Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum... Albert Marquet

          

'Is it Vienna?'
'Naw, it's jist alang the road fae Partick.'

           One of the most remarkable red sandstone buildings in Glasgow is the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum. The gallery contains pictures by some of the greatest names in the history of Western art – Giovanni Bellini, Botticelli, Titian, Rembrandt, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Carot, Jean-Francois Millet, Turner, Constable, Courbet, Monet, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Raeburn, Gauguin, Renoir, Seurat, Signac, Whistler, Fantin-Latour, Sisley, Vuillard, Picasso, Pissarro, Braque, Utrillo, Matisse, Émile Bernard, Raoul Dufy, André Derain, David Wilkie, George Leslie Hunter, Samuel Peploe, J. D. Ferguson, Francis Cadell, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, L.S. Lowry and probably the greatest and most famous religious artwork of the 20^th century, Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross. But despite the fame of these names and paintings, the picture I would chose for myself is one of the most obscure pictures on display. It is The Port of Algiers by Albert Marquet.

Port of Algiers by Albert Marquet

           It is very simple and very simply done. The predominant tone is one of a bright light-blue sea and sky of a north African morning on the Mediterranean. A two-master steam ship is anchored inside the harbour and just off the quay of the main dock-building. Or, is the ship just about to leave the harbour? I like to imagine that it is just about to leave.

    Who was the artist? Albert Marquet was a French artist born in 1875 in Bordeaux and who died in 1947 in Paris. He liked to paint port scenes and painted the ports and bays around Marseilles, Naples and Venice. He was also fond of painting the bridges and quays of Paris. He was one of the Fauves and a lifelong friend of Matisse and a student under Gustave Moreau. After his time with the Fauves he took on a more naturalistic style, painting water especially, in large areas of a simple tone. His paintings are unostentatious and deceptively simple, which is probably why he is not as well-known as his more-showy contemporaries. As far as I am concerned, he is a mood-painter. His paintings often have a predominant tone, invoking a particular time of day – the morning blue of Algiers, the setting-sun-orange of a Marseilles evening, the overcast blue-grey of Naples before the rain falls. In life he was said to be a quiet man of timid personality and I think that is reflected in his work. There is a contemplative feel to his work, the feeling of someone who liked to sit apart and watch, to think about what he sees but not to get too close to where the action is. He was not a participant observer. It is said he travelled widely. Marquet didn’t sell many works in his lifetime but other artists became aware of him. Was it because of Marquet’s timidity that he refused all honours? Or was it humility? Or, perhaps, a disdain for all awards and demonstrative recognition?

There is a local story that The Art Gallery and Museum was built back to front and when this was realised the architect committed suicide by jumping from the roof. The idea that an architect might be so obsessively dedicated to his art as to commit suicide when he finds fault with its execution is a wonderfully romantic notion. Unfortunately, it isn’t true. There wasn’t one architect but two: Sir John W. Simpson and E.J. Milner Allen. The building was opened in 1901. Sir John W. Simpson died in 1933 at the age of seventy-five. He also co-designed Wembley Stadium. E.J. Milner Allen died in 1912 at the age of fifty-two following years of ill-health. At the time of the commission a lot of people in Glasgow were not happy that two English architects were chosen to design the building, but that seems to have been forgotten now and the building sits very picturesquely in its position in the park surrounded by the trees and shrubby which have matured around it in the past 120 years. The building's design is a strange one, not only for Glasgow but for Scotland and Britain. It is Spanish Baroque in design and the centre of the north front was inspired by the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

North front of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery Museum and the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela.

