EXHIBITING GALLERIES

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The Barbican Gallery

The Barbican Gallery is a Brutalist space that was built in the 1970s.

Location: Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS (blue, turquoise)

The Hayward Gallery

The Hayward Gallery (1968) is an art gallery that hosts temporary exhibitions. The Brutalist style building forms part of the South Bank arts complex. It was named after Sir Isaac Hayward, a Labour politician who had led the London County Council from 1947 to 1965.

In 2011 The Hayward changed its name to The Hayward Gallery.

Location: Belvedere Road, SE1 7AF

Website: www.southbankcentre.co.uk/venues/hayward-gallery

Archigram

The gallery was designed by Norman Engleback of the London County Council s Architecture Department. He was assisted in the task by Warren Chalk and Ron Herron. The pair were members of Archigram, a six-strong Futurist group.

The sextet's members were a diverse bunch. No two of them had come from the same town or had attended the same university. Their ages ranged over a decade. The three younger men had set up a journal and had invited the older fellows to contribute to it. The projects that they outlined in the publication tended to be a margin more realistic than were the contemporary fantastical works that were being envisaged in France and Italy.

The Walking Castle

Herron and Chalk found their work on concrete buildings to be frustrating. Le Corbusier had coined the aphorism that a house was a machine for living in. This prompted Herron to write a pamphlet that he entitled The Walking City (1965). In it, he outlined his concept of a city that could be relocated by its inhabitants at will. The idea became known within the architectural profession and leaked out into broader society. There is a resonance of it in Diana Wynne Jones fantasy novel Howl's Moving Castle (1986). This involved a castle that wandered about a landscape. The book was adapted by Hayao Miyazaki into an animated movie.

Movie: Hayao Miyazaki Howl's Moving Castle Studio Ghibli (2004).

Website: www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/a/archigram-walking-city-living-pod-instant-city www.archigram.net

The Photographers' Gallery

The Photographers Gallery

Location: 16-18 Ramillies Street, W1F 7LW (blue, turquoise)

Website: https://thephotographersgallery.org.uk

Raven Row

Raven Row is a not-for-profit art gallery that is supported by a member of the Sainsbury family. The building has a fine 18^thC shop front

Location: 56 Artillery Lane, E1 7LS (blue, red)

Website: www.ravenrow.org www.6a.co.uk (The architectural practice that adapted the building into a gallery.)

The Royal Academy of Arts

The Royal Academy started staging loan exhibitions in 1870.

One of the institution's most notable shows was Sensation (1997), which was composed of works by members of the Young British Artists movement. The displayed items came solely from the collection of Charles Saatchi.

Location: Burlington House, 50 Piccadilly, W1J 0BD (orange, brown)

Website: www.royalacademy.org.uk

The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

Each year, during June, July, and August, the Academy holds its Summer Exhibition. Amateurs and professionals alike submit works for consideration by the Hanging Committee. This body is composed of Academy members. It whittles down the submissions to a number that can be hung and that should be hung. The exhibited works can be purchased.

The first annual show was held in 1769.

Website: www.royalacademy.org.uk/exhibition/summer-exhibition-2022

The Saatchi Gallery

Charles Saatchi was a renowned figure in the advertising industry during the 1970s and 1980s. Early in the latter decade he was inspired by a series of sewn-up slashed canvases that had been created by Lucio Fontana to devise a campaign for the Silk Cut cigarettes brand.¹ This proved to be highly effective. In a variety of permutations, it ran for over twenty years.

In 1963 Saatchi paid $100 for a Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) drawing in a New York gallery. Saatchi and his then wife Doris were partners in buying art. In 1973 the Saatchis bought a David Hepher painting in Paris for their home. They set up the Boundary Gallery (1985). The space for it was found by the architect Max Gordon. It was a former paint factory on Boundary Road, St John's Wood. The works that were displayed there were initially by the likes of Robert Gober, Jeff Koons, Julian Schnabel, Cy Twombly, and Andy Warhol.

