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Curators, collections and catalogues
The International Journal of Museum Management and Curatorship (1988), 7,269-273
Curators,
Collections and Catalogues
CHRISTOPHERWRIGHT
It has for quite some time been taken as read that the public picture collections of the United Kingdom have been in a state of crisis, but the fact that they continue to survive is hopefully proof enough that the situation is not as serious as the pessimists would have it. But in trying to pinpoint the difficult, though not impossible, position in which the picture collections of museums and art galleries throughout the country find themselves, certain factors stand out. Some of the problems are easily identified, but all too often they draw attention to unpublicized complexities in which the attitudes of individuals are just as important as the more obvious shortage of money and scholarly resources. Most of the British public collections of pictures are effectively static. This is a fact of life and may be clarified by the twin observations that pictorial creativity has in relation to the total population diminished in volume if not in quality, and that those public picture collections which continue to make acquisitions now have, for reasons of economics, to be discriminating rather than all-embracing. There would appear to be no real harm in this position, so long as an adequate representation of living art is maintained, thereby avoiding yawning ‘gaps’ such as those which exist in respect of the art of the recent past. The dogged refusal of most British public collections possessing acquisition funds to pursue policies independent of conventional taste has been responsible for not only these ‘gaps’. It has also meant that all too many British public art collections-and those of 20th century art in particular-have a depressing family resemblance to one another, both in their strengths and their weaknesses. The most important issue, or pressing need, depending on the individual’s point of view, is to present and promote understanding of the vast accumulations of pictures held in perpetuity by British public collections. Without taking into account works on paper, easel paintings alone amount to several hundreds of thousands distributed amongst many hundreds of established picture galleries and, less obviously, countless churches, libraries, hospitals, town halls, universities and charitable institutions. These range from masterpieces of world renown to objects of a strictly local significance, the latter in many cases far removed geographically from the locality to which they relate. Less evident, even to those in charge of these collections, is that the treatment demanded by this disparity of objects needs to be both flexible and varied, and it is in this area that the first major problem surfaces. It is undeniable, though assiduously minimized by a great many curators, that no decision of any sort can be taken about the function a work of art is to perform within the art gallery until the status of that work of art has been correctly identified. There has been in recent years, particularly in the older and more respected universities, something of a concerted effort to phase out the art of picture identification, which tends to be known by the now insulting term of ‘connoisseurship’. A whole generation of student art historians, many of them now in charge of important picture collections, has been 0260.4779/88/03 0269-05$03.000 1988Butterworth
& Co(Publishers)Ltd
270
Curators, Collections and Catalogues
encouraged to avoid the question of the creativity of the individual. The reasons behind this change in attitude are in themselves complex, but the results are remarkably uniform, and those in charge of a surprisingly high proportion of the public picture collections of the United Kingdom now choose to remain in deliberate ignorance of the artistic status of their collections because they do not believe that information about particular artists and an understanding of the contribution made by the individual to the visual arts is intellectually significant or morally valid. In oversimplified terms, the art worker replaces the artist, and the individual art work is seen as basically the product of the social milieu rather than the particular artist. Consistent with this point of view, they tend to believe that art has little need of refined technical language to explain it, whilst it is generally held in these circles that pictures of every school and period, tastefully displayed, make a natural mix and, as all representatives of ‘old art’, they no longer require specific historical explanation to the general public. Such views, which appear to the writer to be extreme, have been expressed both by responsible officers of the Arts Council of Great Britain and, more surprisingly, a number of curators. However, this extreme point of view almost certainly represents a reaction against the previous generation of art historians and museum curators who divided the art of the past into an essentially elitist hierarchy, and this was, until recently, the method practised by the leading British centre for the training of art historians, the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London. Many of the students leaving the Courtauld Institute a decade or more ago found themselves working in museums and art galleries up and down the country, but they knew little about the