Sadly, the next Hayward exhibition, starting in early September, doesn’t promise to be the harbinger of more invigorating times. It’s an anthology of post-war British art drawn exclusively from the extensive Arts Council Collection. Since the Hayward has looked after the Arts Council Collection for almost 20 years, this sounds like a lazy way of staging an exhibition. Nobody is going to refuse you a loan, there are no transport costs and the storage problems are minimal.
It certainly doesn’t look like the kind of idea that will start the new director’s tenure at the Hayward with a bang. He is Ralph Rugoff, by the way, who has been in his post since the spring — probably not long enough to be blamed for this show. But subsequently? Well, an Antony Gormley retrospective is promised, and, since the Wilson twins have been appointed artists in residence at the South Bank Centre, there will have to be a show of unwatchable videos not long after that. Then there is going to be a look at the development of contemporary painting during the past 40 years. What’s the difference between that exhibition and the one fast approaching? Well, it covers a shorter period, examines just one art form and will be international in scope.
Is your metaphorical mouth watering? No, neither is mine. Such concentration on near-contemporary European and American art overlooks several important groups of art-lovers to whom the Hayward used to cater. These people tend to enjoy shows of works by single, historically important artists, as well as historical surveys. They have already seen enough work by YBAs to last them for years. But Rugoff is obviously caught fast in the moribund modernist project. According to his boss, Jude Kelly, artistic director of the South Bank Centre, he “isn’t afraid to provoke. He enjoys the iconoclast in an artist or artistic proposition and knows how to communicate that iconoclasm to audiences in unlikely ways”.
So why isn’t the next Hayward show precisely one of those eclectic surveys that many people find instructive and entertaining? In theory, it could be, but the older the art concerned, the less it gets a look-in. The closer we get to the present, the greater the number of artists. The 1940s are represented by just two painters, Bacon and Bomberg, while the 1950s are represented by 12, and the following two decades by only a few more. The 1990s, on the other hand, are represented by no fewer than 32 artists, and the Noughties, though only half expired, by 24.
Personally, I’d have preferred a selection that would have reminded me of some of those British artists who, though once praised to the skies, are now half forgotten. Where in this survey of British art 1946- 2006 are Graham Sutherland or John Minton, both hugely influential in the 1950s? Where is Keith Vaughan, or William Coldstream, or Claude Rogers? Where are John Bratby and the other kitchen-sink painters?
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One of the essays in the catalogue for this exhibition is by Marjorie Allthorpe-Guyton, who is on the purchasing committee of the Arts Council Collection. More pertinently, she is also director of visual arts at the Arts Council England. Paradoxically, however, the Arts Council has had nothing to do with the Arts Council Collection for more than 20 years. In 1983, it was handed over to the Hayward to administer.
At the same time, the visual-arts department of the Arts Council was transferred lock, stock and barrel to the South Bank Centre. Its head, the late, feisty and resourceful Joanna Drew, moved with her well-trained and ambitious staff from their high-ceilinged, elegant offices on Piccadilly to a desk and a phone in an anonymous building behind the Festival Hall. The experience must have been dispiriting: try borrowing a masterpiece from the Louvre if you work for the South Bank Centre. In international art circles, the Arts Council had some clout.
It was around that point that the Hayward Gallery’s exhibitions programme began to go downhill. Not long after, the well-known process of empire-building demanded that the Arts Council England acquire a new (and not necessarily improved) visual-arts department. That’s the trouble with most reforms: they only make matters worse, especially if they’re iconoclastic.
How to Improve the World: 60 Years of British Art is at the Hayward Gallery, SE1, September 7-November 19