Independent on Sunday, 27/11/11
Merger of funding agency with business charity will make up for ~£3m government spending cut
By Simon Tait
The Prince of Wales has personally intervened in a growing row over arts funding by taking the doomed sponsorship agency, Arts & Business (A&B), under his wing.
A&B had been funded by the government through the Arts Council but lost its entire grant earlier this year. It was preparing for closure.
Instead, on Prince Charles’s own initiative, the organisation will merge with the charity Business in the Community of which he is president. “The Prince of Wales personally urged this as an alternaive solution and convinced me that it was the right one”, said A&B’s chief executive Colin Tweedy, whose own resignation after 28 years in the post is part of the arrrangement.
The merger is in effect a takeover by Business in the Community (BITC), created in 1982 in response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots to encourage urban regeneration through corporate social responsibility among businesses.
It will be formally announced at the BITC annual meeting on December 1, but Prince Charles himself revealed it on Thursday at a private ceremony at Clarence House to present his annual medals for arts philanthropy, a scheme he devised four years ago with A&B of which he is also president.
His intervention will fuel a disagreement over arts funding between the government, which has slashed its cultural subsidy by 33% and believes a revival of arts funding lies in philanthropy, and those who are convinced with A&B and the prince that the business community’s contribution can be more effective sooner. He is expected to strike a much higher profile in promoting business sponsorship of the arts.
“People don’t realise Prince Charles’s understanding of the zeitgeist, he has the ability to get people to listen and his brand is a very powerful one,” Tweedy said. “The business community respects it enormously.”
Arts & Business was founded in 1976 under the chairmanship of the late Lord Goodman, a former Arts Council chairman, to introduce the concept of business sponsorship of the arts when it registered an annual corporate contribution of £600,000. A&B established the “mixed arts economy” for the arts whereby funding is roughly a third earned income, a third public subsidy and a third private sector support. By 2007 the private contribution had risen to £700m a year, but since then it has fallen back to around £600m.
In 1984 the organisation developed the idea of matched funding, whereby business contributions would be matched from a government fund run by A&B. Between then and 2008 £90m of public investment was matched by £1 billion from the private sector, but that year the scheme was scrapped and A&B’s government grant cut from £7m to £4m.
A&B had been highly respected in government circles, with George Osborne on its board for four years before last year’s general election, and its research was the basis for much of the current cultural policy. This year, howeve, it learned that all its subsidy was to go and its official responsibilities taken over by the Arts Council.
Tweedy was called to a private meeting with Prince Charles who urged him not to close but to join BITC, now a global operation. A&B’s operations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have become independent, though still funded by their regional governments.
Ironically, it was Arts & Business that revealed the unsuspected significance and potential of private giving to the arts in 2004 when research showed that an astonishing £236m a year was coming from individual giving compared with £111m in business sponsorship, and the figure continued to grow over the next five years. It has since faltered and is dwindling at a rate of 7% year.
The govenment, however, believes private philanthropy is most likely to help arts funding to recover, and last December Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt launched a campaign to encourage more private giving, declaring 2011 to be the Year of Corporate Philanthropy.
“I sense the Year of Corporate Philanthropy has been written off,” Tweedy said. “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsorship, you cannot conflate the two – and nothing can be done in a year. The government was right not to exclude the arts from subsidy cuts, but we believe the government has a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons why people give. Philanthrophy will kick in again but it will take much longer than the government thinks, and most people who give privately in this country earn less than £50,000 a year and go largely unrecognised”. Subsidy will take at least a generation to recover, he said, but the business community’s contribution is already recovering.
Moving A&B into BITC will mean the former’s staff being reduced from 100 to 22 and losing its responsibility for training arts organisations in fundraising and acting as a broker between the arts and business, though retaining its charitable status. “We are going back to our roots, as a campaiging organisation in the business community, and the Prince of Wales will take a high profile in that campaign,” Tweedy said.
Tweedy, 58, who was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, the personal gift of the Queen, in 2003, will to be replaced by a campaign director who will report to the BITC chief executive, Stephen Howard. Tweedy will become a fund-raising vice-president alongside celebrity supporters Stephen Fry, Lord Mandelson, Joanna Lumley, Dame Diana Rigg, former Arts Council chairman Sir Gerry Robinson and Lord Puttnam.