In 1987 Saatchi took to buying British art. He purchased School of London paintings by the likes of Frank Auerbach, Lucian Freud, Leon Kossoff, and Paula Rego. He also acquired work by sculptors such as Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, and Bill Woodrow, who were represented by the Lisson Gallery.

In 1991 the Saatchi Gallery started exhibiting Richard Wilson's 20:50. The oil piece is the only work that the gallery has displayed continuously. It is no longer possible for visitors to stand in its centre as the artist had envisaged originally.

Saatchi was slow to appreciate the Young British Artists. In 1988 he attended the Freeze student exhibition but did not buy anything. In 1990 Saatchi bought two of Damien Hirst's medicine cabinets. This was his first Y.B.A. acquisition. He soon became the movement's principal purchaser. In 1991 he advanced Hirst 50,000 to create the pickled tiger shark that he entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death In The Mind of Someone Living. Individuals whom he did not buy initially included Michael Landy and Tracey Emin.

In 1990 Saatchi and Doris divorced. In the later stages of their relationship their taste in art had come to diverge.

In 1997 the Royal Academy of Arts mounted the Sensation exhibition of Young British Artists art. The institution used works that were sourced solely from Saatchi's collection. By then he had almost 900 Y.B.A. pieces. He paid premiums to fill in the gaps in this array. The show toured in the United States and Germany.

By 2003 Saatchi had developed a reputation of buying and selling art in an artistic manner. He has been accused of neither making loans to museums nor seeking to develop the careers of artists. He can dispose of his possessions of an individual artist. Saatchi sold off his holdings of works by Sean Scully that he had bought during the early 1980s for $250,000. The collector realised $4m in the process. Scully felt prompted to declare of Saatchi, He's really a commodities broker who has been let loose on the art world. He claims to love art, but his is the love that the wolf has for the wolf.

The Saatchi Gallery moved into a space in County Hall in 2003. The following year there was a fire at the Momart warehouse in Leyton, east London. At the time, a major part of the Saatchi collection was being stored in the facility. The pieces that were destroyed included Jake and Dinos Chapman's Hell and Tracey Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With, 1963-1995. In 2005 the Gallery withdrew from County Hall.² Three years later it moved into the Duke of York's Headquarters in Chelsea. The building had fifteen galleries with 70,000 sq. ft. of floor space.

In 2016 the Saatchi Gallery staged Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones an exhibition of materials that were connected to the Rolling Stones. The show included a recreation of the squalid flat in Edith Grove in which Jagger, Jones, and Richards had lived. At least one critic noted that it was far more squalid that Tracey Emin's My Bed (1998) had been and for which Charles Saatchi had been the subject of adverse comments.

Location: The Duke of York's Headquarters, The King's Road, SW3 4RY (red. purple)

Website: www.saatchigallery.com

¹. Saatchi's idea was executed by Paul Arden. Upon one occasion Mr Arden tried to buy a Camden Council water-mains repair works. He was under the impression that it was an instance of installation art. He was to go on to write a book that was subtitled The world's best-selling book by Paul Arden .

². Following the 2005 closure of the County Hall gallery, Saatchi established the Your Gallery website. The site received a major boost when the allied Stuart ( student art ) was opened.

The Serpentine Gallery

The Serpentine Gallery mounts temporary exhibitions of modern and contemporary art. Its principal building (1934) was constructed as a tea room. The Arts Council opened the space as an exhibiting gallery in 1970.

The Serpentine Sackler Gallery (2013) was designed by the architect Zaha Hadid (1950-2016). It is located to the north-east of northern end of the bridge that crosses the Serpentine.

