Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain
288
Transformative Beauty: Art Museums in Industrial Britain
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Overview
Why did British industrial cities build art museums? By exploring the histories of the municipal art museums in Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester, Transformative Beauty examines the underlying logic of the Victorian art museum movement. These museums attempted to create a space free from the moral and physical ugliness of industrial capitalism. Deeply engaged with the social criticism of John Ruskin, reformers created a new, prominent urban institution, a domesticated public space that not only aimed to provide refuge from the corrosive effects of industrial society but also provided a remarkably unified secular alternative to traditional religion. Woodson-Boulton raises provocative questions about the meaning and use of art in relation to artistic practice, urban development, social justice, education, and class. In today's context of global austerity and shrinking government support of public cultural institutions, this book is a timely consideration of arts policy and purposes in modern society.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804780537 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/21/2012 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 288 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
TRANSFORMATIVE BEAUTY
Art Museums in Industrial BritainBy AMY WOODSON-BOULTON
Stanford University Press
Copyright © 2012 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-7804-6
Chapter One
RUSKIN, RUSKINIANS, AND CITY ART GALLERIES
Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester established city art museums in 1867, 1877, and 1883, respectively. By the middle of the nineteenth century, exposés and novels had stereotyped industrial cities as driven by greed and intractably divided by class; Manchester, the epicenter and leader of these changes, became known as "Cottonopolis." Against this still-powerful image, the museum movement reveals the complexities and contradictions of people striving to improve a system of profound structural inequality. In Birmingham, leaders embraced sermons on the sanctity of civic service and made culture central to their larger project of municipal reform, while the Society of Art applauded lectures by its president, William Morris, and put his ideas into the city art museum's collection and catalogues. Meanwhile, in Liverpool, class divisions and a parsimonious town council forced the art reformers to be creative, under the guidance of one city councilor who sought John Ruskin's approval and another who was determined to bring nude sculptures and paintings to the people. And in Manchester, a close network of ambitious and radical reformers oversaw the gifting of the Royal Manchester Institution to the city, while also trying to bring art to the poorest in the slums of Ancoats on principles explicitly derived from Ruskin. They engaged deeply with Ruskin's writings and often with the man himself, but, as we will see, he did not share their hopes for liberal reform and civic projects. These museum advocates held many of the same assumptions about the role of art in reforming industrial society, but each city had its own politics and economy, and each found a different way of creating a new public space for art.
The histories of these three museums show the extent to which they owed their founding to several (sometimes overlapping) groups: highly motivated reformers convinced of art's efficacy and of industrial society's glaring deficiencies; others who felt that museums would provide excellent models for both working-class behavior and industrial design; and the many citizens who enjoyed art museums' prestige and cultural capital. Indeed, in this historical moment, "art" as a concept meant many things to many people, and could fill many different social roles; this is ultimately why cities built art museums. Reformers believed that art could effect social healing, promote moral and cultural regeneration, and train workers to become alive to beauty in the world and in design. Even those who did not accept art's reforming potential, however, felt that art had a particular ability to raise the civic profile and provide a key arena for genteel sociability. Most supporters associated the resulting public spaces with the domestic sphere, set apart from the corrosive effects of industrial society, and emphasized the importance of art for the experience it offered of beauty, morality, and narrative. Yet these new public collections, like the homes they emulated, depended on the wealth generated from the same rampant commercialism they sought to beautify and soften.
Because of the very multiplicity of art's possible uses and champions, the histories of these three regional art museums allow us to examine the conflicts that emerged over the use and meaning of art. These political battles show us the extent to which middle-class museum advocates acted out of differing motives; the depth of many reformers' discontent with industrial, capitalist society; and, finally, the way that ideas played out in different local circumstances. In practice, financial and social pressures often overwhelmed the idealists, and those reformers most firmly committed to using art as a means of promoting real social change for workers frequently saw their pet projects subsumed into the "ritual" spaces of middle-class use and display. Thus, as others have recognized, museums emerged in the nineteenth century as vital sites for class expression: the middle classes showed their cultural uniqueness—their difference from both the aristocracy and the working classes—through precisely this kind of cultural project. Yet at the same time, these museums were not the product of a unified middle class but emerged out of continual debates between groups with conflicting visions of art's purpose.
Reformers overcame a long-standing British aversion to taxation, and an even longer-standing suspicion of art as foreign, idolatrous, and aristocratic, to make cities provide art to their citizens. This use of art helped to expand and extend the role of government to include new aspects of citizens' welfare, thereby forming a key part of the remaking of British government that had begun earlier in the century. Indeed, in Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, the movements to establish municipal art museums faced considerable opposition precisely because to do so meant a significant redefinition not only of art, but also of the role of the local city council and of the very idea of government in British society. In turn, however, governments transformed the meaning of art, putting it on the municipal payroll in order to proclaim the achievement of local self-rule and the success of their industrial cities. Reformers such as George Dawson, John Henry Chamberlain, and Whitworth Wallis in Birmingham; James Allanson Picton and Philip Henry Rathbone in Liverpool; and Thomas Coglan Horsfall and John Ernest Phythian in Manchester hoped that art museums would both represent and realize a new relationship between the government and the governed, between the middle and the working classes, between beauty and the industrial city. Ultimately, these histories show the development and enactment of a particular understanding of art as providing an experience of beauty that could counteract the moral and physical ugliness of industrial society. This powerful idea created lasting institutions that, perhaps unsurprisingly, rarely lived up to their founders' hopes.
