London
In 1987, Neil MacGregor was appointed director of the National Gallery with no previous experience in the field. Now he moves on to Britain’s most challenging museum job, the British Museum, having gained national, even international fame as an outstanding director.
The problems he faces are well known and have mostly to do with money (see p. 19). His single most important challenge will be to make the British Museum’s paymasters, the Department of Culture Media and Sport, realise the world importance of this museum of world cultures and the short-sightedness of underfunding it. He is a skilled advocate but it will be easier for him to do that if the museum is generally accepted to be well administered. In this he will be assisted by Dawn Austwick, formerly at the Tate and trusted by the Department, with which she has worked closely. He will also need to help the museum present itself better. There is no doubt, for example, that its exhibition programme needs better coordination and communication. And while it is difficult to have all the galleries of such a huge institution equally up to date in their presentation at any one time, at least a common objective in labelling should be agreed.
If one has to single out any one talent in Mr MacGregor, it is as an inspiring communicator. The Art Newspaper has tried, therefore, to put the thought and feeling behind this talent on record before he moves on.
The Art Newspaper: Would you tell me about your intellectual training and any major turning points in your way of thinking?
Neil MacGregor: I read French and German at Oxford. Then I studied philosophy in Paris at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and afterwards law in Edinburgh, was called to the Bar, and finally read art history at the Courtauld.
The beginning was a linguistic one, and I think that's really been very much behind the way I approach works of art. The first question I always want to ask of a piece of art is, what does it mean? The formal questions come later and seem to me to be always secondary.
You ask about turning points. I was studying Racine at Oxford, “Iphigénie”, and realised quite suddenly that this was a row that could happen in any family. It had never really occurred to me before that the same was true of “King Lear” also—that all these great work are actually about our lives. A perfectly banal and rather belated insight, but it does seem to me to be vital to discover about a work of art what bit of your life it is actually about. There are of course other very important aspects, particularly historical ones such as what it tells you about other cultures, past cultures, but why works of art ultimately matter is because of how they illuminate your predicament
TAN: What is your ambition for the visitor?
NM: I think the job of the curator is to try to present the art so that the visitor can come at it in as many different ways as possible, and if the main interest is an historical one about the development of European painting, then you've got to make it as easy as possible to grasp in the presentation. An important duty is to allow an individual dialogue between visitors and the work of art so that they can interrogate it, not as part of a series, but as a thing on its own, speaking to them.
TAN: What is your ideal museum visit?
NM: First of all, the ideal museum visit is a short one; so that, of course, leads immediately to the issue of free admission. The ideal is where people, can come to look at one or two things, go away and come back, very much as you would read a poem or a novel or listen to one piece of music. I think, therefore, that you want to hang in such a way that there’s enough space between the pictures for the visual dialogue not to be disturbed by other works of art. Otherwise it is like listening to music with other music spilling from somebody’s headset next to you. Ideally, you should be able to sit down, and you need clear lighting, but it’s really space and stillness that are important
TAN: The National Gallery has become known for a number of distinguished exhibitions in which much emphasis has been put on reinserting the art in its context. The Pisanello exhibition earlier this year is a very good example of that. There were the works by Pisanello in all his various media and then unexpected items such as pieces of armour put next to a medal that showed similar pieces of armour. How did you come to develop these exhibitions?
NM: It’s a tradition that’s been running at the National Gallery since long before I arrived, the focusing on one or two works in a collection and trying to put them in a context which makes it easier to see how the works relate to life at the time and therefore how they might relate to life now.
The point of those exhibitions, why I think they are so important for all large collections, is that it makes it easier for the visitor to focus on one picture and to ask a whole series of different questions about it, and then, after the exhibition is over, not only is the catalogue a residue but the spectator has moved into a new relationship with the work.
In the case of the Pisanello, the courtly world of 15th-century Italy is so remote in its assumptions and conventions from us that I think the easiest way to grasp it is by the objects you put around the art: the armour, the falcon’s hood, the hunting cutlery. Those objects make something like the vision of St Eustace completely comprehensible. You suddenly understand chivalric tradition in a way you can't just by reading.
TAN: Do you think that more museums could make better use of their own collections by mounting special exhibitions with them?