The Times, 26/11/11
By Simon Tait
Edward Elgar stretches his legs before him on the garden bench, his favourite pipe in his left hand, as he gazes over the Malvern Hills, “my beloved country”, that were his inspiration.
The garden belongs to the small cottage at Lower Broadheath, three miles from Worcester, where the composer was born in 1857, and though he only spent his first two years here he returned throughout his life. He wrote his first music as a teenager at the neighbouring farm where he and his siblings spent their summers.
But although the bronze by Jemma Pearson was commissioned in 2007 by the Elgar Foundation to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, this small but respectable rural cottage has become more than a memorial to one of England’s greatest composers. It has developed into the primary source for studying the work as well as the life of the man whose music was seen to mirror the British character in the tumultuous first half of the 20th century.
Now, running a regular annual deficit and receiving no subsidy, the museum needs to avoid closure and on November 23 an appeal for £1m over three years is launched by the conductor Sir Mark Elder who is president of the Elgar Foundation, the charitable trust that owns the museum. “Only at the Elgar Birthplace Museum can you get close to Elgar, feel his presence and understand his work,” Elder said. “The museum’s existence as a centre of excellence for Elgar’s life and work is vital to the international world of music.”
The son of a piano tuner who later had a music shop in Worcester High Street, Elgar was the fourth in a family of seven children. Self-taught, his career began a gradual upward trajectory almost from the day he married his muse, Alice, at the age of 32. Recognition did not come for another ten years with the premiere of The Enigma Variations in 1899, and all his greatest works came in the next 20 years with Alice dying in 1920. By then he had world renown, was the confidant of royalty, and he eventually accrued four knighthoods, including “The 1st Baronetcy of Broadheath” as he styled himself.
When he died at home in Worcester in 1934 Elgar asked his daughter, Carice Elgar Blake, to create a memorial in the Broadheath cottage, then and now owned by the local authority. She endowed with many of Elgar’s own manuscripts, music, letters, recordings and photographs which over the years have been added to by purchases and gifts.
It opened in 1935 and no attempt was made to recreate the house as the toddler might have known it, there was no record. Instead, the house tells Elgar’s story through his own objects – his desk, his pens in the pen holder he made himself, a gramophone (“The gramophone… can bring into being a new public which shall understand music by playing great compositions adequately recorded” he prophesied, slightly pompously, in 1921), his pipes, his books. He was enthusiastic about his hobbies, golf, cycling, travel, scientific experiment – he invented a soap in his laboratory – and crossword puzzles.
In 2000 a new visitor centre was built to the north to ease the pressure on the cottage, controversially because it was seen as architecturally inharmonious. At its centre is a changing display taken from the large archive which tells of Elgar’s early life, the violin he played in local orchestras, the bassoon he played in his own wind quintet. His annotated music manuscripts are here as well as some of the wealth of correspondence, and his honours and decorations. Also in the centre is a shop, a room for meetings and small concerts, office space rented by the local authority which is now going through a cost-cutting exercise.
But with only a steady 10,000 annuals and miserly public transport services which mean a visit requires a car journey, the Elgar Birthplace Museum needs to expand its operation to survive, believes its director Catherine Sloan.
“We need to broaden its appeal by looking more widely at the social history surrounding Elgar,” she said. “We can’t look at this music in the context of the Great War, for instance. He loved the Malverns, but we forget there were quarries with explosions going off all the time and dust pollution which would have affected him. We ought to be able to look at what Worcester was like when he was growing up.”
Already, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts, there is to be a recasting of the visitor centre with more interactive displays and a café, and the delicate paper collections – including 10,000 letters and 200 original manuscripts – have been digitised to make access easier, but to expand further the museum needs to establish an endowment.
Secure storage capacity has to be enhanced, and an adjacent building is to become a new exhibition space. The museum wants to strengthen its acquisitions fund, and while it earns only a third of its costs from admissions, ticket costs need to be kept to a minimum if access is to be widened. Outreach and education programmes also need to be developed.
“Elgar wanted his music to be for the people,” Catherine Sloan said, “and we need safeguard our future if we are to make that dream come true.”
The Times, 12 November 2011
Simon Tait visits the 18th century artist’s house in Chiswick that has reopened after a £400,000 restoration
The portrait hanging in the hall of Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, West London, is not the famous self-portrait, that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. In this context, it is more significant.
