Why we need a National Gallery of Wales

Desmond Clifford

Uniquely among the capitals of the British Isles, Cardiff has no National Gallery. In each of London, Dublin and Edinburgh such a gallery is at the centre of the nation’s identity and, into the bargain, attracts thousands, if not millions, of visitors. In Wales, something’s missing.

Wales has a National Museum which serves the dual purpose of butt-joining the nation’s treasures – the museum artefacts, and its art collection. It’s a wonderful institution in many ways.

Among other treasures, it houses the magnificent Davies Sisters collection, which transformed the Museum in the mid twentieth century to international standing.

A museum is not an art gallery. Museums curate artifacts which illuminate history. In the very best sense, a museum looks backwards. An art gallery has an entirely different function. Art, no matter when it was conceived, is alive and projects forward. It invites us to see and reflect on the human condition.

A National Gallery says something about who we are, both in the “here and now of us-in-Wales”, but also about the “all-of-us-everywhere”.

Quite recently I spent a morning at the National Gallery in Dublin. It tells Ireland’s story, for example, through the collection of Jack B Yeats and art associated with St Patrick. The most popular work in the museum is the thrilling Caravaggio painting The Taking of Christ (the incredible provenance of which deserves a book all to itself).

It seems strange that Wales doesn’t have a national gallery standing alongside the other cultural institutions developed through the twentieth century.

There’s no obvious reason for this. It’s a gap in the nation’s cultural landscape.

I was switched onto this topic by a recent John Barnie essay in New Welsh Review (#137) reviewing the “No Welsh Art” exhibition mounted by Peter Lord at the National Library in Aberystwyth. The exhibition is finished but I thoroughly recommend John Barnie’s essay.

Priority

The main reason Wales doesn’t have a National Gallery is that no one’s ever been bothered enough to make it happen. The arts authorities and Welsh Government have never made it a priority.

If you look at galleries elsewhere, many were founded originally by super-rich benefactors and Wales has had fewer of those. There are campaigners, to be sure, and no one has done more than the admirable Peter Lord.

Literature in Wales, both Welsh and English, benefitted from communities of motivated “literary entrepreneurs”, but visual art has had nothing like the same organised energy behind it. It’s also expensive.

Quite a lot can be achieved in literature with modest sums while a new museum, for example, is a substantial commitment. Without a large philanthropic community, investment falls on public bodies and the government. The first step, though, is ambition.

Culture

Let’s reflect on the first 25 years of devolution. So far as culture is concerned, the scorecard is mixed but, ultimately, underwhelming. In fairness, there has been some progress. Creative Wales, established by the Welsh Government, does good work.

Wales has undoubtedly grown as a centre for film and TV production, building on the track record of our television companies (BBC Wales, S4C, ITV Wales) and their network of independent producers, alongside powerful and dynamic operators like Bad Wolf.

“Mr Burton”, directed by Marc Evans, demonstrates top-drawer excellence; if a better film was made in Britain this year, then it passed me by.

Other areas have fared less well, with piecemeal provision. The debacle surrounding the National Theatre was depressing and Michael Sheen can hardly be expected to carry that weight forever.

Affordability in government is about choices. The National Museum has struggled to keep its doors open because of a leaky roof; instability like this makes it hard to laud the Welsh Government uncritically as guardian of the nation’s culture.

Ireland provides a reasonable comparator. The Irish Arts Council is allocated 384million Euro next year while the Welsh Arts Council will get around £42m-ish (bundling revenue and capital together).

Some caution is required with comparisons – they’re not like-for-like – but even so, the disparity is obvious and hardly suggests Wales is fully stimulating a key area of natural comparative advantage.

Ireland woke up decades ago to the importance of using its cultural offering as both an economic driver and a source of small-nation soft power.

It would be unfair to characterise successive Welsh Governments as philistine, but thus far, they’re treading in the lowly foothills of culture’s significance.

Transformational

A quantum shift is required. For the most part, Creative Industries provision in the devolution era has added incrementally and modestly to what it inherited, but there has so far been no transformational reprioritisation.