collections for which they were responsible because their education had been limited to the development of ‘High Art’, above all the Italian Renaissance or, particularly in more recent times, the development of the Modern Movement. There was consequently no great interest in undertaking research on the vast municipal collections with huge numbers of works by apparently insignificant masters in which many Courtauld Institute graduates found themselves working. Certainly there was little or no existing tradition of museum and art gallery based scholarly research comparable to that undertaken by institutions such as the National Gallery in London which, during the 1950s and 196Os, was the envy of the world in respect of the exceptional standards established by its research and published catalogues. But before deploring in greater detail the sad state of affairs which exists today in a high proportion of British public picture collections, it is worth attempting to define the purposes of museum research and cataloguing and to identify what benefit, if any, can possibly accrue to the general public from them. Until very recently it was thought quite enough to look up all the published references to a particular picture and list them in chronological sequence irrespective of their relevance or importance. This was the method used by Anthony Blunt in his well-known catalogue raisonne of the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, and that technique was inculcated by the Courtauld Institute as the standard. The results are, of course, liable to be bizarre in the extreme because a handful of controversial or famous pictures acquire alarmingly long bibliographies while the rest remain little discussed. For most purposes such accumulations of references are useless even for the specialist because they make no attempt to discriminate. At best they are a monument to the compiler’s ability to hunt down ever more recondite references, but this self-indulgent method of cataloguing is still solemnly practised by many institutions which ought to be more responsive to the needs of the public they are paid to serve. The preparation of a critical bibliography does, nevertheless, require the compiler to have consulted the entire literature on the works of art in his care, and this is virtually impossible to achieve in the present intellectual climate, at least in the provinces. With
CHRISTOPHERWRIGHT
271
the museums of the United Kingdom no longer continue to very few exceptions, document their collections on a systematic basis by accumulating records of the literature published on their holdings. This is even more disappointing than it first sounds because the introduction of new technology such as the photocopying machine should have meant that large amounts of material from different sources could be gathered into the filing system without the physical labour of accurately copying out by hand large numbers of extracts and references. Many collections known to me are either unwilling or unable even to take the trouble to note when their pictures are published in the standard catalogues raisonnes or serious periodical literature. This is due not just to a perceived lack of funds or access to scholarly resources but also because it is no longer a part of current museum priorities to collect into the institutions’ files records of what art historians have written concerning those institutions’ own works of art. The result of this policy is that an alarming number of institutions up and down the country-large museums and art galleries as well as small-can no longer make available to the inquirer a dossier of the essential published information about their own pictures. At this point it becomes necessary to justify the systematic collecting of art historical information, if for no other reason than to expose to critical scrutiny the current trend which is rapidly reducing the status of many of the British picture collections to mere accumulations of unclassified material. The current perception is that it is very old-fashioned, and thus essentially discredited, to accumulate information for its own sake. Yet if we reverse the argument and consider instead the point of view of the general public several important factors stand out. The ever growing attendance figures show beyond doubt that pictures of all schools and periods are extremely popular with the general public, both in London and the provinces, because those collections which are dominated by pictures do not reveal significantly less public interest when compared with other disciplines. Nevertheless, it is surprising, and to my mind shocking, that it has come to be accepted that information about works of art should be withheld from the public. This does not take the form of a deliberate refusal to disclose information to those who ask for it but a passive resistance to fulfilling the pressing need for more and accurate information. Many people will be inclined to argue that this account of the current state of affairs is exaggerated, and they will cite the increased use made of explanatory labels in public collections. Unfortunately these are frequently inaccurate to the point of being fictional, and when they are long enough to provide a meaningful commentary on a complex work of art they fail to serve their primary purpose fully because the walls of the picture gallery become plastered with information to the detriment of the aesthetic impact