This one is a copy, painted by a local bookbinder called John Leighton in the 1890s as part of a campaign to save the house from developers. It is a signifier for the local determination over two centuries of Chiswick residents, the latest manifestation of which is responsible for it opening on Tuesday, November 8, a couple of days before the painter’s 314th birthday. The picture was found by present day local volunteers – led by museum consultant Val Bott – in store, torn, its frame broken and badly in need of restoration and conservation.
£400,000 has been spent on restoring the cottage, £287,000 coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund, researching its original appearance and the families that lived here before and after the Hogarths, and refurbishing it so that it can reopen, free of admission charge.
The Queen Anne house was built in 1715 and bought and extended in 1749 by a newly prosperous Hogarth to be his “little country box by the Thames”, the last house in the village of Chiswick before the rolling fields and copses of Middlesex. The lane, now part of one of the busiest thoroughfares in the country where the Great West Road becomes the Hogarth Roundabout, was probably not even named. The house was known simply as North End, and all that is left of an orchard planted then is one crazily gnarled mulberry tree which has survived iron clamps, blight and even the Blitz. Hogarth and his wife Jane were to spend the summer months here for the next 15 years until his death aged 66. He is buried in St Nicholas churchyard nearby, the headstone legend written by his friend David Garrick.
Its acquisition was a mark of Hogarth’s arrival at the pinnacle of his career after an uncertain start. Self-taught, his father was a schoolmaster who opened a coffee shop in Clerkenwell where only Latin was to be spoken. It failed and he found himself bankrupt and in the Fleet while his wife supported a family of seven children by selling patent medicines. William was apprenticed to a silver plate engraver, and began to make a name for himself with book illustrations, most notably for Samual Butler’s Hudibras. He met James Thornhill, creator of the ceiling paintings in Greenwich’s Painted Hall, who introduced Hogarth to painting, and to his daughter with whom he eloped in 1729.
They were childless but Jane continued living here with her cousin, Mary Lewis, until her own death, and the family connection ended when Mary died in 1808. It was bought by Henry Carey, poet, cleric and associate of the Romantics. In the 1860s it was the home of a celebrated melodramatic actor, Newton Treen “Brayvo” Hicks, but it was falling into disrepair. The studio Hogarth built in the garden disappeared, and recent paint scrapings have revealed many layers of Victorian grime as well as paint.
The next door neighbour, a well-to-do printer, bought the house and restored it, but towards the end of the 19th century it was scheduled for redevelopment. A campaign by the artists and writers who had drifted to Chiswick in Hogarth’s wake mounted a campaign to save it, but failed. The house was put up for auction.
Happily, it was bought by a local magnate called Robert Shipway who restored it, collected the engravings to display on the walls, and had furniture made, copied from the engravings by the Chsiwick Artweorkers’ Guild. He even took the photographs for the first guide book, and opened the house to the public in 1904.
Shipway gave the house to the local authority in 1909, and it was kept by custodians who lived there rent-free provided they admitted the public when required. In 1940 it was badly damaged by a parachute mine, but was repaired and reopened in 1951.
In 1984 Hounslow Council, which still owns it, decided to sell the house and another local campaign was launched, this time by the local history society and Val Bott, who has guided the latest restoration. They won the day, and the house returned to being, effectively, a gallery for the display of Hogarth engravings. In 1997 Bott was called in again to fund-raise for a refurbishment to mark Hogarth’s tercentenary, but before long it needed more fundamental repair and recasting.
“Local people who came to events here told us they wanted more than serried ranks of framed prints on the wall, fascinating as they are,” Bott says. “They yearned to understand the place as a home, so we’ve presented the house so as to make sense of its building phases, and we’ve added some domestic details.”
She assembled a committee of local scholars, academics and specialists into a charitable trust to oversee the restoration, and they remain as an advisory council.
Much of Col. Shipway’s furniture has been reassembled, and crockery from the period has been acquired, mostly at the personal expense of the volunteers. Hogarth-related objects have been loaned by other museums around the country. A suit of clothes based on Hogarth’s own has been made to hang in his bedroom closet, and copies of some of his own books, such as his lavishly illustrated The Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753. There is an engraving plate from Hudibras, and, discovered discarded in a cupboard, the Latin primer Hogarth’s father had written and published in 1712. Bott found original shutters painted in at one of the first floor parlour windows.