NM: Let me give you an example: the exhibitions organised here by Ernst Gombrich on shadows in paintings and by Jonathan Miller on reflections, which were linked by complementary questions. You ask those perfectly simple kinds of questions about pictures in an exhibition which invites visitors to explore; it doesn't necessarily require any great works of art from outside your collection but other kinds of objects will illuminate the subject for investigation. Such exhibitions have a very strong appeal because people realise that you can start looking for particular things; as with great discoveries, everything begins to look different thereafter.
TAN: To carry on with the question of context, the physical, the aesthetic, the spiritual context out of which the works of art in a museum have been torn. In your BBC TV programme, “Seeing Salvation”, you commented critically on the fact that Roger van der Weyden’s “Last Judgement” had been “banished from the Hôtel Dieu at Beaune to an illuminated showroom where we are invited to see it as a work of art”. Would you like to talk more on this subject?
NM: That is a particular case. It was a picture painted to be looked at by the dying, for a room in which people were dying. That room still exists and even if there are no patients now in the hospital room, if the picture had been left in that space, its prime purpose would still have been immediately clear to the visitor. The kind of dislocation that has taken place makes it very hard to link the picture to the intention of the artist, and therefore its power is materially reduced I think this is all part of a wider debate.
The notion of the museum as it evolved particularly in France after the Revolution, and therefore in many parts of continental Europe, was a very deliberate attempt to take religious pictures out of a church which had been dismantled by the revolutionaries and put those into a narrative which was wholly about human achievement. The assumption of the museum was that the main interest of the picture was what it was about—individual artistic creation and its development—and it was obviously therefore essential to deny the value of the other questions.
This is one reason why it's been much easier for British museum collections, which are born out of a quite different intellectual climate, to ask those other questions. What's clear is that you can approach the work of art either as a secular object, as an artistic object or as a religious object in the context of museum. I see no reason why the museum should preclude the different responses; indeed, I think it’s a false polarity.
TAN: But we are almost shocked when we go to a Russian museum and find floral offerings in front of icons. It seems inappropriate for museum objects to be venerated.
NM: I don’t find that shocking. We, like any public collection, know that there are people who come to pray in front of our pictures.
TAN: There’s a kind of paradox though in today’s art world: most art in public collections is effectively desacralised, while very ambitious, almost para-religious claims are made for contemporary art. Do you think this reflects a wish for art to play a higher role, or the fact that people are looking for solutions to problems in their lives and art is one of the solutions?
NM: I think you have said it exactly. It’s clear that one of the functions of art is very close to the function of philosophy or religion, and it is to put disturbing experiences into a wider pattern, give them some kind of distance, some kind of perspective—in every sense. In the 20th century, particularly post-1945, the major question we have kept having to address has been human suffering, whether suffering inflicted in the context of the Third Reich, Soviet Russia, of famines and Aids or whatever. It seems to me to be very close to the ambitions that Christian artists had set themselves for centuries. Take the recent exhibition at the Louvre of “La peinture comme crime”, organised by Regis Michel, a brilliant exhibition, looking at painting and drawing and video which address the question of pain and the attacks on the human body. It is a very clear demonstration of the fact that the phenomenon of individual suffering inflicted, consciously inflicted or consciously allowed, has been a preoccupation of Western artists certainly since 1800, but I think from the beginning of Christian painting.
TAN: You are intellectually imbued with the Christian tradition. What were you trying to achieve with the exhibition “Seeing Salvation” which took place at the National Gallery in 2000 and attracted 355,000 visitors?
NM: What I was trying to argue was that the subject matter is a universal one that goes far beyond the particular context of belief. Because we live in a post-Christian society, because very few people in our society now believe the totality of traditional Christian theology, there's a great danger that art linked to that theology is seen as illustrating a belief which is no longer held and is no longer valued. But it is so much the central part of European tradition, as that was the framework within which all the big questions were looked at for centuries. The aim of the exhibition was to make it clear that this art is valuable for people who have no particular Christian position at all because the central elements are about the role of suffering, and the roles of love and pain and hope, and you can read the pictures as investigations of those ideas even without the theological underpinning.
TAN: It had the highest attendance of any exhibition in Britain that year. Do you have any idea what kind of people came to it?
NM: We do. We know we had more first-time visitors to the gallery than we've ever had before; we know we had more visitors from social categories C2D and more visitors from ethnic minorities than we've ever had before. It was quite clear that that the subject matter brought in a whole range of people who had not normally thought of coming to the gallery and, I think, discovered that these pictures, as well as being high art speak very directly and very powerfully.
