We can only hope that the judges for the Museum of the Year award, run by the Art Fund, selected the Whitworth (formerly the Whitworth Art Gallery), Manchester, as the ­winner to endorse its new extension, increased spaciousness and general refurbishment. It cannot surely have been for the redisplay of its collections, the shortcomings of which we identified in a recent Editorial, particularly the considerable contempt shown for the visitor and the celebrated collections themselves, especially its British watercolours. Readers may like to be reminded that these are now hung on three short walls at the end of a large gallery, often five or six deep, with the lowest near the floor, the highest almost beyond sight and their frames nearly touching. In the absence of labels, the visitor is provided with an A4 sheet for each wall with a plan of the hang showing numbered rectangles and minimal accompanying information. ‘Superb examples’, we wrote, ‘by Blake, Girtin, Turner, Cozens et al. are almost throttled to death by such a presentation’.1

While we must accept that the old, carefully displayed ­museums and galleries with their typological groupings and straightforward labelling are virtually a thing of the past (although they linger in institutions unable to afford, perhaps, a ‘new look’), we are by no means alone in finding aspects of ‘refreshed’ displays – invariably thematic and ahistorical – frequently crass, uninformative and detrimental to visual pleasure. This happened notably at Tate Britain from its inception, but it has crept through many regional institutions in recent years. For example, the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art has an exhibition opening this month (see the Calendar, p.580) on ‘new ways to put our collection to use through the lenses of its new vision as a “useful museum”. It is a presentation based on dialogue between staff and the public to arrange feature displays in the gallery’. We cannot, of course, prejudge the effect of such a lustreless-seeming exercise – it could be a great success – but it seems symptomatic of a lack of curatorial confidence, even at this gallery which, in spite of its good collection, has ­little dedicated space for its display.

Alongside a museum’s temporary exhibitions, acquisitions are an essential part of its public face. For this issue, we have compiled a highly selective but broad-based Supplement of acquisitions made by regional collections. We did not approach national museums such as Liverpool and Cardiff nor university collections and we steered away from local history and craft museums, admirable though they can be. We requested up to four significant acquisitions made in the last five years by seventeen galleries and museums, and had the final say in what we chose to reproduce. On the whole, reactions were enthusiastic and occasionally went beyond expectations, but we also encountered a number of difficulties over the availability of images and responses from curators and local government officials. In most cases these can be attributed to the attrition of expertise from qualified staff within the museums, cuts in the funding of general operations and less-than-informed management at local council level.

The chosen works range from the fine double-portrait by Peter Lely from the mid-seventeenth century to works made in 2014. Most were acquired as gifts, a good number accepted in lieu of inheritance tax and allocated to suitable institutions (such as the Lely, no. I, for the Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery, the sitters having a local connection and being patrons of Lely, who visited Norfolk). These also include two of the group of Frank Auerbach paintings that were owned by Lucian Freud (nos.XXVII and XXVIII); and works from the estate of the daughter-in-law of the Camden Town painter Robert Bevan (nos.XII, XIII and XVI). There are few non-British works but the Degas bronze head (no.XIV), also from Freud’s collection, and the still life from Maurice de Vlaminck’s best period (no.XV) are outstanding. International contemporary art acquisitions have been encouraged by the Art Fund and include works by Ai Weiwei and Grazia Toderi (nos.XXVI and XXXVI; see also Middlesbrough in the Calendar, p.580)). There is an interesting pairing of a portrait of one future Dame by another – Ethel ­Walker’s image of the young Barbara Hepworth – with a characteristic large late work by the sculptor, both of which are at the Hepworth, Wakefield (nos.XVIII and XIX).

At the same time as the Supplement was being assembled, we  made field trips to several regional museums which included institutions in Bristol, Norwich, Leicester, Birmingham, Leeds, Sheffield and York. Impressions have ranged from the dire to the heartening. Some museums are making valiant efforts to counteract the debilitating climate of cuts and chronic lack of funding. Others are putting inadequate plasters on the wounds, while a number seem to have no thought-through strategy in place to reinvent themselves in difficult times.

Some of these concerns were raised at ‘A Future for Regional Museums?’, a panel discussion held at the Courtauld Institute, London, in March. Funding and staffing were top of the bill. Some depressing statistics were given, such as the £1.5 million reduction in financing for the Birmingham Museums Trust, with a quarter of its staff made redundant. Museums Trusts, it was pointed out, although able to rely on the fiscal advantages of charitable status, still count on some local authority funding to deliver expected services.2 At the same time, philanthropic giving, much touted by the government, is an unreliable source of finance and its generally erratic nature prevents secure ­forward planning. In relation to this, we can comment here on another Museums Trust, that of Sheffield, instigated in 1998. Liberated from local government restrictions, this venture had some initial success with considerable support from the Renaissance in the Regions scheme. This funding came to an end in March 2012; an application from the Trust to become one of the Arts Council’s Major Museum Partners was refused and precipitated a financial crisis with cuts to many jobs. Since then the Arts Council has helped the Trust, but matters remain precarious. For example, on a recent visit we found that two of the six galleries devoted to the permanent collection at the Graves Art Gallery were closed. At the Weston Park Museum, a richly miscellaneous part-civic, part-international institution, unseemly schools-targeted displays range from paintings to didactic ethnographic groupings and stuffed animals. All this may well be transformed under a £1 million plan for several of the Museum’s public spaces. We shall see. But definitely in need of transformation is the space devoted to the Ruskin Collection in the Millennium Gallery, an execrable tribute to this great figure where visitors are urged ‘to explore the gallery with John Ruskin and his cat called Puss’, an animal that duly appears in fluffy form in a chest of drawers.