The HLF funding has allowed the employment of an outreach officer, John Collins, who had been in post two weeks in 2009 when the half-complete refurbishment was set back by a freak electrical fire. “It’s been frustrating,” he says, “but it’s meant that we could do some important extra research for the new displays, and to connect the house with the community that has done so much to ensure its survival.”
The Times, 15/10/11
By Simon Tait
An astrophysics program that uses the public to identify elements of the galaxy is to help thousands of amateur art lovers in compiling the largest online paintings catalogue in the world.
The works of art are the 200,000 oil paintings from public collections rarely if ever on show that the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), in partnership with the BBC, is putting on its new website, Your Paintings. The site was launched in June, but a unique “tagging” programme has been added that is being launched this month (September) to universities and schools as well as the general public.
“By looking at the paintings in detail,” said Andrew Ellis, director of the PCF, “taggers can help generate useful subject classifications for each work that wouldn’t occur to art historians, and give us important keyword information about people, places and events shown in paintings.
“Our challenge is that basic material – title, artist etc is just not sufficient to find one’s way around 200,000 paintings. What the public might search for may not be as simple ‘fashion between 1800 and 1825’, but it might be someone teaching a class of primary school children who wants red vibrant paintings that are abstract. Or something specific – Alsation dogs, top hats. If we can categorise the pictures in this way we can make them more easily searchable.”
The on-line technique of “crowd-sourcing” was perfected by the Oxford astrophysicists Arfon Smith and Chris Lintott who, in trying to map the galaxies, had millions of pieces of unconnected data. In 2007 they created the Citizens Science Alliance, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators, to put together an internet sweep that would glean the ordinary public’s assessment of some of the material, and encourage wider interest.
They launched Galaxy Zoo online and within 24 hours were receiving 70,000 new classifications an hour, and in a year had 50 million from 150,000 respondents. “Then we asked, could you go beyond astrophysics?” Dr Smith said, and adapted the programme, Ancient Lives (http://ancientlives.org/), to help archaeologists sifting the myriad papyri found at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Oxhyrynchus in the early 20th century, and including everything from private letters to lost gospels.
It was launched in July and to date 20,000 people have examined 130,00 unpublished papyri fragments providing over four million individual character transcriptions. They include a small piece from Thucydides, the 5th century BC historian, in which he explains how some Greeks turned to piracy as their main source of income, a poem lamenting a warm drink on a hot day, part of Plutarch’s dialogue on the Cleverness of Animals, and a Simonides fragment in which the 6th century BC poet explains the use of ice to cool wine.
The Public Catalogue Foundation is hoping for similar success in sourcing insights into the enormous but little seen national oil painting holdings. Since its beginning in 2003 the PCF, a charity, has published 33 volumes of pictures in UK public collections, county by county, many of them in store or in unconventional exhibition venues such as fire stations and town halls.
The PCF has joined forces with the Citizens Science Alliance, the art history department at Glasgow University and museums, galleries and art scholars around the country to devise the tagger and bring, it is hoped, thousands of non-experts to the project, giving extra information about each picture as it is tagged.
The programme takes visitors through easy preliminary steps, with the process becoming progressively more sophisticated as the taggers become more adept. They are asked to add their own remarks and impressions.
“I never know what is coming next, and it’s amazing to see how many pieces of art are held by corporations, councils, libraries, etc, across the UK,” said Vivienne Bradshaw, an early tagger. “At first I wondered if you needed to have specialist knowledge, but the information given made me realise that it was open to all. Time really flies and in no time I had tagged a dozen or so paintings. I tag at odd times really, whenever I think of it and have some spare time. I find that I am drawn to anything with really finely detailed costumes, especially ‘power’ portraits with their fine satin and silk gowns, jewellery, feathers, gloves, etc.
“William Etty is a painter whose work I have been introduced to by tagging. I look out for his paintings and spend a bit longer studying them before moving on.”
The project has a dual purpose, Ellis said, encourage viewers to spend more time absorbing pictures, and to fill in missing information. “What’s so striking,” he said, “is that it does encourage you to look at paintings for longer, and that’s a wonderful pleasure and greatly satisfying.
“While the range of knowledge in range of knowledge of the paintings is wide, there are gaps in the smaller collections and our guess is that 10% don’t have firm artists’ attributions, that’s 20,000 paintings,” he said. “Tagging will also allow people to make suggestions like the missing names of sitters, and I think we’ll get a lot of response over time.”
