PAST EDITORIALS IN this Magazine have frequently discussed the difficulties facing many museums and galleries throughout Britain. In spite of moments of considerable optimism and a heightened public awareness of the plight of regional collections, the future for many remains uncertain, even bleak. In investigations of several individual cases, the litany of woes includes, above all, a shortage of funds, diminishing numbers of effective curators, unsympathetic local authorities, restricted acquisition policies and the limitations imposed on institutions by misguided directives at national and local levels. But, as can be seen from the specific examples considered below, such woes are not the experience of all museums. In the last decade, for instance, a number of success stories have emerged through the transformation of a museum (or a group of museums in larger conurbations) into a charitable trust (e.g. Sheffield and York). This allows some autonomy from the local authority (which nevertheless continues to part-fund and to own the collections of the museums) as well as a clarity of purpose and an independent future which have obvious benefits both for museum staff and public alike. In York, for example, the City Art Gallery is a member of a trust with three other local museums; an agreement is in place with the Council for stable, inflation-linked funding until 2013, enabling the Gallery to plan well ahead in a way that other museums, subject to the vagaries of reduced budgets and governance restructuring, are not always able to do. Admirably, York is concentrating on the resources of its rich permanent collection in its exhibition and educational programming. A small number of museums have received a shot in the arm from the local authority, notably the beleaguered and neglected Leeds City Art Gallery which reopened this June after renovation and redisplay. Other galleries have focused on capital projects – extensions and public facilities – often through National Lottery grants and matching private enterprise; here, however, there is the danger of being all dressed up with nowhere to go, the museum facing reduced or ephemeral exhibitions and curtailed or even non-existent acquisitions. Further help has come from the collaboration between the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Wolfson Foundation, with substantial annual grants going to the care of often more modest museums. There are also the continuing publications of the Public Catalogue Foundation whose chief aim is the compilation of as complete an index as possible of all oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom, from the great galleries and museums to town halls, charitable foundations and hospital corridors. Each volume focuses on a particular county or institution, each work is illustrated in colour with basic details and all have useful introductory texts. It is a superb undertaking. Those museums already included, unable to finance their own catalogues (whether printed or online), have all expressed their gratitude to this privately funded scheme. Most recently, the Heritage Lottery Fund has stepped in to make £3 million available for the development of acquisitions, curatorial expertise and research, open to application from museums registered with the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council (MLA). And there are of course those stalwart charities such as the Art Fund without which many a museum would never be able to add works to their permanent collection.

Perhaps the single most helpful outstretched arm for galleries and museums in England has been the Renaissance in the Regions scheme. This was first announced in a report in 2001 which outlined a strategy to revitalise regional museums through the intervention of central government funding. This began to be implemented in 2002 and is still in operation, funding nine ‘hub’ regions in England. It has seen a closer cooperation between national and regional museums, help given to small, specialised institutions, the development of education initiatives and aid for the training of staff. All this is to the good. But anyone reading the progress report on this scheme put out by its originator, the MLA, is likely to be as dismayed by its socially inclusive, politically correct tone as were readers of the founding document of 2001 which, as an Editorial here commented, appeared to perpetuate the belief that the main function of museums was ‘to be an extension of the social services’.1 It might also have added that many museums seem to have become almost the sole province of schoolchildren on mass visits who are then pictured on nearly every brochure and website as being the dominant, targeted audience.

Herein lies the root of the chief criticism levelled at museums today, especially many of those which have ‘benefited’ from recent initiatives. In a desire for increased visitor numbers, ‘accessibility’ and a quantifiable return on funding (not unworthy objectives per se), displays, exhibitions, visitor experience and acquisitions fall far short of the standard of excellence that should be a guide. Frequently inconsequential thematic displays, wall-texts and labelling couched in banal, often highly subjective language, obtrusive and not always enhancing audio-visual aids, too much stress on parochial matters, the community privileged over the individual: all these are representative of business and managerial objectives over curatorial decisions, a ‘let-the-people-decide’ mentality that disguises a loss of nerve and direction and one that does little to create public confidence in professional expertise. In putting some detail to these more general remarks, this Editorial considers some specific museums and the current state of their public profile. We have chosen a great municipal collection, Kelvingrove in Glasgow; a big city collection – Southampton; a much smaller museum, Reading; and a city museum in relation to a local university’s collections, Norwich Castle Museum and the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.
The City Art Gallery in Southampton is a local authority collection founded in 1939 and housed in purpose-built galleries within the civic centre. It is especially well known for its fine-art collections, particularly some outstanding Dutch and Flemish paintings, its Burne-Jones room, good French pictures (Monet, Sisley, Bonnard and others) and its comprehensive holdings of twentieth-century British art from Sickert to Whiteread. It had the early good fortune to receive local bequest funds for purchases which have involved an advisor from the national collections; and it has long been known for the high quality of its temporary exhibitions. It has no funds for acquisitions from the local authority; it is pitifully short of space (adjoining rooms have not been made available); it has suffered heavy staff cuts (two people are doing the work of five in a busy curatorial department) during local government reorganisation (and the city is heavily in the red); there is no designated shop. Given these circumstances, it is little short of a miracle that the Gallery continues to function.

