Swimming pool or work of art?

One of the most amusing broadcast moments of the early 1990s was a radio debate between the painter Patrick Heron and various citizens of St Ives. The subject was the proposal to build a new art gallery in the town. Several angry Cornish voices were to be heard going on about a swimming pool – the alternative project. On the other side, plaintively upholding the cause of Modernist art, were the reedy, patrician tones of the artist (a public-school voice that Heron, a staunch socialist, was very sorry he had).

This almost farcical vocal contrast made vivid a continuing disagreement: on the one hand, bread-and-butter ‘community’ schemes; on the other, ‘elitist’ spending on cultural institutions from which the middle classes persist in getting more value than anyone else.

The issue was raised once again with the decision by the Lottery commission to give a rather large amount of dosh (£11.5 million) to the National Gallery towards the purchase of a fairly small picture by Raphael, the ‘Madonna of the Pinks’.