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Whitechapel's temple of art celebrates 100 years
At the end of the 19th century, a Church of England priest and his wife made a brave attempt to get people to walk in off the streets of London's impoverished East End to look at art. Canon Samuel Barnett and his wife, Henrietta, in their funding appeal for the Whitechapel Art Gallery, proclaimed it an ``attempt to fill the minds of the people with thoughts to exclude those created by gloom or sordid temptation.'' The opening of the free gallery on March 12, 1901, was an astounding success.
Its first exhibition, ``Modern Pictures by Living Artists,'' lasted six weeks and drew 206,000 visitors from all over London, 16,000 of them on one day. Barnett, however, recorded his disappointment that the donations box pulled in only a paltry amount A century later, the gallery is still there and flourishing, yet Whitechapel is still poor. The gallery is next door to Aldgate East subway station on Whitechapel Road where the East End begins, just over the border from the banking temples of the City financial district.
Despite the present-day profusion of galleries and artists' studios in the East End, unimaginable in the Barnett's' day, the centennial show of 79 works from theI10, 000 shown at 725 exhibitions in the past 100 years has pulled in 22,000 visitors in its first month. Whitechapel Road was made notorious by the Jack the Ripper murders of 1888. But the art nouveau-style building designed by Charles Harrison Townsend has always been the place to see avant-garde art. ``I think one reason for its success is the welcoming atmosphere I- no steps. You just walk in from the street,'' says Catherine Lampert, an American from Washington, DC, who has run the gallery since 1988.
Most of the current exhibits are by famous names: Rembrandt van RijnIand J.M.W. Turner, Emil Nolde and Mark Rothko, and living artists like David Hockney and Lucian Freud. Hockney, in a letter to Lampert from his California home, recalled his journeys from his native Yorkshire to see the Jackson Pollock's and the Rothko's there. It was the time when Bryan Robertson, director from 1952Uto 1968, introduced Britain to the American abstract expressionists, the New York School and pop art.
Other stars shown in those years were Robert Rauschenberg, Franz Kline, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis and Robert Motherwell ``I would hitch-hike to London and go to the museums and always Ito the Whitechapel,''Hockney wrote. ``I think it used to be closed on Mondays but there was a newspaper seller outside ... who said if you knocked on the door and told them you were from the north they would be kind and let you in. My accent was stronger then - no hints of California - and so it always worked,'' Hockney said. Nicholas Serota, director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery from 1976 to 1988 and now very influential as director of the Tate Gallery, had seen the Rauschenberg and Kline shows and recalls being ``knocked out by them.''
The gallery has looked around the world for its exhibitions. ``Chinese Life and Art'' was one show in its very first year. It had Japanese art in its second year and Dutch old masters in its fourth year. I The centennial reflects all this, with works by the 18th-century British animal painter George Stubbs, 12th-century Chinese Sculpture, contemporary British sculptors Anthony Gormley and Tony Cragg, American video artist Bill Viola and modern chairs selected from a furniture show of 1970. U There is also a photograph to recall the gallery's chance coup of JanuaryE1939 when it displayed the icon of the war-torn 20th century, Pablo Picasso's ``Guernica.'' A The painting, evoking the bombing of that town in the Spanish Civil War, had been on its way from Paris to New York and was shown at a gallery in London's smart West End. Then, for two weeks, it was at the Whitechapel, arranged by a committee supporting the republican side. ``Guernica'' never came back to London despite years of trying by numerous gallery and museum directors and now hangs in Madrid. |
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