BIRMINGHAM: MAKING THE CITY BEAUTIFUL
In Birmingham, art became a dominant metaphor in civic development as the municipal government remade itself and rebuilt much of the city center over the course of the 1860s and 1870s. Birmingham was a manufacturing town with relatively stable employment and many small workshops, and the municipal art museum played a crucial role in embodying both the town council's new goals and the ruling elites' hope to connect all classes in the pursuit of beauty and good design. Debates about art focused on the extent to which good government might solve society's problems without prohibitively heavy rates of taxation and on how to make art accessible and useful for the greatest number of people. In the end, the city got an art museum through a clever use of the wealth and civic space created (literally) by Birmingham's municipal socialism.
Until the middle of the nineteenth century, the Birmingham Town Council met in a pub and had a reputation for penny-pinching narrow-mindedness. Three influential Birmingham ministers—Unitarians George Dawson and H. W. Crosskey and Congregationalist R. W. Dale—helped to create a new "civic gospel" by arguing that, as Dale put it, "perhaps a strong and able Town Council might do almost as much to improve the conditions of life in the town as Parliament itself." All three men gave municipal reform a spiritual meaning; although from different traditions of Dissenting Protestantism, they shared an emphasis on the duty of public service and the interpretation of Christianity as the emulation of Christ's work in the world. Crosskey preached that "there is no distinction between that which is practically useful and that which is divinely good," and thus on the possibilities for "divine service" in working to improve the conditions in a large town. Dale brought an eloquent and respectable zeal to the continuing reform in Birmingham local government; as a dedicated minister and scholar, he built on Dawson's approach and brought it to the wider evangelical Nonconformist community.
George Dawson set the tone for much subsequent municipal reform. Like later advocates of government cultural provision, he understood the experience of beauty in terms deeply influenced by the works of John Ruskin. As the Spectator wrote, Dawson was "a kind of literary middleman between writers like Carlyle and Ruskin and those ordinary English manufacturers, or merchants, or tradesmen, who like thought but like it well illustrated." Like Ruskin, he argued for the importance of beauty in everyday life; he judged the accomplishments of a society in terms of the quality of its arts and the quality of its citizens' lives, and he believed that art could bring people closer to God through nature. In his sermon "Beauty and Purity in Towns," Dawson interpreted scripture in ways that show Ruskin's influence, particularly his idea of artistic truth to nature. Just as Ruskin had described art as a window on nature, which he conceived as a kind of sacred scripture, Dawson made nature into a mirror reflecting God's glory: "No man can see God and live, and therefore we have, as it were, our backs to Him, and Nature has spread out a mirror, so that we may see as much as possible for us without being dimmed with glory." His reading gave new social meaning and importance to the artist, who, Dawson said, "has a great vocation—to hold up the glass to Nature until man can behold the glory, and, looking into the picture, be tempted to go back to its original, and see, perchance for the first time, how glorious it is." Nature is God's mirror; art is nature's.
If, as Dawson concluded, "pursuit of beauty becomes a duty to all," this also meant that the municipality had to ensure that everyone had the opportunities and abilities to perceive beauty, which could only come as a result of education: "To a well-taught man everything is beautiful. There are no ugly things in the world but ourselves—nothing but the unruly working of carnality." Also, it was the government's responsibility to give its citizens beautiful surroundings since, as he further explained, "he who would get and keep within himself the sense of beauty must look upon things that are beautiful, in order that the law of assimilation may be carried out." Dawson even suggested the formation of a "Beauty Society," which would be made up of "educated men, artists, and all true patriots, and it should have for its object the seeking after beauty"—everything from limiting the smoke pouring out of manufacturers' chimneys to providing architectural advice to homebuilders. Echoing Ruskin's discussions of the role of the artist as an interpreter of God's creation, Dawson gave these ideas new meaning as the inspiration for civic activism.
Heavily influenced by Dale, Crosskey, and Dawson, Liberal reformers believed in the importance of art and culture, and in civic activism as a Christian duty, as they worked to improve their city. The Birmingham Liberal Party thus expanded both the power of the town council and the council's role in providing cultural and educational opportunities as mutually reinforcing aspects of the same project. One sign of Dawson's impact is that the first four chairmen of the Free Libraries Committee were members of his congregation, as were others intimately involved in art education. Other evidence comes from Crosskey's church, which included many of those who would most influence the cultural policy of the new municipal administration. The resulting preponderance in the city's Liberal leadership of a Nonconformist, active Christianity was not lost on contemporaries; one critic wrote in 1871 that the town council was being taken over by "Unitarians, Dawsonites."