Location: Kensington Gardens, W2 3XA (orange, yellow)

Website: www.serpentinegalleries.org www.serpentinegalleries.org/about/serpentine-north-gallery

The Whitechapel Art Gallery

The Whitechapel Art Gallery (1901) is a public gallery that hosts temporary exhibitions of modern art. It was founded by Canon Samuel Augustus Barnett, the Vicar of St Jude's Whitechapel, and his wife Henrietta. John Passmore Edwards provided funds towards the cost of constructing the building that Charles Harrison Townsend designed to house it.

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica (1937) in protest at the Luftwaffe's aerial assault upon the Spanish town.¹ This was the first time that a civilian target had been purposefully bombed by military aeroplanes. In 1938 Roland Penrose organised a touring exhibition of the art work. The Whitechapel Gallery and the Stepney Trade Union Council made the arrangements that enabled the painting to be brought to London, where the gallery displayed it.

In 1956 the Whitechapel mounted the Independent Group's This Is Tomorrow exhibition. The show launched Pop Art movement in Britain. The term Pop Art may have derived from Richard Hamilton's collage Just What Is That Makes Today's Home So Different, So Appealing (1956). The elements within the work included a bodybuilder holding a lollipop. The word Pop appeared upon the confection.² Among those who visited the This Is Tomorrow (1956) was the writer J.G. Ballard (1930-2009).

Bryan Robertson was to turn the Whitechapel from a local government amenity into the U.K.'s most vibrant exhibition space. Under his leadership, the exhibitions of foreign artists that the Whitechapel staged included ones of works by contemporary American artists such as Jaspers Johns and Robert Rauschenberg.

In 1964 the Whitechapel mounted the New Generation show. The British artists whose work was displayed included: Patrick Caulfield, David Hockney, John Hoyland, Paul Huxley, Alan Jones, and Bridget Riley. Michael Kaye (1925-2008) of The Peter Stuyesvant Foundation, which had been set up by the Rupert family, who controlled Carreras-Rothman, helped mount exhibition. A generation of young dealers followed up on the work that had been displayed. They included Alex Gregory Hood, Kasmin, and Leslie Waddington (1934-2015).

Robertson stepped down from his post at the Whitechapel in 1969. He had had the position for seventeen years. Subsequently, the gallery experienced something of a decline. It had a succession of directors. Its reputation for being at the forefront of contemporary British art was overtaken by those of the Institute of Contemporary Arts and The Hayward.

Nicholas Serota was appointed to be the Director of the Whitechapel in 1976. Previously, he had headed the small Oxford Museum of Modern Art, which was also an exhibiting gallery. There, his successes had included mounting the first retrospective of Howard Hodgkin's paintings. Under Serota's leadership the Whitechapel s standing began to revive. The gallery took to displaying work by the likes of Gilbert & George, as well as mounting shows of foreign schools such as the German Neo-Expressionists. A number of traditionally-minded art critics disliked its progressive outlook and took to voicing their opposition to it in the media.

The Whitechapel's renewed reputation amongst artists was witnessed by the way in which a number of them gave to it works that could be sold at auction. The money so raised was used to help to pay for a redevelopment of its building that was carried out in 1984-5.

The Whitechapel acquired its next-door neighbour the former Whitechapel Library.³

Location: 77-82 Whitechapel High Street, E1 7QX (purple, turquoise)

Website: www.whitechapelgallery.org

¹. Picasso is supposed to have painted Guernica with an appreciation that it would remain a powerful work when it was reproduced through the medium of black and white photography, which was all that was available to the newspapers during the 1930s.

². Hamilton's collage work drew on that of the German exile Kurt Schwitters. (Stefan Themerson Kurt Schwitters In England, 1940-1948 Gaberbochus Press (1958).)

Alternatively, it may have been coined by the critic Lawrence Alloway. The painter Peter Blake was expressing a wish that art should have the same broad appeal as pop music.

³. Whitechapel Library was termed the university of the ghetto; the poet and painter Isaac Rosenberg (d.1918) acquired much of his education there. At one point the library housed the largest collection of Yiddish books in Europe.

David Backhouse 2024