Museums Art Odyssey: Day Two and on Tuesday I visited Manchester Art Gallery for their latest temporary exhibition, Art Treasures in Manchester: 150 years on. In 1857, the city paid host to a massive festival of the plastic arts, the biggest ever held in the UK, in a specially constructed building in Old Trafford.
There were over sixteen thousand exhibits, nearly a million and a half visitors including Queens and princes and consolidated and was a zeitgeisty moment in which visitors could see all what the art world looked like at the time. Then, bizarrely, it was quietly forgotten, with smaller displays at Crystal Palace becoming part of school curriculums at the expense of an event that was arguably far more important.
The exhibition opens with some history and a burst of civic pride as a range of statistics about the city is blasted at the visitor. Life expectancy in the city in 1857 was just 26 years, the lowest of anywhere in the country and the annual death rate was at thirty-one in every thousand. In the poorest areas, a hundred or more people shared what amounted to a toilet in those days, a hole in the ground. Families of up to twelve people gathered in a single room and only thirty-two percent of five to fourteen year olds where at school.
And yet, and yet, money was found and time was taken to produce this art exhibition which would be visited by the poor and rich alike as factories closed for the day and schools too – despite the context and the contents the aim was to make this folly accessible to all. Patron’s traveled from throughout the country and I would suspect that the show’s influence created ripples across the art world as artists had the opportunity to suddenly see a range of different movements together.
Then it’s straight into the main display, a selection of the original work, hung in one space for the first time in a hundred and fifty years. The exhibition space has been turned into a miniaturized version of that shed, the wallpaper recreating the patterns on the walls back then, a line drawing of the original filling one of the walls to try and offer some idea of the scale of the original show. The last time I visited the gallery was for the Kylie exhibition and it’s always surprising to see this space transform around the material on show.
Also replicated is the original exhibition’s biggest innovation – presenting the art in chronological order so that visitors could see the development of art and its techniques from the earliest medieval works through to the then present day. Before that time, as with a recent experiment at the Tate, the work was displayed thematically by subject – but the historical format caught on which is why most galleries follow that process to this day. Actually, I think both are valid but the thematic approach only really works in large collections where the visitor is able to contrast different visions of the nativity, for example.
About ten years ago, The Royal Academy was given over for some months to Art Treasures of England, which temporarily pilfered the very best of the UK’s regional collections placing them into its barn like space, producing a massive version of one of those small galleries; for those few months London had its own extra ‘traditional’ art gallery whose quality dwarfed the Tate and the National. I had hoped that in some smaller way, this exhibition would be the reverse, ‘classic’ works from the southern galleries brought up north once more.
For the most part it delivers; in the opening section there’s Gerard David’s Adoration of the Kings, Annibale Carracci's The Dead Christ Mourned and of course Michaelangelo’s The Madonna and Child with Saint John and Angels (or The Manchester Madonna as it was nicknamed during the Old Trafford show) from the National Gallery and looking further into the space reveals from the Tate, Landseer’s dopey dog painting Dignity and Impudence and Arthur Hughes’ sublime April Love (which was running first in the favourite painting poll being taken at the exit to the exhibition). The Queen’s private art collection is also represented – an epic canvas, The Death of General Wolfe by Benjamin West and a startling panoramic photograph of the Alps taken in the 1800s hundreds which is as good an illustration of what’s been lost through global warming as anything shown during Al Gore’s slideshow-cum-film An Inconvenient Truth.
But regional galleries are also necessarily in there and it’s a brilliant illustration of what I’ve discovered through my visits to local regional galleries – that for all the attention the nationals get in the press, local galleries also have some unsung work in their collections. Indeed, in places, if the information labels didn’t necessarily list the origin of the work it would be difficult to tell which of the work was from London. In some cases you wonder if an image would be quite as iconic if it was hidden away in a regional gallery. Certainly the medieval paintings from the Walker in Liverpool are as good as anything brought from the National (although to be fair their star works weren’t in the original Manchester exhibition).
There’s just something so wonderfully odd about seeing the world famous self portrait of Esteban Murillo from the National Gallery (the one in which he sits in a hoop and there’s not enough room for him to have legs) next to a fairly humble still life of flowers and fruit by Jan van Os from Warrington Art Galleries. The sympathetic image of Marie Antoinette and family awaiting their fate in EM Ward's The Royal Family of France in the Prison of the Temple is a marvel from the Harris Museum in Preston but the most surprising moment for me was seeing their Lytham Sandhills by Ansdell which I'd last walked past in Oldham. The exhibition world is a small world and I love seeing paintings I’ve seen before in new settings – it’s like greeting an old friend.
Another surprise was discovering that at Old Trafford, visitors did not see the work in a space that was silent but for their own chatter and footfalls. Charles Halle commanded an orchestra that would play two free concerts a day and the music would echo throughout the gallery, a mixture of light music and more challenging works. Listening posts here offer some idea of what might have been on offer. Amongst Manchester folk songs, you can hear a Trumpet Voluntary by Jermiah Clarke (which is often attributed to Purcell – it’s the one which you always here at the close of Royal Weddings) and a delicate piano piece, Strauss’s Pensez a moi. The legacy of the exhibition can also be seen here, since the popularity of these concerts would lead to the setting up of the Halle Orchestra which is still going strong in Manchester today.
If I left the exhibition slightly disappointed its because given the statistics provided throughout as to the scale of the original endeavour that only a fraction could be brought back together here. Of the 16,000 original exhibits, but a thousand are here and a large percentage of those are in the decorative arts. In addition, with the exceptions of the surroundings, little attempt has been made to recreate the way the paintings were hung back then, up and down the wall. Although the new vogue, painting then information lbael then painting then information label all parallel to our eye line does allow us to appreciate the work better it would have been fun to have given some idea of what the space would have felt like back then – the illustrations in the catalogue are startling as the work is crushed in together. Perhaps there were safety and insurance concerns, which is understandable (you can see art displayed somewhat in this way in the entrance hall to Birmingham Art Gallery).
But as an exhibition about an exhibition this is a startling, amusing and exciting display, constantly surprising and yes, a treasure.
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