Art of the State: Liverpool:World Museum.

Art The old Liverpool Museum has changed much since it began as a two room display of the 13th Earl of Derby's natural history collection on Duke Street in 1851. Between remodelings and recreations both before and after a bombing decimated the building during the Blitz it expanded to fill the space across the bottom end of William Brown Street. My own connection with the museum began at school and continued through working there in the late nineties on the reception desk during the brief period when the eight museums and galleries in what was then National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM) attempted a nominal charging structure.

The redevelopments have continued.  In 2005, the current atrium and entrance was created and since various displays have been refreshed, notably most recently the classical world galleries, which have allowed for much more of the collection to go on display.  It's name has also changed to World Museum so as not confuse things with the new Museum of Liverpool on the city's waterfront.  But some of the displays, notably the horology galleries and natural history sections are almost exactly as they were when I was in primary school, so visiting now really is like stepping back in time.  Presumably this means that the refurbishment will continue shortly.

Accessibility of Collection.

The museum is open daily from 10am-5pm and is free to enter, although none of the works shown on the Art UK website are apparently on obvious public display (it is possible that they were amid the World Cultures gallery although speaking to the invigilators led me to believe that wasn't the case).  Including general museums in Art UK does open up a discussion about why what are considered ethnographic or historical items in museums aren't included.  Much of what's there now is built on the old BBC Your Paintings project and is expanding to feature sculpture, but will it eventually include any items of artistic merit such as ancient polytheistic icons, cultural heritage of the Americas or the Roman and Greek statuary?

Collection Spotlight.


© the artist. Photo credit: World Museum Liverpool
Tsewang Tashi's Untitled No. 6 (2006) is part of the museum's Tibet collection, which contains "over 2,000 Tibetan objects gives an insight into the lives of British India officers connected to Tibet and the Himalayas."  Tashi was born in 1963 in Lhasa and as the entry on the museum website indicates, that although it's not currently on public display, this painting's inclusion in the collection helps in "understanding the development of the younger artists now emerging out of Lhasa" and that it is "also reminiscent of the colonial officer’s attempts at ethnographic photography".  Nothing in the image indicates directly that the subject is Tibetan, which could be seen as a reference to how the people of that area are viewed within China and the rest of the world.  Tashi stringently refuses to include any elements in his work which perpetuate the myth of Tibet being some kind of Shangri-La, knowing that "contemporary art cannot be created when contemporary life is ignored."

Art of the State: Liverpool: Liverpool Central Library.

Art William Brown Street is actually graced by a series of adjoining buildings, originally conceived as a single library and museum building designed by John Weightman, Surveyor to Liverpool Corporation, and completed in 1860. Since then various extensions have been added, like the Picton Library and the Hornby Library. For a brief period in the noughties, a door was opened up that allowed visitors to the library to visit the museum via the old entrance hall and vice-versa. The World Museum has since been through extensive refurbishment work and so has this library, reopening in 2013, making a virtue of the older architecture and transforming what was quite a dated, dingy entrance space into an extraordinary open atrium which has become a minor tourist attraction and is always in heavy usage.

Accessibility of Collection.

The library is open 9am-8pm Monday to Friday, 9-5 on a Saturday and 10-4 on a Sunday. None of the paintings listed on the Art UK website are on public display, although some of the sculpture is, notably the busts which are dotted about the historic areas of the library.

Collection Spotlight.



As the name suggests Salthouse Dock was a key part of Liverpool's salt export industry, the city being a hub for the refining of rock salt and its transfer into Cheshire and abroad. John Atkinson Grimshaw traveled the country painting these dockside scenes, the evocative lighting influenced by the pre-Raphaelite brotherhood.  Few in painting have captured the feeling of gaslit streets and this is subject he returned to again and again.  His Salhouse Dock, Liverpool (1884) could almost be a preparatory sketch for Glasgow, Saturday Night, although that has much warmer colours.  I wonder where it is currently - it deserves to be on public display.

Art of the State: Liverpool: The Walker.

Art Let's begin. Back when I was completing the old project, I decided to leave the Walker Art Gallery until last because as I said when writing about that visit, "having worked there, being so familiar with the collection, it seemed more valuable to head out and visit the places where I’d never worked and was unfamiliar with the collections". Since this is both a new project and a continuation, I decided to begin there again knowing it would be a relatively short visit.  The permanent display hasn't changed much in the meantime.  The portrait of the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia which has been in the Walker's collection since the 50s and was until recently listed as from the Studio of Van Dyke has now been confirmed as being by the master himself.  But there's little point in me repeating any of the material which was in the original post, which you can still read here.

