The north is full of exquisite treasures. If only we actually got to hear of them
On Friday, the Courtauld Gallery in Somerset House in the Strand in London will finally reopen its doors after a long revamp, a moment of excitement not only for the art world – “It’s too much!” wrote one blissed-out critic in his preview – but for anyone who has found themselves missing such masterpieces as Goya’s Portrait of Don Francisco de Saavedra or Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.
I can’t wait to gaze at the ceiling of the restored Great Room, for so long unaccountably partitioned. The heart lifts at the thought of seeing this huge space – until 1837, it played host to the Royal Academy summer exhibition – again suffused with light.
But still, something in me rankles as I read of this comeback, phase one of which has cost £22m. Once again, London draws all the oxygen, not to mention the cash; once again, it’s as if nothing could possibly be happening anywhere else. I always carry a slight resentment of this metropolitan monomania: a bat-squeak grudge born not only of my roots, but also of the way I tend to side instinctively with the underdog.
Last week, of all weeks, I was more than usually struck by the attention in which the Courtauld is basking, because only days before I’d visited an exhibition in a city other than London that I considered to be as beautiful and as important as anything I’d seen in years – and yet, veiled in silence, I’d found it only by accident. In York for a break, I went to see newly discovered drawings by Thomas Gainsborough at the city’s brilliant art gallery and they were delightful; it made me smile to learn that Gainsborough used broccoli as models for trees in his studio. But in truth, they were not half so fantastic as what was waiting for me upstairs in the ceramics gallery, where someone had taken the trouble to tell the story – or one of the stories – of 20th-century Britain via a collection of hundreds of pots.
Slowly absorbing the bare bones of what this exhibition was about – its curator, Helen Walsh, spoke of one extraordinary, ordinary man and his obsession with the haptic experience of hand-thrown bowls and cups, vases and jugs – I was for a moment so utterly astonished I felt I needed to sit down. I looked around. The only chair was next to a table on which, at one end, there were yet more pots and, at the other, a typewriter, on which visitors
were invited to bash out their thoughts. C-R-I-K-E-Y, I wrote. The exhibition is called The Yorkshire Tea Ceremony and is based around the 3,600 pots – the single most important collection of British studio pottery in the country – gathered in the years after the Second World War by a librarian from Wakefield called WA Ismay (they came to York after his death in 2001). In ceramics circles, Ismay is famous; Edmund de Waal is among those potters who once applied to visit his tiny terrace house to see the collection (Ismay liked to use his pots, hence the show’s title).
But for most people, his name is unfamiliar. Like all the best and most passionate collectors, Ismay was not in this game for attention, for all that his doggedness and uncommon taste led him in time to become friends with such celebrated potters as Lucie Rie and Michael Cardew. His little home with its outside lav was like every other house in his street, save for the fact that on every surface, including his kitchen table, reconstructed by the gallery, complete with typewriter, there were precious works of art, some of which cost him a week’s, even a month’s, pay. Every name is here: Hans Coper, Bernard Leach, Magdalene Odundo, William Staite Murray, Emmanuel Cooper, Gillian Lowndes, Takeshi Yasuda… (500 potters are represented here).
It doesn’t matter if pots are not your thing. Looking at the photographs of Ismay’s home, and watching a film in which those who knew him struggle to describe not only the nature of his obsession, but the precise quality and scope of his knowledge, you understand that this is social history too (a bath lived in a kitchen cupboard all Ismay’s life, a relic that never made it upstairs when the builders of the house he inherited from his parents ran out of cash). It makes you wonder about education, money and social class, about progress. Would it be possible for the son of a cloth presser to build such a collection now?
But there’s something else here and perhaps it’s the more important thing. It’s right for the government, and all of us, to worry about the northsouth divide; the Tories’ conviction that “levelling up” is urgent is not misplaced, even if their motivation for believing so is cynical. However, the feeling grows that this talk perpetuates a vicious circle by reinforcing the notion that the north is only deprived; that there is little else about it to be said or seen, or pondered, even that it has no middle class.
Thanks to this, in the case of the arts in particular, the media will always ignore its riches in favour of (I’m thinking of the BBC here) yet another miserabilist vox pop in a market. For a long time, I haven’t always been able to connect the north that I know with the one the political pundits, and just about everyone else, tells me about. But this disconnect was never more confounding than the other day, when I stumbled on William Ismay’s pots, in all their lustrous glory, and wondered why I had not read one word about them, though perhaps this will change now.
It made me smile to learn that Gainsborough used broccoli as models for trees in his studio