London's Museums: Let them eat praise

The politicians and the great and good or equivalent were patting themselves on the back. Under the enormous twisting glass Medusa tendrils of Dale Chihuly's chandelier the crowd at the Victoria&Albert Museum hoovered up tasty canapes and drank nicely chilled white wine. London & Partners "the official promotion company for the capital" bash to encourage the press to get the message out:  London's museums are more Googled than those of any place in the world.  A video message from our blond bombshell mayor Boris Johnson Visitor numbers are way up. Americans are coming in droves. I like a good party but my response to this one was outrage.                                     .
  .The budgets for London's museums are being cut way back ==again. Much of the National Gallery is closed to visitors because its security staff has been on strike for months. Tough luck for all those millions who want to see Leonardo or Veronese.  One or another of the British Museum's galleries are often shut because of staff shortages. The V&A, whose deputy director spoke at the party and which is launching an expansion into East London, has cut curatorial staff so severely that some departments feel they are bleeding to death.
    Hey but why spoil the party? Well because the situation is terrible. Either the government must support the art institutions that are the pride of the country and bring millions of visitors and pounds sterling to the capital every year or it must alter the tax structure to encourage private individuals and corporations to take over their running costs. It is that simple.


 

Making a Splash: Sickert in Dieppe

Under valued, under appreciated but coming up fast, at last.




The photograph of a handsome man in his sixties, hair slicked back, hands on hips, wearing a thigh length, horizontally stripped bathing costume faces the title page "Sickert in Dieppe," a rewarding exhibition at the Pallant House Gallery in Cirencester.  He looks straight into the camera while knee high in the foaming waves of the English Channel off the Normandy coast. The year was 1920. In fact he might have been staring inland at the Royal Hotel on the front yet nothing about him connects him with the painting of that hotel he completed in 1894, more than a quarter of a century before. It is charming, delightful even and safe. Yet only 8 years later, still in Dieppe he painted "The Fair at Night" seen on the right. And "Le Grand Duquesnne, Dieppe" (left) one of four powerful paintings commissioned for a restaurant which the timid owner rejected. This rewarding, revelatory show gives plenty of support to those who argue that if Sickert remained in Dieppe instead of returning to England he would be far more famous than he is today. He is a much better painter than some French contemporaries who are better known (Sisley comes swiftly to mind), more highly praised and whose work sells for more money.