Accessibility of Collection.

The Walker has free entry and is open from 10am-5pm Monday to Friday. Their website has an extensive collections section highlighting prominent works. The Art UK website lists all 2,255 artworks.  As with most larger art collections, there is a lot of minor works but what's on display is incredible.  That said, it would be good to have a room or two which revealed works from the pre-1900 collections in themed displays as happens in other regional galleries.  A large proportion of the gallery is currently consumed by a display of John Moores Prize winners which are usually empty when I visit even though the rest of the galleries is buzzing.  There are some items in the stores which would be star attractions at some smaller locals like Bolton or the Atkinson in Southport.



Collection Spotlight.

This is Fantine (1886) by Margaret Bernadine Hall. Illustrating the character from Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, this is a devastating example of how lighting and staging can draw the viewer into the space of a subject. When Fontaine is sacked from her job because of her illegitimate child, she falls into prostitution to survive (the Anne Hathaway sequence in the film version of the musical).  What strikes you is the contrast between how the child is painted, all rosy cheeks and contented sleep and her mother in stark monochrome.  They living in different words, and Fontaine is fighting to keep it that way, to shade her baby from the darkness.

Hall was both in 1863 in Wavertree.  Her father Bernard Hall was a merchant, local politician and philanthropist, and elected Mayor of Liverpool in 1879.  In 1882, her family moved to London and from there she went to Paris for five years to study painting, a time when she would have found herself amid the Impressionists but few female artists.  It's in this period she must have produced Fantine at just 23.  Between 1888 and 1894 Hall travelled extensively to countries including Japan, China, Australia, North America, and North Africa, returning to Paris in 1894.  She died in England in 1910, at the home of the playwright George Calderon in Hampstead Heath.

In an ideal world, Hall would be lauded as one of our great painters.  But since her death, most of her paintings have apparently disappeared.  Her brother Douglas offered Fantine and and other of her works Les Abandonées to the National Gallery but they were declined. During the following year he offered them to the Walker Art Gallery, and Fantine was accepted.  I haven't been able to track down where Les Abandonées ended up, but Art UK lists another of her works at Trinity College Cambridge, a sketch portrait of Sedley Taylor one of the librarians at Trinity College.  This was a complex life worthy of further study.  But her single biography is out of print.

Art of the State: Introduction.

Art Back in 2015, when I wrote the final blog post describing my adventures working through the late Edward Morris's book Public Art Collections in North West England, which was naturally the Walker Art Gallery where we both worked together in the late 90s, I closed with the slightly tortuous line: "When really it's about time for the project to end. Here. For now."  Even as I ended that little crusade, something was nagging at the back of my mind that I'd end up back on the trail again in some form.  What about all the art collections Edward didn't include in his book?

In the past couple of weeks, I've been "boxsetting" the YouTube series, All The Stations, which records how rail enthusiasts Geoff Marshall and Vicki Pipe visited all the stations on the National Rail Network during Summer 2017. Seeing them dashing between trains and wrestling with logistics has made me nostalgic for the old times of some of my more specific projects. After a few rather sedentary years, I know that it's about time I got myself back out there and however enticing it is to repeat their exercise, it feels like it's been done. Plus I'd be lonely. And it would cost a lot of money.

So instead, having recently also signed up for an Art Fund card, I've decided to take a crack at all the art collections Edward didn't include in his book. The Art UK website, formerly the BBC's Your Paintings and mentioned weekly on the likes of Britain's Lost Masterpieces and Fake or Fortune, lists over three thousand two hundred venues. I don't for one minute think I'll end up visiting all of them, which is why this isn't called All The Art Venues or something less clunky, working my way through all the Art UK listed sites feels like a decent guideline.

What to do about collections I've already visited in my life?  Geoff and Vicki conducted a couple of test days as part of their Kickstarter campaign and then went back to those stations again as part of the main project.  This seems like a good guide, plus it's been four years since The Walker and times change, people change.  I'll also be tackling them in a slightly different way, talking about how accessible the collections are and choosing a single favourite items from what's on display (or not as I expect will be the case sometimes).  There will be some ground rules.  Here we go again.

Nu Top Trumps.

Games Like many people of a certain age, I was kept "busy" on train and car rides by I Spy books and more often Top Trumps. It's the simplest of educational games, a series of cards on a particular subject with various trivia underneath and cards won when one number is higher than another. The first person to get all of the cards wins. My clearest memory is of the dinosaurs set, hoping against hope to have the T-Rex card which had the capacity to slay everything in its wake. My young imagination filled with images of the actual dinosaurs squaring off against each other in the stop motion animated glory of a Ray Harryhausen movie. Eventually, I had the cards memorised, not that I can recall any of the facts now. They've been replaced with other useful things like the story order of Doctor Who seasons and when various Shakespeare plays were written.