of the pictures they are intended to support, and even a consequent reduction in the numbers of paintings able to be displayed. The inescapable conclusion is that the portable catalogue or fully informative guide (both critical and explanatory to use the Victorian term), which was introduced as early as the 18th century to provide basic information for the general public, retains its advantages. If compiled with an open mind, a properly constructed catalogue or guide can reduce the need for information clutter in the display galleries, whilst at the same time allowing additional information and comparative material to be included when the works of art have related versions or form part of a sequence. There are, however, a number of difficulties, and the public has two main choices. Either they wade through rooms covered with labels and information panels reading as they go, and have nothing to refer to subsequently, or they must buy a potentially expensive catalogue which many cannot afford. There is no obvious solution to this problem, but it remains the curator’s duty to see that as much information as is available is published or provided in a form comprehensible to the layman. However, it is not
272
Cuuatovs, Collections and Catalogues
always recognized that in order to be able to arrive at this position at all serious research has to be undertaken first. There is still a depressingly large number of museums and art galleries where even the artists’ names are misspelt, and dates on labels are derived from out-of-date dictionaries and potted histories which lack even a modicum of accuracy. To make matters worse, many even quite modest museum publications, especially those with illustrations, now cost f2O.00 or more. Most people consider this to be an unacceptably high price even though such sums are spent regularly on other forms of cultural activity such as visits to the theatre and the opera. It is also worth noting in this context that the entrance fee and guidebook to many stately homes can leave but small change out of 25.00, whereas museum entrance is thankfully still free in most instances. Curators who do respond constructively to the need to undertake satisfactory documentation of their collections and then to publish it in a form comprehensible to the general public will be rewarded by the failure of their publications to sell. The reason for this is not mass poverty on the part of museum-goers but arises from a strange mixture of attitudes. On a number of occasions the present writer has, at the time of the publication of a catalogue, addressed an enthusiastic local audience on the very subject covered by that catalogue, but in respect of these publications, the size of that audience has been virtually the same as the local sales of the catalogue achieved then and subsequently. The conclusion to be drawn is that the public likes to listen rather than to read and will turn out on a foggy winter night to hear a cataloguer speak but is not interested in reading Fortunately foreign museums and libraries still collect about the same pictures. catalogues on a systematic basis and thus the minimal local response can be compensated for by international sales. This is now the only hope of survival for the serious permanent collection catalogue published in the United Kingdom. The odds are weighted so heavily against the curators of the smaller collections that little can be done when there is no response from the local general public, and an absurd situation has thus been reached. A sound understanding of our cultural past can be gained only through the patient accumulation of information as the basis on which that understanding is built. The general public gives every indication of being passionately interested in its cultural past, but not in the ‘raw’ information which forms the backbone of the permanent collection catalogue. There has been, as far as the present writer can see, no effective response from scholars and curators directed towards reassessing the whole position of scholarly research within the museum environment and its function in a society with very different values and perceived needs from those of the previous Nevertheless, a few institutions have rejected the general trend towards generation. publishing no scholarly publications whatsoever, and have instead produced catalogues which are so loftily academic that they can appeal only to fellow specialists or are so recherche as to be incomprehensible even to other art historians. The reverse is rather more common. This is the determinedly superficial and cheaply produced museum guide which attempts to cater for the mass market by selecting only ‘highlights’ from the collection, but is all too often poorly written with indifferent reproductions-inadequately captioned-and patronizing towards the public it is ostensibly intended to serve. Today there seems to be little escape from this impasse as a surprisingly large number of museum publications fall into one or other of these categories. On the other hand, if any proof were needed that the general public still expects its museums to be power-houses of knowledge, it is the relentless use made by the public of the various identification services which are provided by them. It is expected that curators should give generously of both their time and their expertise to members of the public who bring in objects for identification. But how is that expertise to be maintained?
