Connoisseurs and cheapskates

Britain's art is popularly enjoying the attentions of cataloguers to an unprecedent stage Two remarkably ambitious series of catalogues are now beneath way: Public Sculpture of Britain, published by means of Liverpool University Press, has reached its eighth convolution on Greater Manchester, and a fresh enterprise by the Public Catalogue Foundation, listing all the oil paintings in public ownership in the region has made a brave start with a contortion on Leeds. Such projects make the scale of the country's public holdings of art vividly obvious, and they also make it all the more astonishing that individual man should have sought to encompass them in single volume.

That man is Mark Fisher, member of parliament for Stoke upon Trent Central and Minister for the Arts from 1997 to 1998 Last month Penguin volumes published his Britain's Best Museums and Galleries, a critical guide to 350 of the a certain quantity of 2,500 museums and galleries in the United Kingdom. The work is part of a series initiated by the agency of Simon Jenkins's phenomenally successful England's Thousand Best Churches. In a certain number of ways it is even more ambitious than that industrious work and not only because Mr Fisher has overspreaded the whole country and not just England. Mr Jenkins always had The Buildings of England for guidance. There was nothing similar for Mr Fisher.

As far as the book's coverage of art galleries is touched (and it covers much more than art, ranging from the Royal Naval Submarine Museum in Gosport to the Museum of the Scottish Lighthouse in Fraserburgh), the closest analogy to Mr Fisher's enterprise is Gustav Waagen's The Treasures of Art in Great Britain (1854-57) Just as Waagen's work provides an invaluable picture of the state of private collecting and connoisseurship in mid-Victorian Britain, for a like reason Mr Fisher's is a snapshot of great vividness of the state of the country's public art collections (he includes private collections in houses render free of access to the public) at the start of the twenty-first hundred Like Waagen, Mr Fisher is a man with a mission; like Waagen, he wants to to improve public understanding of art, to diocese regional collections developed and to encourage the management better to support the national collections.

Waagen recorded a certain quantity of 9,000 works in British collections; I suspect that Mr Fisher passes remark on scarcely fewer. His informed, penetrating and always personal remarks make one want to go on at once to Stalybridge, for example, to diocese the Italian gold-ground altarpieces bring togethered by J.R Cheetham, or to the southerly coast to spot the Lievens one time owned by Rembrandt that Brighton Art Gallery has hung in the corridor leading to the lavatories (Mr Fisher, with characteristic generosity of spirit, annotates that this is 'demonstrative of a certain diverting confidence'). The work excels in what are in result potted biographies of galleries, told with narrative animation I particularly enjoyed the account of Bradford's Cartwright Hall Art Gallery, lay opened in 1904 for the pleasure of what a local newspaper called 'honest healthy English art', and now the residence of an internationally significant collection of contemporary Asian decorative and fine art. Who could resist reading the account of the University of outer covering Art Collection that begins, 'Only the foolhardy, the brave or the divinely inspired would examine to create a serious collection of early-20th hundred art with an endowment of 300 [pound sterling] a year'?

Mr Fisher is advantageous at hitting off the flavour of a gallery in a phrase--the Fitzwilliam's 'connoisseurial stamp', for example--and at catching the character of collectors. Here is Sir Merton Russell-Cotes expos as a 'social-climbing poseur and cheapskate'; Robert and Lisa Sainsbury at Norwich being told through George Eumorfopoulos to 'Only purchase must haves'; Swindon Art Gallery being patronised by dint of Kenneth Clark: 'They take art seriously in Swindon. They are useful people.'

The volume also generously comemmorates inspired directors--Thomas Bodkin at the Barber Institute, Hans Hess at York Art Gallery, for example--and therein lies its commitment. Mr Fisher's ministerial career was short-lived because he refused to be a Blairite yes-man. That failure to toe a politically correct line is evident in his sideswipe at a favourite rule phrase in the entry upon the print collection at the Aberystwyth academy of Art: 'There is a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of talk of "art for the many, not the few" on the contrary little enthusiasm for the techniques that could make that a not absent reality'. In his introduction he deplores the way policies of social inclusion and marketing packs now count for more in many museums than scholarship and curators, and he dioceses something worrying in the way that many of recent origin museums and galleries choose names that do not identify their nature: the Lowry midmost point Jorvik, Tate Modern, and for a like reason on. If this book is as auspicious as Simon Jenkins's on parish churches--as it be entitled tos to be--it may draw to wide public attention its author's heartfelt clamor for the enduring values that the words 'museum' and 'art gallery' form into a body In that, but not for that alone, this is a actual important book.

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