‘When artists were just tolerated’

In San Francisco in the late 1970s you could cover the entire modern art gallery scene, both commercial galleries and temporary exhibitions in museums or other public institutions, between a leisurely Saturday breakfast in Sausalito on the far side of Golden Gate Bridge – eggs Benedict and coffee perhaps – and a late lunch in the centre. Anyone who lived in London in the 1930s could have done something similar. Today, Galleries Magazine lists some 250 galleries which spread from Teddington to Hampstead and from Hammersmith to Hoxton. In 1935, there were fewer than a dozen dealers’ galleries focusing on contemporary art and they were all within walking distance of each other. Everyone knew that if you wanted to find out what was really going on you had to go to Paris. Similarly in 1975, Californians knew that, although Los Angeles was less parochial than San Francisco, the phrase ‘where it’s at’ applied only to New York.

Now that London is an increasingly cosmopolitan centre which aims to vie with Paris and New York, with the wisdom of hindsight, how pathetically backward our capital’s public gallery scene in the Thirties seems. The Hayward, ICA, Barbican and Serpentine galleries were non-existent. The Tate, of course, was a single building 70 years ago, on only one bank of the Thames. Its director was J.B. Manson, an ex-painter and ex-secretary of the mildly Post-Impressionist Camden Town Group, who failed to expand his taste and was overfond of drink, by all accounts. He was regularly bailed out of police stations after midnight by Sir Evan Charteris, the long-suffering chairman of his trustees, and he famously misbehaved himself by insulting a lady and jumping on the table at an important dinner in Paris, crowing like a cock. Typically, the newspapers gave the credit for staging this bohemian incident to the director of the National Gallery, the seemingly prim young Kenneth Clark, father of Alan and subsequently Lord Clark of Civilisation.