CHRISTOPHERWRIGHT
273
In view of all these problems can any sensible guidelines be laid down? What suggestions, if any, seem relevant in the present confused state of affairs? In trying to formulate answers to these questions several factors stand out. Constructive neglect of our cultural past is intellectually indefensible, and yet there are those in positions of responsibility in United Kingdom museums who actively support that neglect because they deny the importance of research on the collections for which they are responsible. Their motives are frequently political and moral, as well as economic, but few of them are brave enough to stand up publicly and defend them. However, the opposite extreme of self-indulgence is equally pernicious and is represented by those who seem to believe that what they create and so assiduously document need be addressed only to fellow specialists. But these extremes represent the attitudes of a worrying proportion of those in charge of the public picture collections of the United Kingdom, especially those of Old Masters. It would, in the context of this note, be invidious to name any of them, but the number of institutions whose positions are in reality close to neither of these extremes is depressingly limited. In pointing out the way to a middle course, the following considerations are relevant, not least because most collections are fundamentally miscellaneous in their composition and thus do not conform to historical principles, generally reflecting the varied tastes of past collectors and not documenting systematically the developing of art through changes of style. Unlike the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it is not possible to treat any individual British collection as pages from a textbook on the stylistic development of art. Indeed, British collections are notoriously weak in German and Central European art as a whole, Italian art of the last two centuries, Spanish art other than that of the 17th century, French Neoclassical and 20th century art, American art of every period, and so on. As there can be no historical structure as such we have to fall back on an aesthetic approach. The museum permanent collection catalogue, however well researched and carefully written in terms accessible to the layman, represents at best an accidental slice of the past since it can only address those items which happen to have been brought together by the whims of benefactors or the vagaries of committee purchasing policy. Thus, apart from constituting a progress report, it cannot but be an imperfect document because it is by its nature limited to providing an insight into an accidental assemblage of artifacts from the past. Perhaps in an ideal world, in which every collection was thoroughly researched and catalogued according to the same criteria, the total result would be a much more balanced view of the history of art. But what can and should be achieved in the short term-as a practical objective rather than a vague idealistic goal-is that every institution should as a deliberate policy decision devote a specific proportion of its resources to research into its own possessions and publish the results of that research in an acceptable form. It has to be constantly borne in mind that although the amorphous general public is interested on many different levels, it currently remains woefully ill-informed, and the prices of museum publications can and should be kept to a minimum, with their production supported by sponsorship and private benefaction, as they already are in London but rarely outside it. However, above all, the picture collections of the United Kingdom deserve better than passive and demoralized curatorship, and in this respect they compare very unfavourably with their continental and American counterparts. Thatcherite policies of self-help, stiffened by private finance, are only part of the answer. What is inadequate and needs to be changed is the collective museum attitude, and too many curators still do not accept that a major part of their function is to know about the objects in their care and be able to interpret them to and for their public.
Curators,
Collections and Catalogues
CHRISTOPHERWRIGHT
It has for quite some time been taken as read that the public picture collections of the United Kingdom have been in a state of crisis, but the fact that they continue to survive is hopefully proof enough that the situation is not as serious as the pessimists would have it. But in trying to pinpoint the difficult, though not impossible, position in which the picture collections of museums and art galleries throughout the country find themselves, certain factors stand out. Some of the problems are easily identified, but all too often they draw attention to unpublicized complexities in which the attitudes of individuals are just as important as the more obvious shortage of money and scholarly resources. Most of the British public collections of pictures are effectively static. This is a fact of life and may be clarified by the twin observations that pictorial creativity has in relation to the total population diminished in volume if not in quality, and that those public picture collections which continue to make acquisitions now have, for reasons of economics, to be discriminating rather than all-embracing. There would appear to be no real harm in this position, so long as an adequate representation of living art is maintained, thereby avoiding yawning ‘gaps’ such as those which exist in respect of the art of the recent past. The dogged refusal of most British public collections possessing acquisition funds to pursue policies independent of conventional taste has been responsible for not only these ‘gaps’. It has also meant that all too many British public art collections-and those of 20th century art in particular-have a depressing family resemblance to one another, both in their strengths and their weaknesses. The most important issue, or pressing need, depending on the individual’s point of view, is to present and promote understanding of the vast accumulations of pictures held in perpetuity by British public collections. Without taking into account works on paper, easel paintings alone amount to several hundreds of thousands distributed amongst many hundreds of established picture galleries and, less obviously, countless churches, libraries, hospitals, town halls, universities and charitable institutions. These range from masterpieces of world renown to objects of a strictly local significance, the latter in many cases far removed geographically from the locality to which they relate. Less evident, even to those in charge of these collections, is that the treatment demanded by this disparity of objects needs to be both flexible and varied, and it is in this area that the first major problem surfaces. It is undeniable, though assiduously minimized by a great many curators, that no decision of any sort can be taken about the function a work of art is to perform within the art gallery until the status of that work of art has been correctly identified. There has been in recent years, particularly in the older and more respected universities, something of a concerted effort to phase out the art of picture identification, which tends to be known by the now insulting term of ‘connoisseurship’. A whole generation of student art historians, many of them now in charge of important picture collections, has been 0260.4779/88/03 0269-05$03.000 1988Butterworth