Glancing through the selection of titles available, I'm pleased to see the dinosaurs are still there, albeit with an updated design. But in keeping with the times, Top Trumps have moved on to more pop culture topics and so its with this curiosity I agreed to their PR sending me a bunch of sets to have a look at and write about on here along with a FRIENDS quiz. Since I'm just embarking on a first rewatch of the sitcom in a few years, I'll save that until I'm in a position to have any chance of answering the, at a glance, incredibly nerdy questions.  Rather like BBC's Mastermind when it often covers pop culture, it also keeps its questions within the fiction of the show.  So nothing asking who directed the first episode, who played Charlie Wheeler, Marcel the Monkey's real name or which other network series took part in "Blackout Night". *

The cards themselves have been updated.  Back in the day, these were quite schematic affairs with an image on top and a small yellow table underneath listing attributes.  Now each is more uniquely designed with a photo of the subject, a small fact file (character biog, episode synopsis) and the attributes in much bolder text inspired by the given IP.  The FRIENDS set in particular feels like a callback to the era of the series in its text and iconography, although the use of something approximating Comic Sans is a bold choice.  It's here that I notice that the first episode, which in pretty much every home release is called simply "The Pilot" has is called the Netflix title "The One Where Monica Gets A Roommate".  I wonder when this was adopted at the prefered title?  Do you know?

Having not seen Top Trumps in all these years, it's disorientating to now find a game which, at least in its pop culture version, is generally numerically based on opinion with rather random categories.  The Friends set eskews characters in favour of episodes.  So instead of pitting Janice against Mr Heckles, it's The One Where No One's Ready fighting The One With The Lottery.  That means the editor of these numbers can boldly give The One After The Superbowl, Part 2 a "Top Trumps Rating" of 92 ahead of The One Where Rachel Finds Out on at 87, which I'm not sure anyone would agree with.  The Only Fools and Horses set mixes characters, things and places which presents the spectacle of an alpine ski suit as being more intelligent than Rodney and radical hair-dryers having better family values than Cassandra.  Why is one thing higher than another?

The closest to old school is the Star Trek set, with just characters but even then there are problems for those of us who have an interest in the franchise. One of the attributes is "year of birth" which is a bit ageist since it automatically puts older officers at a disadvantage. Plus the choice of characters is incredibly curious. All of the various Captains are here but crew members omitted include Beverley Crusher (even though Wesley is here for goodness sake), Bashir, Jazdia Dax (it's Ezri), Harry Kim, Tom Paris, Tuvok, Kes, B'Elanna Torres and everyone on the NX-01 apart from Archer, Tucker and T'Pol.  Chakotay has a threat to the universe score of 22 which has to be someone in the office taking a satirical swipe at Janeway's executive officer.  And what does the To Boldy Go score refer to and why does Sisko merit a 40 but Kirk a 20?  Overall, such things as skill, stamina and intellect would have made much more sense, especially since Cunning is included, something which Data scores curiously low on.

So how does it play?  I've just got back from testing the Only Fools and Horses set and either because of the age of the participants, mid-40s and mid-70s, we didn't complete a game.  As the contest went on, we pretty much coalesced around reading out the "laughs" score only, I think partly because it was the only moderately tangible number on the card.  As I suspected, because it was impossible to conceptually gauge how a number applied to the subject, it then made it less of a game of skill than simply reading out random numbers and seeing who missed out in each turn which becomes incredibly boring in the short and long term.  In what universe does Del Boy have greater style than Marlene?

Am I just having a sense of humour of bypass about a kids game.  Possibly.  Probably.  But I'd argue that there's little point in doing Top Trumps if the game mechanics don't work and I wonder if any of these sets have been playtested in house for their longevity and the extent to which the scores have been mulled over.  A short explanation included within each set might have helped.  There's also the notion of having a Top Trumps game for FRIENDS or Only Fools.  Who exactly are these meant for?  Children will have little to know interest in these properties, both broadcast before they were born and the game is too simplistic for adults outside of family time.  Fortunately the more educational options are still available.  "Height  3.3 metres ..."

* ǝldoǝԀ ǝɥʇ ɟo uɐɯpɐW puɐ 'plǝɟuᴉǝS 'spuǝᴉɹℲ 'no⅄ ʇnoq∀ pɐW 'ǝᴉʇɐʞ 'ɹǝlʎ┴ ɐɥsᴉ∀ 'sʍoɹɹnq sǝɯɐſ