 The architectural historian Ray McKenzie said of the building that ‘its peculiar eclecticism defies classification’. That would seem to be very fitting as it is also something which I have heard said of Glasgow in general. There is certainly a great similarity between the façade of the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela but, grand as the Kelvingrove building is, alongside the Cathedral of Santiago it looks like its dowdier little sister, not yet grown to full and flamboyant maturity. It seems appropriate though, that the Kelvingrove galleries should be inspired by what is probably the greatest site of pilgrimage in Spain considering the Kelvingrove is home to the greatest religious work of the 20^th century which is also Spanish, Dali's Christ of St. John of the Cross, inspiring pilgrims of a different and similar variety to visit the city from all over the world. It seems an incidence of synchronicity, as though the two - the Dali and the gallery - were destined for one another, and the architects adopted the appropriate Spanish inspiration which, of course, is impossible given that the painting wasn't painted until over 50 years after the gallery was constructed. But then, the mystically inspired might argue that the insignificant matter of time and the linear trajectory of cause and effect bare no relevance on the case. 

There is another religious element to Kelvingrove. The central porch in the north side holds a statue of the patron saint and founder of Glasgow, St. Mungo. Mungo is a pet-name for the saint based on an old Welsh word meaning ‘dear one’. St. Mungo’s given name was Kentigern, probably deriving from an old Brithon name meaning hound of the lord. The coat of arms of Glasgow depicts St. Mungo and representations of the four miracles he is said to have performed – a bird, a tree, a bell and a fish. There is verse to accompany this which Glasgow schoolchildren were once taught and may still be for all I know.

Here is the bird that never flew

Here is the tree that never grew
        Here is the bell that never rang
        Here is the fish that never swam

As for the bird, when he was a child St. Mungo is said to have restored life to a robin that one of his classmates had killed. The tree relates to a hazel tree. St. Mungo had been left to tend the fire at St. Serf’s monastery but being a typical young boy and bored with his task, he fell asleep and the fire went out. He grabbed a hazel branch and restarted the fire. The bell refers to a bell of miraculous properties brought from Rome to Glasgow by St. Mungo, to be used in services and for the mourning of the dead. The fish concerns the story of Queen Languoreth of Strathclyde. The King suspected her of having an affair and to trap her he asked to see a ring which he claimed she had given to her lover. In fact, he had thrown the ring into the river and when she was unable to produce it he would have all the excuse he needed to have her executed and take another wife. She sought the help of St. Mungo. He told one of the novices to go to the river and catch a fish. The novice did so, and inside the fish was found the ring which cleared the Queen’s name and saved her life.

I wonder what the King’s reaction was?

Glasgow Cathedral now sits on the site of St. Mungo’s burial.

St. Mungo/Kentigern

It is this side of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, bearing the statue of St. Mungo in the portico of its grand entrance, which is said to be facing the wrong way. The story is partly true. What many consider the rear of the building is the front of the building but it is not facing the wrong way. There was no mistake in the orientation of the building for which the architect of legend threw himself to his death. The building turns its back on Argyle Street, on the busy, everyday world with its mundane concerns, and faces the university on the hill. Most visitors approach the gallery from Dumbarton Road, either by foot, bus, of from the nearby underground station in Partick (now called Kelvin Hall), and regard the rear entrance as the front because it faces the main road. But visitors were always intended to drive around the building and enter by the steps surrounding the portico. It is easy to picture carriages sweeping around the avenues on either side of the building and depositing the men and women in their Edwardian grandeur before the steps.

If you can’t imagine such a scene, it is recreated in a film adaptation of Edith Warton’s House of Mirth filmed in 2000 and starring Gillian Anderson as Lily Bart. The Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum doubles as the New York Opera House of the early 1900s. In fact many of the exteriors are filmed in Glasgow and Lily Bart’s house is located in one of the grand Victorian villas of Great Western Road. She also meets her lover at the steps of Kelvinbridge underground station.

Kelvin Bridge Underground as New York c.1900

I like the fact the building turns its back on the world. Like Glasgow itself, it stands in no need of objective appreciation. Its knows its own worth - like Marquet, who stood in no need of honours and like T J Honeyman, who bought the Dali painting for Glasgow despite the controversy involved. Glasgow art students petitioned against the purchase and others complained that the cost of £8,200 was too much for a painting by a living artist. I suspect a lot of the complaints were due to the fact that it was a blatantly Catholic work by a Catholic artists, despite the fact that the gallery has numerous religious paintings from the Renaissance - but then they are sanctified by age. One of the more open complaints at the time, cited in the Glasgow Herald, was that the image was 'Papish propaganda'.

