Honorary Graduates
Orations and responses
Sir Nicholas Serota
Oration given on 18 April 2002
Chancellor, the Senate of the University has resolved that
the degree of Doctor of the University be conferred upon Sir Nicholas
Serota.
It is with especial warmth that we welcome Sir Nicholas Serota, Director of
the Tate and the moving spirit behind the hugely popular new Tate Modern gallery
at Bankside. As the Vice-Chancellor has already mentioned, the Art History
department here at Essex has enjoyed a close relationship both with the man and
the institution. Professor Dawn Ades who is a Trustee was awarded an Arts and
Humanities Research Board grant of £850,000 to establish a Research Centre for
Surrealism in collaboration with Tate Modern. Several staff have worked on Tate
projects and several former students have been employed there.
Sir Nicholas is a man of major achievements. In some quarters, however, he is
a controversial figure. At last year’s exhibition of the Turner Prize, held at
Tate Britain and awarded annually for the best contemporary artist, a
traditional painter, Mrs. Jacqueline Croft of Hampstead “hurled eggs at the
controversial winning exhibit … an empty room in which the lights go on and
off.” The London Evening Standard reported that she was subsequently questioned
by police and barred from the gallery. A Tate spokesman said, ‘We have no idea
why she did it.’ Mrs. Croft was in no doubt: ‘What I object to fiercely is that
we’ve got this cartel who control the top echelons of the art world in this
country.’ She was particularly critical of Sir Nicholas, chairman of the Turner
Prize jury. ‘He seems untouchable. It doesn’t seem to matter how much the
gallery’s exhibits are ridiculed. He just sits back and laughs.’
I am amused by this story because Mrs. Croft seems to have got the wrong ends
of all the sticks. It is totally out of character for Sir Nicholas to ‘sit back
and laugh’ for while he is indeed a champion of contemporary art, his own
artistic sympathies are far from narrow. For example, some people may have been
surprised to see no fewer than three paintings by the late Norman Blamey in the
first hang at Tate Britain. A Royal Academician little given to publicizing
himself, Blamey was probably the finest naturalistic British painter of the
post-war period, a master of the traditional craft of painting dating back to
the Renaissance. Sir Nicholas honoured him in a characteristically generous but
unostentatious manner. The range and catholicity of the many exhibitions held at
the Tate during Sir Nicholas’s directorship make the same point.
Like many of his contemporaries at the University of Cambridge in the 1960s,
Sir Nicholas’s enthusiasm for art was awakened by the collection of Jim Ede in
Kettle’s Yard. Ede had been a keeper at the Tate Gallery in the 1920s, a
supporter of the revolutionary art of this period, from Picasso to Miro and
Mondrian. He left the Tate after conceding defeat at the hands of the English
artistic conservatives of the day. After a lifetime of collecting he established
his home in Cambridge in a row of old cottages which he converted. There he held
open house for undergraduates. His objects ranged from fastidiously graduated
spirals of pebbles to major works by Ben Nicholson, Gaudier-Brzecka and
Brancusi. Visitors might be asked to polish the floorboards by gliding around on
waxed cloths or to help ring the Angelus in nearby St. Peter’s Church where Ede
had installed a large photograph of Leonardo’s Madonna of the Rocks.
The English modernism of Kettle’s Yard provided a remarkably aesthetic broad
education in the visual arts which Sir Nicholas has publicly acknowledged as a
major formative influence. The series of programmes on television in the run-up
to the opening of Tate Modern in May 2000 showed Sir Nicholas involved in every
detail – down to the precise shade of grey of the walls of the Turbine Hall to
the precise positioning of each painting in the galleries. His hands-on
attention to detail is legendary. Furthermore, as a young member of the Tate’s
staff observed, ‘I hate to say it, but he’s always right” – both about small
details like the positioning of a picture and about the large decisions, such as
splitting the Tate Gallery into Tate Britain and Tate Modern and situating the
latter in the former power station at Bankside.