& Co(Publishers)Ltd
270
Curators, Collections and Catalogues
encouraged to avoid the question of the creativity of the individual. The reasons behind this change in attitude are in themselves complex, but the results are remarkably uniform, and those in charge of a surprisingly high proportion of the public picture collections of the United Kingdom now choose to remain in deliberate ignorance of the artistic status of their collections because they do not believe that information about particular artists and an understanding of the contribution made by the individual to the visual arts is intellectually significant or morally valid. In oversimplified terms, the art worker replaces the artist, and the individual art work is seen as basically the product of the social milieu rather than the particular artist. Consistent with this point of view, they tend to believe that art has little need of refined technical language to explain it, whilst it is generally held in these circles that pictures of every school and period, tastefully displayed, make a natural mix and, as all representatives of ‘old art’, they no longer require specific historical explanation to the general public. Such views, which appear to the writer to be extreme, have been expressed both by responsible officers of the Arts Council of Great Britain and, more surprisingly, a number of curators. However, this extreme point of view almost certainly represents a reaction against the previous generation of art historians and museum curators who divided the art of the past into an essentially elitist hierarchy, and this was, until recently, the method practised by the leading British centre for the training of art historians, the Courtauld Institute of Art of the University of London. Many of the students leaving the Courtauld Institute a decade or more ago found themselves working in museums and art galleries up and down the country, but they knew little about the collections for which they were responsible because their education had been limited to the development of ‘High Art’, above all the Italian Renaissance or, particularly in more recent times, the development of the Modern Movement. There was consequently no great interest in undertaking research on the vast municipal collections with huge numbers of works by apparently insignificant masters in which many Courtauld Institute graduates found themselves working. Certainly there was little or no existing tradition of museum and art gallery based scholarly research comparable to that undertaken by institutions such as the National Gallery in London which, during the 1950s and 196Os, was the envy of the world in respect of the exceptional standards established by its research and published catalogues. But before deploring in greater detail the sad state of affairs which exists today in a high proportion of British public picture collections, it is worth attempting to define the purposes of museum research and cataloguing and to identify what benefit, if any, can possibly accrue to the general public from them. Until very recently it was thought quite enough to look up all the published references to a particular picture and list them in chronological sequence irrespective of their relevance or importance. This was the method used by Anthony Blunt in his well-known catalogue raisonne of the paintings of Nicolas Poussin, and that technique was inculcated by the Courtauld Institute as the standard. The results are, of course, liable to be bizarre in the extreme because a handful of controversial or famous pictures acquire alarmingly long bibliographies while the rest remain little discussed. For most purposes such accumulations of references are useless even for the specialist because they make no attempt to discriminate. At best they are a monument to the compiler’s ability to hunt down ever more recondite references, but this self-indulgent method of cataloguing is still solemnly practised by many institutions which ought to be more responsive to the needs of the public they are paid to serve. The preparation of a critical bibliography does, nevertheless, require the compiler to have consulted the entire literature on the works of art in his care, and this is virtually impossible to achieve in the present intellectual climate, at least in the provinces. With
CHRISTOPHERWRIGHT
271
the museums of the United Kingdom no longer continue to very few exceptions, document their collections on a systematic basis by accumulating records of the literature published on their holdings. This is even more disappointing than it first sounds because the introduction of new technology such as the photocopying machine should have meant that large amounts of material from different sources could be gathered into the filing system without the physical labour of accurately copying out by hand large numbers of extracts and references. Many collections known to me are either unwilling or unable even to take the trouble to note when their pictures are published in the standard catalogues raisonnes or serious periodical literature. This is due not just to a perceived lack of funds or access to scholarly resources but also because it is no longer a part of current museum priorities to collect into the institutions’ files records of what art historians have written concerning those institutions’ own works of art. The result of this policy is that an alarming number of institutions up and down the country-large museums and art galleries as well as small-can no longer make available to the inquirer a dossier of the essential published information about their own pictures. At this point it becomes necessary to justify the systematic collecting of art historical information, if for no other reason than to expose to critical scrutiny the current trend which is rapidly reducing the status of many of the British picture collections to mere accumulations of unclassified material. The current perception is that it is very old-fashioned, and thus essentially discredited, to accumulate information for its own