It is sometimes said that Wales lacks depth and variety of tradition in the visual arts.  I really don’t accept this. For historical reasons, Wales generated less art than some parts of Britain, largely because of the scarcity of rich patrons and a sustaining bourgeois class, but the tradition of Welsh art is very visible and amply contextualised by Peter Lord and others.

The issue isn’t No Welsh Art, but the absence of a proper place to put it. A National Gallery for Wales.

Here’s my proposal.

The National Museum stands alongside Cardiff City Hall on the Cathays Park estate, the grand legacy of the world’s one-time coal capital. These days the City Hall is essentially a wedding venue. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s a scandalous underuse of the country’s finest public building.

Once, the City Hall could have been the home of Senedd Cymru. I remember the arguments very well; an intransigent city council had great plans for the building. Here we are 25 years later with nothing going on except sweeping up confetti. It’s a building in need of rescue.

My proposal is that the City Hall become the National Gallery of Wales.  The building’s a work of art all by itself. The art currently in the Museum next door should form its foundation collection but that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of pictures in the vaults of Welsh galleries unseen by the public – a cultural scandal.

There are large Kyffin Williams landscapes hanging in the Welsh Government building in Cathays Park hidden from everyone except the cleaners and security-guards; put them in the gallery. The contents of Peter Lord’s No Welsh Art exhibition; put them in the gallery.

Exhibitions

Think of the exhibitions that could be attracted to a properly functioning National Gallery of Wales.

I see Ireland’s National Gallery is attracting these exhibitions over the next year: Picasso, Turner, Blake, European Drawings and Hilma af Klint, the outstanding Swedish surrealist. I’ll likely buy a plane ticket and a couple of nights in a Dublin hotel at some point to see one or two of them (Hilma af Klint as my top priority).

Ireland’s national gallery opened as a private venture in 1864 with a stock of only 112 pictures (for comparison, the Davies sisters bequeathed 260 works to the museum). The art tradition in Ireland was hardly any better than Wales, yet today the gallery stands very fair comparison with most medium/ small countries in Europe.

Wales already has the art stock in the Museum, it just needs to be rehoused next door.

This, in turn, would allow the National Museum free rein to regear itself with a specific museum focus curating the nation’s past. There is so much more it could do if it were liberated and resourced properly.  We need to empty the vaults and get Wales’ art and artefacts circulating around the country.

It would be uplifting to see some vision on Creative Industries in next year’s election manifestoes, with Big Thoughts rather than tinkering.

In the Plaid Cymru Co-operation Agreement with the Welsh Government, the idea of a Contemporary Art Gallery of Wales was floated. It was a great idea but put the cart before the horse. Start with a proper National Gallery, then the Contemporary version – that’s the right order.

Cyfarthfa Castle

There’s a perfect home for the Contemporary Art Gallery at Cyfarthfa Castle in Merthyr – where better?

Currently the populous Valleys, the region which generated the bulk of Wales’ wealth, houses no national cultural institutions (though Blaenavon’s excellent Big Pit forms part of the Museum estate).

I’m not ducking the fact that all this costs proper money.  The key is for the Welsh Government to see Creative Industries as an investment, not a sunk-cost burden after everything else has been paid for.

It will bring visitors, create jobs, build education and promote Wales.  Cardiff has developed as a centre for sport, entertainment and culture; a National Gallery would add handsomely to the offer.

The city has genuine potential to become one of the great culture and entertainment centres, not just of Britain, but Europe.

Whoever forms the next Welsh Government shouldn’t just mind the shop they inherit.  They should shape things, build the nation’s institutions, put Wales on the map. Over devolution’s first 25 years, the score card on culture is mixed but on the timid side, modest rather than transformational.

Governments have continued to see culture as cost, not investment, while they’ve spaffed millions on pointless, failed “economic” projects which were never much more than hopeful punts.

It’s time to see culture as an industry and economic priority, and a National Gallery for Wales as one of its pillars.