraged creativity among his staff within certain limits. His management was rigorous and detailed, and his grasp of the activities of each member of staff was extraordinary. He was remarkably skilful at making his displeasure known when necessary. After I became Chief Restorer I enjoyed a weekly meeting with the Director. There were also frequent lunches at which it was forbidden to discuss Gallery affairs. Michael claimed to model his management of the Gallery on Liverpool Football Club (he was a supporter because his parents-in-law came from Liverpool) in that anyone who left or retired was replaced immediately by someone of higher quality.

The Gallery’s acquisitions of the early 1980s were of an astonishingly high standard. An increase in the purchase grant, the acceptance-in-lieu system, the establishment of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the generosity of the NACF and many other charities led in quick succession to Rubens’s Samson and Delilah, Altdorfer’s Christ taking leave of his mother and great works by Claude, Degas, Hals, Poussin, Van Dyck, Monet, Raphael, Renoir and many others joining the collection. Prolonged negotiations over the export from France of the superb Portrait of Jacobus Blauw by Jacques-Louis David were successfully concluded, to Michael’s delight. Many fine acquisitions were almost taken for granted, for example works by Meléndez, Købke, Wright of Derby, the Master of the St Bartholomew altarpiece and Maarten van Heemskerck.

Michael’s last years at the Gallery consolidated his achievements as Director but were also probably his most difficult and eventful. The exhibition of Danish Golden Age paintings was a particular highlight, but this was against a background of reduced Government funding and the handover of the building from the PSA to the Trustees. There was also of course the pressure for a commercial development of the Hampton site for the National Gallery extension; when the Prince of Wales saw the plans he famously described the proposed addition as ‘a monstrous carbuncle’.

Despite the debilitating illness of his wife, the writer Brigid Brophy, and Michael’s care for her, his focus never wavered, and bore fruit in two great acts of benefaction. The three Sainsbury brothers, led by John, offered to finance a new wing entirely for the Gallery’s use on the Hampton site, and J. Paul Getty Jr. provided an endowment fund of £50 million. Michael’s directorship ended on a triumphant note.

Michael Levey (1927–2008)

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