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‘The Attic Bedroom’ by Alberto Morrocco
You realise that Dundee has high hopes for the prosperity that the V&A Museum may bring as soon as you step outside the railway station. The old Temperance Hotel (an eyesore for over three decades) is now being transformed into a part of the Malmaison hospitality empire – ‘so cool it’s almost criminal’.
I am not sure if the demographic profile of museum lovers is as high spending as this particular chain expects, but it’s good to see such a major development in the heart of the city where I was born. Cultural regeneration can be controversial but Dundee clearly sees it as an important method of boosting the local economy, as well as widening opportunities for the enjoyment of art and culture.
When the V&A does finally open, it will join two other well respected galleries, Dundee Contemporary Arts (DCA) and the McManus, as well as the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, to secure Dundee’s place more firmly on Scotland’s artistic map. Two recent visits to the McManus gave me the chance to see some of the wonderful paintings that they have in their collection and to reflect on the role of such galleries in relation to the communities where they are situated.
The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery and Museum dates back to the 1860s when the jute barons and other philanthropists in the city decided to hire George Gilbert Scott as architect for a memorial to the late Prince Consort. When it was first opened, the Albert Institute for Science, Literature and the Arts was best known for its reading room; over the following 20 years new galleries were added and collections began to take shape. Paintings, photographs, statues and a whole series of artefacts were purchased or commissioned to create one of the finest municipal museums in Scotland.
Later re-named after Councillor Maurice McManus, it recently underwent an extensive refurbishment programme and re-opened in 2009. State of the art displays are set within a building which still revels in its original gothic revival features. It feels to me like a modern museum space grounded within its historic setting without being subservient to it.
I was aware of Consider the Lilies, the exhibition of Scottish painting between 1910 and 1980 from the Dundee collection, which went on show around the country while the McManus was being re-furbished, but I was not able to see it. It did, however, illustrate their commitment to take art out of the cellars and make it as widely available as possible. Last year I saw Celebrated, the exhibition of works from the Dundee collection, which included a variety of British painters such as Adrian Wiszniewski, Steven Campbell, Laura Knight and Graham Sutherland as well as Chagall and Picasso.
My single favourite painting in that exhibition was ‘The Berry Pickers’ by John Johnstone (born 1941); this is sometimes also known as ‘The Fruit Pickers’. He is a figurative painter and he has said that he likes to paint people acting out little dramas. The 16 figures in the 1979 painting of the berry field are captured in a frame as they busy themselves weighing berries, reaching high for the ones that they might have missed, feeding a dog, having a berry fight or eating their piece. Fashion connoisseurs will enjoy looking at what passed for haute couture in the berryland of the 1970s. It is a masterpiece of humorous observation of a scene that will be familiar to many people who visit the McManus galleries.
The current exhibition which is open until August is called Reflections from the Tay and focuses on four groups of artists who had connections with Dundee. It includes the Tayport Artists Circle from 100 years ago, the Dundee classicists, such as the ever popular Mackintosh Patrick, and seven painters from the 1970s who flourished under the tutelage of Alberto Morrocco. It was a delight to see two pictures by Morrocco himself; one, ‘The Attic Bedroom’, was both domestic and intimate while the other, ‘Riders on a Beach’, was warm and colourful and set in Italy. James Howie’s luminous ‘Island’ reminds us that this inspirational artist was more than just a character in a Michael Marra song. There is also a section devoted to the colourists and it, interestingly, identifies a fifth colourist, John Maclaughlan Milne, who came from Dundee.
Most of the paintings in this exhibition are, along with many others in the McManus collection, also available online. The McManus along with the BBC and the Public Catalogue Foundation have collaborated to photograph all the paintings in their collection. This is part of a wider initiative to keep an online archive of paintings in public ownership so that they can be accessed by anyone within reach of a computer.
The website address is www.bbc.co.uk/arts/yourpaintings/ and all you need to do is type in the name of the artist you are interested in. A book of all the Dundee paintings photographed for PCF is also available for sale. The website illustrates how technology can be used to disseminate art in a totally unprecedented way; the fact that people will have been introduced to particular works of art will, doubtless, encourage some who have never previously visited galleries to make the time to cross the threshold for a more direct experience of what they have already begun to enjoy.
Perhaps the McManus might like to think about how best to represent the local historical character of this Dundee institution in such a way as to be of interest to local visitors as well as to the Malmaison crowd. I would suggest that one way of pursuing this theme would be to display ‘The Berry Pickers’ prominently in the entrance hall. While it would be highlighting ‘the berries’, which have always been an important feature of this region, it would not be a statement of parochial nostalgia. Rather it would be a way of saying that this gallery is in Dundee and, although it’s proud of its Chagalls and its Titians, one of its aims is to represent the lives and labours of the people of the city and its hinterland through world class art. The local and the global through a shared prism.
Bob Cant is the editor of Footsteps and Witnesses: lesbian and gay life stories from Scotland