The attitude of the art-students of Glasgow doesn't surprise me as art-students in general - despite what they might think of themselves - are among the most conformist and conservative of any student body. Their conception of what constitutes 'Art' hasn't changed since Marcel Duchamp exhibited his Fountain in 1917. But, whereas for Duchamp his Fountain was only a momentary expression of his artistic philosophy which he moved on from, less imaginative minds have continued with Duchamp's momentary experiment which has led to the dominance of Conceptual-Art in the 20th and 21st Centuries. Is this why the art scene has never been more irrelevant and redundant than it is now? Duchamp perhaps saw the dead-end that conceptual art would lead to and gave up art for chess. Maybe the present art-school should start a chess club.

During the 1990s I was a regular visitor to the Art-School Union on a Friday and Saturday night. The students I met there, despite their appearance, were among the most repressed, painfully self-conscious, and conformist group I have ever come across in any student body. It was impossible to pick-up a woman there without a formal introduction and a dating period lasting at least six-months, probably chaperoned. They were not looking for casual sex - they were looking for a relationship. Their morality and manners - and what they were 'rebelling' against - were formed by their middle-class upbringing. Mentally, they wouldn't have been out of place in the 1920s-1950s. They didn't have the free and easy manner of life of other student I have known, such as medical students - or the city of Glasgow in general. I don't think it is a coincidence that the only artists of any significance to have emerged from Glasgow Art-School in the past 50 years have had a working-class background.

The attitude towards the rebuilding of the Art-School after the recent fires seems to exemplify the mentality of the place. They are prepared to pay a fortune to have it rebuilt exactly as Charles Rennie-Mackintosh designed it. It seems to reflect a failure of confidence in the present. This might be the prefect opportunity to have a young Glasgow architect redesign a new Art-School to fit the needs, and incorporate the innovations, of the present age. But the choice to restore the old building seems symptomatic of a lack of imagination that the original board who commissioned Mackintosh did not share. It demonstrates an insecurity and uncertainty about the present and the future. Incidentally, I have never liked Mackintosh's style. I find it too twee. It is the style of art old women like, women of a genteel persuasion, art and furniture to accompany afternoon tea. It is the visual equivalent of those who listen to classical music to relax - or to sleep. The Classic FM of art - easy listening, easy viewing. Art as a sedative.

Glasgow, unlike the Art-School, is a city confident and at ease with itself. It is self-secure and in no need of gaudy self-advertisement. I have lived in London and London is an insecure city. It is always comparing itself to Paris and New York but London doesn’t have the energy of New York or the finesse and sang-froid of Paris. At least once a week the London Evening Standard has an article on how much better London is than Paris – methinks the lady doth protest too much. Glasgow is said to have a rivalry with Edinburgh. The rivalry is entirely one-sided. Glasgow has no need to prove itself over Edinburgh. Edinburgh may be the capital and postcard pretty in a very middle-brow way but Glasgow knows its importance; culturally, economically, socially, nationally. Glasgow has always set itself apart. Whereas Edinburgh’s new town architecture was an attempt to imitate and incorporate English fashions into Edinburgh town-living for the middle-classes, Glasgow allayed itself with northern European and North American models, incorporating a grid-plan street structure like New York and Chicago and an architectural style which went upwards in a practical sense, utilizing a limited amount of space in a small country rather than have every home isolated in the English manner where every Englishman’s home is his castle no matter that the castle is only fit for a pygmy to live in and results in the bland uniformity of the same mediocre structures stretching to an infinity of banal similitude.

