A lovable, impossible man: Bryan Robertson, gifted curator and Spectator critic

Andrew Lambirth claims that Bryan Robertson was ‘the greatest director the Tate Gallery never had’; but on the evidence of this book, he would have been a disaster — chaotic, hopeless with money and eternally late. What he actually was was the inspired and inspiring director of the Whitechapel Gallery from 1952 to 1969. He also wrote on art and ballet for The Spectator and was an esteemed contributor to The Critics radio programme. But he did not get the Tate appointment he longed for and was effectively forgotten by l990, so it’s a bit mysterious why he is being written about now.

Lambirth is careful to say that his book is not a biography but a ‘compendium of Robertsoniana’ — which is posh-speak for a jumble of old articles, interviews, catalogue introductions, poor-quality photographs and personal reminiscences, thrown together in vaguely chronological order but with no attempt at editing. The first few chapters are like wading through soup, but one gradually gets hooked on the man.

Robertson was a very remarkable character. Born in 1925 to an ‘ordinary’ family in Streatham, he suffered from chronic asthma, which meant he spent much of his childhood in bed reading. His mother would bring him art books from the local library and take him to the cinema. He realised early on that ‘I lived through my eyes’.

He got a sub-editing job on the Studio magazine, went to Paris for a year and was offered a job at the Lefevre Gallery when he was just 23. Then Heffers in Cambridge asked him to set up a gallery over the bookshop and he made a huge success of it, showing Picasso, Matisse, Gauguin, Braque and Cézanne, which led to his appointment as director of the Whitechapel at the very young age of 27.