TAN: Such an emotional response to art has been out of favour among art historians probably since the profession of art historian has existed. To this extent you're revolutionary.
NM: Not at all. Think of Ruskin!
TAN: Ruskin was not a professional art historian!
NM: Maybe it’s because I didn't become an art historian until so late. I think it's interesting that the success of “Seeing Salvation” came at the same time as the huge success of the Ruskin exhibition at Tate Britain. I would say that what Ruskin does to old art is what we all want to do to new art. We all want to see what it's saying about the burning topics of today and whether it's sincere, whether it's illuminating. Those are questions that Ruskin would have asked.
TAN: And so often art historians have never gone beyond the positivist questions.
NM: There are questions about works of art which you can answer—who it's by, when it was made etc— and it's very important that those questions be answered. The difficulty is that those questions are actually the peripheral ones. The central questions about works of art can't be answered, they can only be experienced and, rightly, we're all nervous about articulating our experience because it is only our experience and we can't be confident that our articulation of it will be any use to anybody else, whereas the establishment of factual information can be used by other people.
TAN: You have brought contemporary art into the National Gallery on various occasions, most prominently with the “Encounters” exhibition in 2000. You’ve also tried to break down the traditional separations, for example between national schools. Do you think we need to question our categories and separations more?
NM: That was part of a long-standing tradition. My predecessor, Michael Levey and, indeed, Kenneth Clarke, both brought modern art into the gallery. What I found really pleasing about the “Encounters” exhibition was that it did demonstrate that the works of art do still speak very powerfully about universals and that any art tradition, any contemporary art creation, is possible only because there has been previous art. I thought, for instance, the way Lucian Freud took the Chardin of the girl teaching the little boy to read, and worked and re-worked it, showed how he had got to know those characters better. I felt the same with Bill Viola's video response to the Bosch. It was a 15-minute video, and the huge majority of people sat through the whole thing without moving. We work closely with art schools in London and we do a lot of drawing teaching in the gallery, both with schools and with colleges. Many artists, such as Leon Kossoff, also come and work in the gallery at night
TAN: Do you think the art colleges should take the teaching of drawing more seriously?
NM: I can't really comment on how you teach somebody to become an artist. All I can say is that drawing is one of the best ways of actually learning to look.
TAN: Have any other exhibitions recently struck you as having a new and effective approach to reaching the visitor?
NM: There is an extraordinarily interesting series of exhibitions at the Cité de la Musique in Paris—the first was on 17th-century France and the current one is on the Romantics—where the pictures are presented with a sound guide of contemporary music on the same subject, so that you look at, as it were, Bacchus and you have a Bacchic piece of music. It’s been a wild success. It encourages people to spend much longer looking at the work of art but it also does makes it much easier for them to understand, to relax the conventions—because one of the things we’re always battling with is to become easy enough with a convention to see the substance behind it.
TAN: Which of the other arts speak to you most?
NM: Ultimately, it's literature. I think one of the essential things about being sustained by a work of art is being able to remember it and I can't actually remember music if I'm not listening to it, so I can't use music when it's not there, whereas painting and literature I can remember well enough. The remembering is an essential part of the process.
TAN: Do you believe that museum curators and academics have a role as custodians of our cultural tradition and our civilisation? And do you see these as being under threat in any way at present?
NM: The answer is yes. Why do we do what we do? I think it's got to be because it's very important to understand that anything we and society are going through has been gone through many, many times before. We are very much shaped by the way those things have been addressed in the past.
The collection at the National Gallery allows you to understand what it means to be European, because you can walk round the continent and watch the way different cultures within the European tradition have addressed the same kinds of questions and see how like they are but also how different.
It's through that understanding of where we've come from that we can make sense of where we are and have the confidence to go forward. The point of a tradition is that it lets you innovate. The great danger is that pre-20th-century Europe is slipping out of sight, for two reasons: partly it's felt that the modern, the now is more important, and partly because today we live in a world that goes far beyond Europe and where many of our fellow citizens are not of European origin ethnically, so it is felt that to focus on the European tradition is somehow to exclude and that only the contemporary can encompass everybody.
I think the real job of anybody working in a museum or gallery at the moment is to make it clear that the European tradition can be inherited by anybody, can be used by anybody and that we can't make sense of contemporary Europe and ourselves unless we understand and can feed on the achievements of the past. That must be the point of any of the great museums of Europe.