Birmingham's new Liberals reshaped city and national politics by combining large secular educational and political reform goals with local organizing. Indeed, many of the most influential political leaders, including minister Dale, city councilors George Dixon and Jesse Collings, and mayor and then member of Parliament Joseph Chamberlain, first worked together and learned their organizational skills through founding the Liberal Association in Birmingham in 1865 and extending it to a national scale in 1867. In that same year, they and others founded the Birmingham Education Society, and in 1869 they created and ran the National Education League to campaign for secular national education administered through local governments. This culminated with the successful passage of the Forster Education Act in 1870, which first established elementary education throughout England and Wales. The takeover of municipal politics by the Liberal Party—specifically, the wing of it dominated by Joseph Chamberlain—effected a sea change in the kind of people serving on the Birmingham Town Council (more large employers and professionals, fewer small masters and shopkeepers) and in their understanding of the goals and powers of municipal government. This local-level political organizing became the backbone of political party development in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It aided the growth of cultural institutions as members put their ideas into practice and consolidated their power.
Alongside the congregations, the Liberal Party, and the National Education League, another point in the Birmingham art-as-reform network was local architect John Henry Chamberlain (no relation to the other important family of Chamberlains in Birmingham, which included Joseph, Arthur, and Richard). According to Warwickshire historian Samuel Timmins, J. H. Chamberlain was a "fellow-worker" and "devoted friend" of George Dawson; he developed Ruskin-inspired Italian Gothic redbrick architecture for both public and private commissions. Like Timmins, J. H. Chamberlain was also a member of Ruskin's Guild of St. George; he formed a remarkable collection of Ruskin's works, and his manuscript bibliography of this collection—A Catalogue of the Works of Mr. John Ruskin ..., beautifully written in a free calligraphy and decorated with illuminations and designs—is a wonderful expression of his close engagement with Ruskin's vast literary output. J. H. Chamberlain participated in almost all possible aspects of the transformation of art, architecture, and art education in Birmingham until his death in 1883 and had a lasting effect as the architect of many municipal libraries, Board Schools, the Central Reference Library, and the School of Art. He spoke of the adoption of "Italian Renascence" architecture as leading to the death of native English art (that is, the art of the Middle Ages), encouraging English artists to "lay aside the supreme folly of clothing our own ideas in the worn-out garments of other nations." He embraced Gothic architecture as an ancient, living, and native tradition that had never ceased practice.
J. H. Chamberlain particularly worked to expand the audience for art; as he said in a lecture the night before he died, "[in 1851] no one wanted Art, now we want Art for all." He understood art as arising out of admiration for "the beauty and the glory of this marvelous world," and with the greater availability of art, "the man and woman of to-day see more to admire in the universe that surrounds them than their immediate ancestors." His son, Arthur Bensley Chamberlain, became assistant keeper of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery in 1890 and served in that position until he retired in 1927. Interest in Ruskin and art reform also connected J. H. Chamberlain to the hydraulic engine manufacturer Richard Tangye, donor with his brother George of the £10,000 that put the Museum and Art Gallery on a permanent footing and of another £10,000 that built the Municipal School of Art. Tangye Bros. was one of the largest employers in Birmingham, and Richard had an extensive collection of Ruskin's works, as well as a copy of J. H. Chamberlain's Ruskin bibliography; he also specifically named J. H. Chamberlain as the most appropriate architect for the School of Art. J. H. Chamberlain's architecture brings us back to the political and social circles that ruled the city, as he designed meticulously rendered houses in an early Arts and Crafts style for both Joseph Chamberlain and his brother-in-law, William Kenrick (a room of Kenrick's house, "The Grove," is now part of the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London; Joseph Chamberlain's house, Highbury Hall, now belongs to the City of Birmingham). Kenrick was "a great admirer of Ruskin" and "a friend of Edward Burne-Jones," owning paintings by Edward Burne-Jones, Alfred Hunt, Henry Wallis, J. W. North, John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, and Albert Moore. He chaired the Museums and School of Art Committee from its inception in 1884, through its change into the Museum and Art Gallery Committee in 1912, until his death in 1918. In their private and public lives, these reformers believed that beauty could and should be part of any project of municipal improvement, not as an addition or afterthought, but as its essential and ultimate goal.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from TRANSFORMATIVE BEAUTY by AMY WOODSON-BOULTON Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Figures....................ixAcknowledgments....................xi
Introduction: Recovering Victorian Ideas About Art, Beauty, and Society....................1
1 Ruskin, Ruskinians, and City Art Galleries....................19
2 The Public House Versus the Public Home: The Debate over Sunday Opening....................54
3 Collecting for Art as Experience, or Why Millais Trumps Rembrandt....................83
4 Teaching Through Art: Beauty, Truth, and Story....................108
5 A New Narrative: From Experience to Appreciation....................148
Epilogue....................175
Abbreviations Used in Notes and Bibliography....................185
Notes....................187
Bibliography....................231
Index....................257