The Norwich Castle Museum is more comprehensive in its collections than Southampton and includes displays of archaeology, natural history and decorative arts as well as its internationally important holdings of the East Anglian School. Norwich City Council provides core funding but there are no budgets for purchase, conservation and temporary exhibitions (partly offset, however, by an extremely active Friends association, the East Anglian Art Fund and much local patronage). It is the hub museum for East Anglia in the Renaissance scheme and it benefits from a close association with the Tate, particularly in its exhibition programme. Unusually it charges for admission.

Complementing the Castle Museum in its Norman keep is the newly refurbished Norman Foster-designed Sainsbury Centre with its splendid Robert and Lisa Sainsbury collections, and the University Collection which focuses on twentieth-century abstraction. At present, along with other university museums, it receives an annual grant from the Higher Education Funding Council for England, but this funding stream is currently under serious threat. In recent decades both the Centre and the Castle Museum have provided the region with exceptionally good and varied exhibitions.

The small Museum of Reading is found in Alfred Waterhouse’s Victorian town hall; its fine-art holdings, one of several constituent collections, are ‘housed’ in the refurbished ‘John Madjeski Art Gallery’ named for the Museum’s benefactor, the well-known collector and patron of the Royal Academy of Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum. We write ‘housed’ but in fact the collection, with good modern British paintings, is rarely visible in any permanent display, a situation that hardly honours the generosity of the Reading Foundation for the Arts, a charity established in 1974 to acquire works on the Museum’s behalf. Designated gallery space must be a top priority.

So far the cases mentioned here have concerned the running of museums more than their displays. In turning to the reopened (2006) Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow the question of curatorial excellence and intellectual credibility can no longer be avoided. The renovated fabric of the Museum is welcome but it has come at a formidable price. The complete new display demonstrates a positively contemptuous attitude to its collections as if from some embarrassment and lack of confidence in its renowned holdings of fine art. Kelvingrove is rooted in Victorian philanthropy and moral improvement, its beginnings inextricably linked to the International Exhibitions held in Glasgow in 1888 and 1901. This is reflected not only in the fine-art collections but in objects relating to local and natural history, all of which make for a possibly complex display, needing imaginative thought and flair if traditional taxonomies are abandoned. They certainly have been, and with a vengeance, to be replaced by platitudinous stories (as against a coherent narrative) in thematically organised rooms. The hang is crowded and distracting, many of the works presented as pawns in some quest for the lowest common denominator. Children are the key to the patronisingly simplistic level of interpretation on offer.

That Kelvingrove has become a kindergarten is obvious from the introductory room (‘Looking at Art’). Here major (unglazed) paintings by Ribera, Constable and Turner are hung perilously low; indeed, a recent visitor observed there was no guard to stop a child from putting both hands on Constable’s Hampstead Heath. Highly representative is this label beside Braque’s still life of fruit, a glass and a bottle, quoted complete: ‘If Georges Braque was struggling with a complex painting, he would often paint still lifes to clear his mind. This bowl of fruit in his studio also provided a handy snack!’. Botticelli’s celebrated Annunciation is shown with a permanent light projection onto the work itself to explain its perspectival structure with additional, timed projections highlighting those elements of the work singled out in words from nearby speakers.

When Fiona MacCarthy wrote recently in the Guardian that, with the exception of Manchester and Glasgow, Britain’s chief municipal museums were ‘in a parlous state’, she was mainly referring to their underfunding.2 But we beg to differ: Glasgow, whether over- or underfunded, is indeed ‘in a parlous state’.

It would be easy to read the above account of Kelvingrove simply as spluttering indignation against change. Certainly we should acknowledge the Glasgow rehang as having ‘vision’ and having been carried through, on a grand scale, down to the last horrible detail.3 But its concept, paradoxically, is dogmatic, and its approach, ironically, exclusive. Furthermore, the museological and social shibboleths it embraces seem to belong to a political era already under scrutiny. Here lies the perhaps unpalatable lesson for the development of museums, a subject we shall consider in a future Editorial.