The Glasgow tenements, for the wealthy as well as the poor, lent themselves to a communal living, a living on friendly terms with one's neighbours resulting in an openness and lack of insularity, evident in the character of the people. Edinburgh, like London, is a city of curtain-twitchers. If a Glaswegian sees anything worth watching they will throw the window open and lean out. They might even join in with a yell or two. 'Is it a private argument or can anybody join in?' It is a question of attitude and seems to have more in common with the Spanish and French nations than the puritanical Anglo-Saxon or Scottish Calvinist inheritance of the East-Coast.

Edinburgh is, perhaps, too near Fife.

Marseille reminds me of Glasgow. The people seem to have a lot in common, perhaps because they are both port cities and people of a certain temperament live in port cities. For those who would claim that Leith, also, was a port, I would respond by saying that the business of Edinburgh, like the business of London, was commerce, and neither city was entirely dependent on its port to the extent that Glasgow's fortune was inseparable from its port activity. Many business men of Glasgow were solely reliant on shipping and many had been to sea themselves. In Edinburgh and London, although many of the merchants might have investments in shipping, shipping and sea trade was not their sole concern. And if they had been to sea it was often only as a passenger, and a first-class one at that.

The humour of the people of Marseille is very similar to the humour of Glasgow, as is the general attitude. I could say the same of Hamburg, New York, Palermo and Naples. As well as being port towns the are also cities with a predominantly working-class population, or blue-collar as the Americans say, even New York. Manhattan might be famous as a financial centre but Manhattan is only one of New York’s boroughs and even that borough has a large proportion of blue-collar residents - or did, until the curse of gentrification took place there also. The people of these cities have a down-to-earth quality, which, I suppose, means a lack of pretentiousness and affectation. They are straight-forward when dealing with one another. Yet despite that grounded attitude they are prone to great flights of fancy and are wonderful story-tellers in the oral tradition, handing down tales of local events and family happenings from generation to generation till their origins are lost from living memory and they enter the realm of local legend and myth. These cities have an exuberance, a vitality, a disorder, and a lack of restraint. They are dirty and dishevelled. They have an anarchic quality to them. The English make quite a fuss over their fabled – and much exaggerated - English eccentricity. But the reason their eccentricity is so noticeable to them and worth mentioning is because it is so rare. The English make such a cult of English eccentricity because they are the least eccentric and most pragmatic people on the face of the earth. On the other hand, the Irish and the Scots, particularly the West Coast Scots, are truly eccentric but never mention the fact because with them it is the norm and in no way remarkable. In fact, if you wanted to hear the purest, most un-self-conscious eccentricity imaginable you could do no better than to eavesdrop on two men from Glasgow in conversation, the Surreality of which would drive Andre Breton and Louis Aragon into orgasmic ecstasy. To the Scots and Irish, the English eccentric appears to be someone trying too hard, too calculated, too contrived, too affected, and completely unnatural. And speaking of eccentricity, Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum turning, so to speak, its back on the world reminds me again of Marseille. Marseille is situated on one of the most beautiful spots on the Mediterranean, but in truly eccentric fashion the city seems to turn its back on the sea even though the soul reason for the city’s existence is the sea. Its people also share something of the same disreputable reputation as those of Glasgow. Is it a consequence of the historic poverty of these places – despite the proximity also of great wealth - or because of an inextricable relationship with the sea? Has a certain anarchic and undisciplined and irreverent attitude developed from centuries of men coming and going and, quite often, never coming back? I’m sure there must be a sociological or anthropological study of the shared characteristics of port towns somewhere. Perhaps someday, when I have the inclination, I’ll look for it. How long might such an influence last?

It is quite a number of years now since Glasgow was a major port, a place of shipyards and warehouses. Its relationship to the sea is only a memory these days, found in City names and in the transport museum on the Clyde, and in the stories told of relatives who sailed on ships or worked in the yards. But still the attitude of a maritime town persists. It might take many generations before the fundamental character of the people is altered. As Maurice Chevalier sang sentimentally of Paris, ‘… please stay the same.’ At least in some things.