Methods of display are obviously uppermost in our reactions to these museums and galleries. It is from them that we take the intellectual and visual temperature. There is a general tendency, as mentioned in relation to Weston Park and the Ruskin Gallery, to talk down to or ignore adult visitors and treat displays as part-recreational facilities, part-kindergarten lessons (although this is not to say we did not witness some excellent classes being held in some galleries). Some museums, frequently hampered by old buildings, it must be said, are less than clear in the itinerary through their galleries (Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery is confusing in this respect). Then there is the problem of sound. In Leicester Museum and Art Gallery’s unique German Expressionist room, two large screens have projections accompanied by the noise of guns, marching etc. (in contrast to the Museum’s exemplary display of the Attenborough Collection of Picasso Ceramics); in Birmingham, the Staffordshire Hoard of Anglo-Saxon metalwork is displayed with three blaring video screens. Another ploy is the insertion of ‘contemporary’ works (often commissioned) among older paintings and sculpture, doing none of them any favours and unlikely to increase visitor numbers. What, for example, is the point of a bowl of fruit in a free-standing glass case near to some still lifes, including one by Meléndez, in York Art Gallery? Fortunately, this Gallery, part of York Museums Trust and reopening on 1st August after very considerable redevelopment, does not condescend to its visitors in other ways and its sixty per cent increase in display space will help bolster its new Centre for British Studio Ceramics.

Two galleries – in Bristol and Norwich – with less than adequate staff numbers have nevertheless benefited from energetic curators. For too long, Bristol Museum and Art Gallery was in the doldrums but has recently set sail again, once more attending to its outstanding and varied collections, from superb Chinese glass and ceramics and Assyrian reliefs to nineteenth-century French and modern British works. A redisplayed and refurbished gallery is scheduled to be completed each year with new lighting, redecoration and labelling. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment gallery was inaugurated early this year and includes an especially conserved Genoese scene by Claude-Joseph Vernet, a fine Wilson landscape and the beautiful Baron Gros portrait of a woman.

Like Bristol, Norwich Castle Museum has no acquisitions budget and relies, like many others, on the Art Fund, the V & A Purchase Grant Fund and the Friends association (particularly active here, as also in York). It has one full-time and three part-time curators for its Fine and Decorative Arts Collections who deal with everything down to basic housekeeping, and an Arts Council-sponsored trainee curator programme. The famous Norwich School collection, especially of works by Crome and Cotman, is well shown with sensible information panels. Here is resilience against the odds.

We have few recommendations to make, let alone predictions in so volatile a climate. It is highly unlikely that local authorities will reverse their cuts to museums or begin to finance acquisitions. We would suggest that a clearer line is drawn between the roles of curators and local government officials (this ought to be one of the  advantages of forming a Museums Trust). We have long argued against the de-accessioning by local authorities of works of art to help finance budget shortfalls in other departments. We continue to oppose admission charges (and are dismayed that York Art Gallery will renew such charges on its re-opening); it always results in fewer visitors and the income generated is hardly significant.

There are innumerable schemes in place for financing, encouraging and maintaining museums but, if they are to be successful beneficiaries of initiatives run by, say, the Art Fund, the Arts Council and the Heritage Lottery Fund, long-term strategies are crucial. Museums and galleries with little or no ­purchasing funds have to be extremely nimble to put applications in place when a desirable acquisition arises. Many, unfortunately, do not make the effort. Acquisition partnerships are a possible way forward. But the validation of a proposed acquisition is now frequently contingent on its value to education, community engagement and local relevance. There is a danger here of mus­eums becoming enmired in social services. This will have little appeal to future curators who believe in scholarly exhibitions and additions to the collection that rise above local considerations. Such curators often suffer from lowered expectations and poor remuneration; yet the future health of the public face of regional museums is in their hands.

One last observation. Contemporary art, as never before, is everywhere available in both public and private domains – in museums, art centres, the gardens of grand houses, in churches and city streets. It has become a quick fix for those in charge of institutions mainly devoted to the art of the past and the changing narratives of British culture, who feel they need the publicity and footfall that contemporary art may generate. Such shows are often expensive to mount and, in some of the less spacious museums, entail the temporary storage of some of the permanent collection. However, our research here indicates some welcome changes with a renewed attention paid to what museums own rather than what is brought in. We also noted the number of older works offered for our Supplement, alongside the more expected – and necessary – contemporary acquisitions. Some reflection of this is also apparent in the high number of exhibitions in the regions listed in our Calendar (pp.579–80) that focus on older art, from Hogarth and Canaletto to Turner and Dadd, almost in balance with recent art. This is more as it should be in museums that are both guardians of the past and trailblazers for the new.

1     Editorial, ‘The new Whitworth in Manchester’, in this Magazine (2015), p.235.
2     For a detailed report on Museum Trusts, see A. Babbidge, R. Ewles and J. Smith: ‘Moving to Museum Trusts: Learning from Experience’ (2006), http://www.egeria.org.uk/online-resources.