Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery, Glasgow
What an amazing place to spend a rain-drenched Glasgow summer afternoon! Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum is a mad red sandstone edifice on the edge of Kelvingrove Park, in the West End of the city. It reopened about a year ago, following a restoration project that lasted three years and cost around as much as a woman from East Kilbride won on the lottery this week. A fortune. Now, I never saw the old Kelvingrove; I can’t tell you what’s changed. But what I can say is that the new Kelvingrove is simply crazy. It’s full of stuff. All manner of stuff.
There’s Sir Roger the stuffed elephant, there since Kelvingrove opened and he was unfortunately shot. There’s the longest beetle (whether in Scotland, or the world, or what, I can’t recall) and the moth with the biggest wing area. There are Chinese vases, African and Indian masks, armour, tartans, various kinds and ages of sculpture, and the skeleton of a horse. There’s an orchestrian music organ from Freiburg, a stuffed monkey and a Spitfire suspended from the ceiling. There are saris, figurines, another moth this time with the biggest wing span, a stuffed koala, the dress worn by Princess Louise, Duchess of Fife, at the 1901 exhibition, and football shirts symbolising the instinct for teamwork human share with ants; a sculpture of a ‘wee’ panther cub; busts by the dozen, a stuffed beaver (honestly) and the silver trophy presented to the inventor of the hot-blast iron smelting method; a Dyson vacuum cleaner, various stuffed birds, bears and hares, meteorites, cupboards and chairs by Mackintosh, an astronomical clock, a stuffed kangaroo and an enormous starfish. In short, it’s an absurd place, a scaled-up version of an old-fashioned municipal museum of the kind I remember from my childhood: Kelvingrove may be a grand and expensive enterprise, but it shares with, say, the Warrington Museum of the 1970s the feeling of being an eccentric palace filled with the odd bits of everything that have somehow washed up on walls and in cabinets.
All of which sounds like harsh criticism, but it’s not. I really, really like this place: it’s ace. The higgledy-piggledy aspect of it not only stops Kelvingrove from taking itself too seriously; it also gives it a kind of magic that’s bound to conquer children’s imagination. Of course like all public institutions nowadays the Kelvingrove has to go in for multimedia stuff aimed specifically at kids, but the truth is that what kids love most is anything gloomy, mysterious and inexplicable bonkers – and the Kelvingrove still has that feel about it. Actually I must record that the spanking new child-centred features seemed pretty good: presumably these are one of the main ways in which the museum’s been tarted up, and I hope they’re well maintained, because that kind of thing quickly loses its charm once it’s knackered. And I imagine much vigilance will be needed to prevent the youth of Glasgow knackering it. As things are, an interactive guide to a Raoul Dufy painting, with a terribly sexy French woman’s voice asking what we thought ‘Monsieur Dufy’ would do next, was I confess quite tempting. Some child was unaccountably hogging it when I passed.
Which brings me to the art. There’s quite a bit of interesting French art – Corot, Courbet, Fantin-Latour, Seurat, Matisse and Monet are all there – and a not bad collection of older Dutch and Italian masters. The most famous work housed at Kelvingrove is Dalí’s Christ of St. John of the Cross, the image of the crucified Christ looming over the earth, or more accurately over water: the viewer is left wondering what is the significance of the boatmen on the shore in the foreground. Do they represent the soul’s journey from this life to the shores of the beyond? But in a museum like this I’m always interested in the native stuff, and the Scottish art here is well worth a good look. I can take or leave the Glasgow boys - I’m not knocking them but their paintings aren’t, for me at least, immediately engaging. The Scottish colourists are another matter, though: by looking abroad, especially to France, early in the last century they gave Scottish painting new colour and a new look. Look out especially for J.D. Fergusson’s Gray Day Paris Plage and S. J. Peploe’s Coffee and Liqueur and Bernaval.
Also on the ground floor, in the Looking at Art display, is a series of photographs from the Partick Camera Club that are one of the highlights of the Museum. Joseph McKenzie’s portraits of Gorbals children are among the best things here, as is the unattributed 1955 chiaroscuro photo of a female figure among the arches under St. Enoch’s station. Make sure you see them.
What else must I mention? Well, there are quite good educational displays about Scottish identity in art, for example, and an Environment Discovery Centre; and in the shop – in fact there are no less than three shops – Julia Cunningham’s Muckle Fantoosh (translation: ‘well poncy’) handbags are great. If I weren’t a sadly single freelance intellectual, my partner would own one by now.
You can easily spend hours in this place; and there’s something about its jumbled-up madness that’ll make you want to go back.
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