sake. Yet if we reverse the argument and consider instead the point of view of the general public several important factors stand out. The ever growing attendance figures show beyond doubt that pictures of all schools and periods are extremely popular with the general public, both in London and the provinces, because those collections which are dominated by pictures do not reveal significantly less public interest when compared with other disciplines. Nevertheless, it is surprising, and to my mind shocking, that it has come to be accepted that information about works of art should be withheld from the public. This does not take the form of a deliberate refusal to disclose information to those who ask for it but a passive resistance to fulfilling the pressing need for more and accurate information. Many people will be inclined to argue that this account of the current state of affairs is exaggerated, and they will cite the increased use made of explanatory labels in public collections. Unfortunately these are frequently inaccurate to the point of being fictional, and when they are long enough to provide a meaningful commentary on a complex work of art they fail to serve their primary purpose fully because the walls of the picture gallery become plastered with information to the detriment of the aesthetic impact of the pictures they are intended to support, and even a consequent reduction in the numbers of paintings able to be displayed. The inescapable conclusion is that the portable catalogue or fully informative guide (both critical and explanatory to use the Victorian term), which was introduced as early as the 18th century to provide basic information for the general public, retains its advantages. If compiled with an open mind, a properly constructed catalogue or guide can reduce the need for information clutter in the display galleries, whilst at the same time allowing additional information and comparative material to be included when the works of art have related versions or form part of a sequence. There are, however, a number of difficulties, and the public has two main choices. Either they wade through rooms covered with labels and information panels reading as they go, and have nothing to refer to subsequently, or they must buy a potentially expensive catalogue which many cannot afford. There is no obvious solution to this problem, but it remains the curator’s duty to see that as much information as is available is published or provided in a form comprehensible to the layman. However, it is not
272
Cuuatovs, Collections and Catalogues
always recognized that in order to be able to arrive at this position at all serious research has to be undertaken first. There is still a depressingly large number of museums and art galleries where even the artists’ names are misspelt, and dates on labels are derived from out-of-date dictionaries and potted histories which lack even a modicum of accuracy. To make matters worse, many even quite modest museum publications, especially those with illustrations, now cost f2O.00 or more. Most people consider this to be an unacceptably high price even though such sums are spent regularly on other forms of cultural activity such as visits to the theatre and the opera. It is also worth noting in this context that the entrance fee and guidebook to many stately homes can leave but small change out of 25.00, whereas museum entrance is thankfully still free in most instances. Curators who do respond constructively to the need to undertake satisfactory documentation of their collections and then to publish it in a form comprehensible to the general public will be rewarded by the failure of their publications to sell. The reason for this is not mass poverty on the part of museum-goers but arises from a strange mixture of attitudes. On a number of occasions the present writer has, at the time of the publication of a catalogue, addressed an enthusiastic local audience on the very subject covered by that catalogue, but in respect of these publications, the size of that audience has been virtually the same as the local sales of the catalogue achieved then and subsequently. The conclusion to be drawn is that the public likes to listen rather than to read and will turn out on a foggy winter night to hear a cataloguer speak but is not interested in reading Fortunately foreign museums and libraries still collect about the same pictures. catalogues on a systematic basis and thus the minimal local response can be compensated for by international sales. This is now the only hope of survival for the serious permanent collection catalogue published in the United Kingdom. The odds are weighted so heavily against the curators of the smaller collections that little can be done when there is no response from the local general public, and an absurd situation has thus been reached. A sound understanding of our cultural past can be gained only through the patient accumulation of information as the basis on which that understanding is built. The general public gives every indication of being passionately interested in its cultural past, but not in the ‘raw’ information which forms the backbone of the permanent collection catalogue. There has been, as far as the present writer can see, no effective response from scholars and curators directed towards reassessing the whole position of scholarly research within the museum environment and its function in a society with very different values and perceived needs from those of the previous Nevertheless, a few institutions have rejected the general trend towards generation. publishing no scholarly publications whatsoever, and have instead produced catalogues which are so loftily academic that they can appeal only to fellow specialists or are so recherche as to be incomprehensible even to other art historians. The reverse is rather more common. This is the determinedly superficial and cheaply produced museum guide which attempts to cater for the mass market by selecting only ‘highlights’ from the collection, but is all too often poorly written with indifferent reproductions-inadequately captioned-and patronizing towards the public it is ostensibly intended to serve. Today there seems to be little escape from this impasse as a surprisingly large number of museum publications fall into one or other of these categories. On the other hand, if any proof were needed that the general public still expects its museums to be power-houses of knowledge, it is the relentless use made by the public of the various identification services which are provided by them. It is expected that curators should give generously of both their time and their expertise to members of the public who bring in objects for identification. But how is that expertise to be maintained?
