LIKE Liverpool and certain other cities in these islands which boomed with the Industrial Revolution, and then in recent years threatened to slump into urban dereliction, Glasgow has embarked since the Eighties on a campaign of urban renewal. It has refurbished and restored its city centre where many excellent late Victorian and turn of the century buildings gave the restorers a solid basis to work on and inside the past decade has built up a reputation as a live centre for the visual arts.
Money, hard work arid commercial promotion have all played their role, and private and public interests have combined to help each other out. In the mid Eighties, the new Scottish School was given much publicity in the British press and for a time had a strong vogue in London which now seems to have run out, or at least run down. There has been talk of a "cultural renaissance", and the new Gallery of Modern Art has been Glasgow's latest throw in the culture stakes. The official opening last Friday appears to have been a gala affair, though when attended the press viewing two days previously, it was plain that the staff and the builders would have a breakneck race to get things finished in time.
There were workmen everywhere, hammering and other sounds of hard labour vibrated through the building, and just outside, men in overalls were furiously spraying water on the pavements and steps, washing away the usual, telltale builders' sludge. At least the basic collection was up and in place, though pieces of equipment still littered some of the four floors, and the basement which is intended to be an arena for "interactive exhibits" was still empty workmen excepted. We were told that Adrian Wiszniewski was busy upstairs in the cafe, putting the last touches to his murals there but in fact he had put his brushes aside by then and was merely posing, not with obvious pleasure, for TV cameras.
The conversion itself seemed to me well done and well thought out in many respects, it parallells the conversion of the Royal Hospital in Kilmainham into the Irish Museum of Modern Art, since both are old buildings with a history. The project architect is Joan Scott. The Glasgow building has a less illustrious past than IMMA, hut it is much more centrally sited and inherently more spacious, at least in terms of large, open rooms. A handsome, colonnaded neo classical structure, it began as a town mansion, was later turned into a bank, for a time was part of the Royal Exchange and then, for several decades, a public library.
Work on the conversion began in 1994 and has cost £7.2 million Glasgow City Council has helped in the financing, so have the Scottish Arts Council and various EU funds, and certain business interests. Buying of works for the collection is mainly financed by the interest on an invested fund of £3 million. So far, 300 works have been acquired, with a sum available each year which varies between £250,000 and £400,000.
SO MUCH for figures. It is an open secret, or rather no secret at all, that Glasgow and Edinburgh are frequently in competition with one another and the Director of the Glasgow gallery, Julian Spalding, has been quoted as saying that he expects much better attendance than those for the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh "whose attendance figures," he added almost smugly, "are rather poor, as it happens." Spalding was also in fighting mood when he addressed the assembled press last week, and the statement he read out it was hardly a speech in the usual sense was virtually a manifesto.
He declared that the new gallery was "born screaming like a baby" and went on to deliver a slashing attack on latter day fashions and the kind of art "which is art only because the person who made it says it is.
He made it plain that his approach would be consciously popular, even populist, and quoted Picasso and Matisse as examples of artists whose work was at once popular and of the highest quality. Obviously, art speak, elitism and cultural pretentiousness are what he aims above all to avoid.
This approach is plain in the works on view, which make a big contrast to, say, the Liverpool Tate. The inclusion of Beryl Cook, for instance, is about as lowbrow as you can go and remain aesthetically respectable a.there are also various "primitives" mostly local ones, who seem to be there chief's a bait for the greater public. But it is not a "cosy" collection either the works of the contemporary Scottish school are prominent on the ground floor (which uses screens for.
Changing, by the way, so making maximum use of the floor space. These artists, including John Bellany, Peter Howson, Jack McFadyen and Ken Currie, are aggressive direct and unsubtle, with a solid debt to German Expressionism and a pronounced socio political message.
ALAN Davie is given a lot of wall space, and so is Bridget Riley, three of whose "stripe" paintings hang close together in an upstairs room and rather banal and dated they look to my eyes, though you should not say so to London critics. William Gear, one of Scotland's elder painters, wears well and has exhibited much abroad. Craigie Aitchison is currently being groomed for a large retrospective exhibition, though it is slightly disquieting to see how much his larger pictures resemble Francis Bacon's. A smattering of international names is included Niki de Saint Phalle, Vasarely, the photographs of Cartier Bresson and Sebastiao Salgado, Andy Goldsworthy but the gallery has not put "internationalism" first and local artists last. It has stood by Scottish talent, though you might argue about some of its choices in this field. In fact, in certain respects the policy is courageously provincial, though it probably would reject the term. A small squad of Australian Aborigine and Mexican primitive artists is added, and, rather bewilderingly, a few oriental abstract painters.
Sculpture is, literally, rather thin on the ground. A genuine curio is the Russian artist Edward Bersudsky who constructs Tinguely like machines which whirr and rasp and sometimes include painted wooden figures rather like used to be seen on old barrel organs and in fairgrounds. They are clever and idiosyncratic, a curious blend of nostalgia and the Machine Age, and though I doubt if Bersudsky is a major artist, the pieces do genuinely engage your attention.
The gallery will also mount large one man exhibitions, retrospectives and the like, and while Spalding certainly has stuck his neck out, he has wide ranging plans for the future. Plainly he has the city fathers behind him, and now we can sit hack and see if the projected attendance figure of 300,000 a year is optimistic, or realistic.