One of Sir Nicholas’s many achievements there has been to translate an
approach to display developed by Ede on a domestic scale onto the vast public
scale of Tate Modern. Like Kettle’s Yard, it is not a new building but a
conversion; the atmosphere is informal; guards wear unobtrusive uniforms; there
are open-air balconies where visitors can take a breather from art and enjoy a
majestic new view of St.Paul’s Cathedral across the Thames; there are relaxing
armchairs where one can leaf through books and magazines. Indeed a group
of undergraduate students in the Department of Art History here at Essex who are
compiling a report on the major millennial museum spaces have placed Tate Modern
top of the field on account of these qualities. Of course the architects deserve
credit, but Sir Nicholas is far more than what the architectural profession
likes to call a ‘good client’; he is in truth the architect of Tate Modern and
of the recently refurbished Tate Britain.
The Director of a major national institution dealing with modern art is
inevitably open to criticism from many sides. Some criticized Tate Modern for
the thin showing of works by the great classic modernists of the first half of
the 20th.Century: Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Mondrian, Dali and others. But this
is the continuing consequence of Jim Ede’s defeat in the 1920s. When thirty
years later in the 1960s the Tate began again to collect and exhibit
international contemporary art, major works by the classic modernists were
beyond its slender means. Rather than play catch-up on a shoestring, Sir
Nicholas and his predecessors have attempted to represent the art of their own
times from Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art onwards. I am sure, however, that
he and the Trustees would not turn down an endowment of several hundred million
pounds needed to fill the gaps.
He has also been criticized for dispensing with the traditional, unchanging
hang of works by national schools. He first did this at the Tate Gallery at
Millbank in the 1990s and has now extended it to Tate Modern where the
collection is shown in rotation like a temporary exhibition, by themes rather
than in chronological order. Unlike the National Gallery the Tate has a vast
collection little of which was ever seen before Sir Nicholas’s arrival there
from a career not in a permanent collection but running programmes of temporary
exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery and before that at the Museum of
Modern Art in Oxford. Above all his policy was based upon the clearest analysis
of the ‘market’ (not for nothing had he studied economics and sociology before
turning to art history): he attributed the huge increase in museum visitors to
the cheap, colour-printed illustrated art book. But this was also a threat. Why
bother to visit a gallery again once you’ve got the book? Galleries, therefore,
had to be differentiated from books. Art no longer needed to be displayed in
historical order, what Sir Nicholas has called the ‘conveyor belt of history’
when books can do the job far better.
He has also been a relentless and unashamed publicist for contemporary art
through the Turner Prize. The Turner is now a major event in the cultural
calendar, even eclipsing the Booker Prize – there is a dedicated programme on
TV, it gives rise to endless comment and controversy in the media and concludes
with a celebrity-studded ceremony. Many may dislike what they see, but the
Turner provides an opportunity for people to see the art of our day and to
reflect upon it. So, even for those who miss the exhibition the virtual, media
experience provides something of a substitute. Although Sir Nicholas fervently
believes that ‘there can be no substitute for direct confrontation’ with the
original work of art, for what he calls ‘the visceral experience of allowing it
to register on the eye, body and imagination’, he also recognizes that the
modern museum must use the media, I.T. and public relations to reach out to the
millions of devotees who cannot make the journey every time, as well as to
create the success which we saw when 1,000,000 visited Tate Modern in its first
six weeks and the gallery had to be temporarily closed during the first weekend
because of the crowds.
I could go on – Sir Nicholas’s achievements are so great and so numerous. I
would like to conclude on this note: it is the privilege and pleasure of the
Public Orator to indulge in unstinted panegyric. This year is the 150th.
anniversary of the Victoria and Albert Museum. Sir Henry Cole, who set up the
Crystal Palace Exhibition of 1851 as part of a public relations campaign to
improve standards of industrial design in Britain, established the V&A out of
the profits. A man of both of great vision and showmanship, Cole was the founder
of the modern popular educational museum.
I have the honour, Chancellor, to present Sir Henry Cole’s heir and
worthy successor, Sir Nicholas Serota, for the degree of Doctor of the
University.
Orator: Professor Jules Lubbock