But time is limited, and the compiling of you’re your Paintings website, including tagging, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012.
http://www.thepcf.org.uk
Simon Tait
The Times, 10/9/11
The once drab Norwegian town of Drammen has announced its rebirth by unveiling a spectacular centerpiece in the form of a £1.1m, 4m high walk-in water sculpture by the British artist William Pye.
It is the latest in a growing line of contemporary British art that is adorning foreign cities, begun by Barbara Hepworth with her Single Form outside the United Nations building in New York (1964), and Henry Moore’s massive Large Spindle Piece bronze in Jedda (1968).
Pye’s Water Pavilion in Norway follows Antony Gormley’s Habitiat in Anchorage, Alaska (2010); Richard Wilson’s Final Corner, commissioned by Fukuroi City, Japan, to mark the 2002 World Cup; Rachel Whiteread’s controversial Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, also known as the Nameless Library (2000), and the extraordinary Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Chicago, made by Anish Kapoor whose Leviathan is currently stunning Parisians as it occupies the whole of the Grand Palais exhibition hall. In Moscow’s Copernicus Centre, a kinetic artwork by the British collective known as Greyworld was installed last year. On Tuesday (June 1), high in the Austrian Alps, Gormley is to unveil his landscape piece, the 100 lifesize figures of Horizon Field, on Tuesday (June 21).
”Public sculpture is always a sensitive subject and a lot of it, like Bill Pye’s, is the result of public competition,” said Andrea Rose, the British Council’s head of visual art who has been responsible for placing many British artists’ work overseas. ”The fact that there is so much British sculpture abroad is down to the fact that we have so many world-class sculptors in Britain, and it’s the world-class bit that people are really after.”
Pye’s “Vannpaviljong”, to give it its Norwegian title, was unveiled by Dramman’s mayor, Tore Opdal Hansen, recently to mark the town’s 200th anniversary, but also the end of its renaissance. “This is the final piece after a 40 year building process” said Knut Smeby, chairman of the committee of Drammen businessmen that commissioned the piece, adding with a valiant attempt at British jargon, “It is the creaming of the cake top”.
About 40 miles from Oslo and Norway’s eighth largest conurbation, Drammen stands at the mouth of the Drammenselv river which flows into the Drammensfjord, and its timber and paper industries made it a prosperous and important centre. But by 1970, Smeby said, it was dying, “a place on the crossroads where no-one stopped”, with its new electronic and service economy still in its infancy, when it was decided to rebuild. It is now Norway’s eighth largest city and growing, with the unveiling of Vannpaviljong in the centre of the new Strømsø Square signalling the end of the multi-billion pound regeneration. “Bill Pye’s sculpture marks our moving on to the world map”, Smeby said.
Pye, 72, was one of 170 artists who answered an open international competition four years ago to create Drammen’s centrepiece, and emerged from a shortlist of five – against an American, a German and two Norwegians. It was to be the gift of Drammen’s business community to the city, and the theme was to be water.
“It was an anonymous selection process, but the Pye proposition simply stepped out at us as the one,” said Smeby. “It was dramatic, inventive and extremely appealing.”
Pye’s water sculptures have made him the most ubiquitous artist in London’s public spaces, but this was his biggest challenge. “I’ve never been asked to make a whole pavilion that you could walk into before, and the more I worked on it the more discoveries I made about the possibilities,” he said.
Admirers step into the pavilion though walls of water cascading over mirror-polished stainless steel walls while LED light add to the constant movement over the structure. At its centre above their heads is a double skin acrylic dome across which water pulses, the dome’s colour changing with the natural light. At their feet, “starbursts” of water like tidal geysers explode against glass tiles.
The huge piece was too large for Pye’s south London studio and had to be constructed in an industrial fabrication workshop in Dagenham. Transportation costs to Norway alone were more than £40,000.
“It has been one of the most complex projects I’ve done, and Drammen was wonderful to work with,” Pye said. “But like all public sculpture, the proof of how good it is will be in hindsight – how much the people like it.”
“British sculpture is in a period of real excellence which is shown by the way its admired and used all over the world,” said Anne Rawcliffe-King, director of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. “The reputation has grown by degrees, and it is characterised by the inventiveness and attention to detail as well as expertise our artists have show, and Bill Pye is at the forefront of them.”