CHRISTOPHERWRIGHT
273
In view of all these problems can any sensible guidelines be laid down? What suggestions, if any, seem relevant in the present confused state of affairs? In trying to formulate answers to these questions several factors stand out. Constructive neglect of our cultural past is intellectually indefensible, and yet there are those in positions of responsibility in United Kingdom museums who actively support that neglect because they deny the importance of research on the collections for which they are responsible. Their motives are frequently political and moral, as well as economic, but few of them are brave enough to stand up publicly and defend them. However, the opposite extreme of self-indulgence is equally pernicious and is represented by those who seem to believe that what they create and so assiduously document need be addressed only to fellow specialists. But these extremes represent the attitudes of a worrying proportion of those in charge of the public picture collections of the United Kingdom, especially those of Old Masters. It would, in the context of this note, be invidious to name any of them, but the number of institutions whose positions are in reality close to neither of these extremes is depressingly limited. In pointing out the way to a middle course, the following considerations are relevant, not least because most collections are fundamentally miscellaneous in their composition and thus do not conform to historical principles, generally reflecting the varied tastes of past collectors and not documenting systematically the developing of art through changes of style. Unlike the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, it is not possible to treat any individual British collection as pages from a textbook on the stylistic development of art. Indeed, British collections are notoriously weak in German and Central European art as a whole, Italian art of the last two centuries, Spanish art other than that of the 17th century, French Neoclassical and 20th century art, American art of every period, and so on. As there can be no historical structure as such we have to fall back on an aesthetic approach. The museum permanent collection catalogue, however well researched and carefully written in terms accessible to the layman, represents at best an accidental slice of the past since it can only address those items which happen to have been brought together by the whims of benefactors or the vagaries of committee purchasing policy. Thus, apart from constituting a progress report, it cannot but be an imperfect document because it is by its nature limited to providing an insight into an accidental assemblage of artifacts from the past. Perhaps in an ideal world, in which every collection was thoroughly researched and catalogued according to the same criteria, the total result would be a much more balanced view of the history of art. But what can and should be achieved in the short term-as a practical objective rather than a vague idealistic goal-is that every institution should as a deliberate policy decision devote a specific proportion of its resources to research into its own possessions and publish the results of that research in an acceptable form. It has to be constantly borne in mind that although the amorphous general public is interested on many different levels, it currently remains woefully ill-informed, and the prices of museum publications can and should be kept to a minimum, with their production supported by sponsorship and private benefaction, as they already are in London but rarely outside it. However, above all, the picture collections of the United Kingdom deserve better than passive and demoralized curatorship, and in this respect they compare very unfavourably with their continental and American counterparts. Thatcherite policies of self-help, stiffened by private finance, are only part of the answer. What is inadequate and needs to be changed is the collective museum attitude, and too many curators still do not accept that a major part of their function is to know about the objects in their care and be able to interpret them to and for their public.