WORKS OF ART THAT DIVIDED SCOTLAND

FROM SALVADOR DALI TO BERYL COOK, JACK VETTRIANO TO ANTONIO CANOVA’S THE THREE GRACES, ART HAS AN UNRIVALLED ABILITY TO UNITE – AND DIVIDE – US

ON Monday June 23, 1952 – 70 years ago this week – a painting by the Spanish artist Salvador Dali went on display at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum amid a din of conflicting opinions and raised voices from the disparate communities in the city.

Christ Of Saint John Of The Cross had been purchased for Glasgow’s municipal collection by then director of Glasgow Museums, Gorbals-born doctor-turned art dealer Tom Honeyman, and it’s fair to say it was a work which divided people.

Why the stushie? The cost for a start. The £8200 price tag was far less than the £57,000 the National Gallery of Scotland would pay just three years later for Velazquez’s An Old Woman Cooking Eggs – less even than the £12,000 Dali initially wanted for the work – but Velazquez was dead and an acknowledged master and the notorious Spanish Surrealist at this point was neither. With the average UK house costing just £1800, you can see why the money was an issue.

Even students at the art school complained, raising a petition in protest at the use of funds they thought better deployed supporting local artists and providing much needed studio space.

And the critics? They didn’t like the work on the grounds of quality, deeming it too conventional or (worse) too gimmicky.

Those of a pious disposition, meanwhile, took the opposite view, some finding the painting too unconventional thanks to its vertigo-inducing use of perspective and great slabs of gloomy black.

In the week of its public unveiling, much of the correspondence to The Herald on the subject turned on the fact that the crucified figure’s face was not visible. No holy visage for the viewer’s gaze to dwell on, no holy eyes cast balefully to Heaven as in Rembrandt’s Christ On The Cross.

But Honeyman, whose other accomplishments include co-founding the Citizens Theatre and securing for Glasgow the treasures of Sir William Burrell’s art collection, was steadfast and resolute.

By the beginning of October he felt confident enough about the purchase to write to Dali at the Hotel Ritz in Barcelona and tell of “a glorious summer with your picture. Visitors and discussions still continue and I have come triumphantly through several battles, enjoying all of them.”

No such battles today, of course. Glasgow’s Dali now has pride of place in the city’s art collection and would grace any retrospective of 20th century art. It formed the centrepiece of the National Galleries of Scotland’s 2016 blockbuster show Surreal Encounters, was loaned to London’s Royal Academy the following year and just last week another loan was announced. On July

7 the painting will go on display for six months at the Auckland Project, an exhibition in Bishop Auckland, near Durham.

A 2005 poll in The Herald handed Christ Of Saint John Of The Cross the number one spot in a list of Scotland’s favourite paintings. But the truth is Glasgow had come to an enthusiastic accommodation with the work years earlier, and long before Dali’s death in 1989.

As early as September 1965, Glasgow Corporation’s museums and art galleries committee met to discuss a request for a loan of the work. It came from one Huntington Hartford, heir to an American supermarket fortune and at the time one of the world’s richest men.

He wanted the painting for a Dali exhibition he was mounting in the museum he had built a year earlier in New York – the extraordinary-looking (and grandly named) Gallery Of Modern Art, nine storeys of marble clad modern architecture sited in Columbus Circle on the edge of Central Park. He planned to open the show just three months later, on December 17.

Hartford, a philanthropist playboy whose residence in the Caribbean was called Paradise Island, had founded and financed an artists’ colony in the Los Angeles district of Pacific Palisades in the 1940s before moving his interests to New York. But he had very particular tastes and not everything met with his approval. He thought Tennessee Williams, TS Eliot and painter William de Kooning “evil”, and once likened abstract expressionism, de Kooning’s preferred style, to an artistic “ice age”. He didn’t like beatniks, existentialists or the “do-nothing philosophy” of Zen Buddhism either, viewing it as the result of an “abuse of liberty and freedom”. Even Pablo Picasso he described as “a mountebank.”

Dali he did like, however. So could he borrow the painting, please?

The committee’s sub-convener Bailie Patrick Trainer thought it a fantastic opportunity to show to the people of New York what The Herald’s report of the meeting called “one of Glasgow’s outstanding art treasures.”

He added that since the painting’s purchase 13 years earlier it had paid for itself three times over, thanks mainly to the sale of reproductions (and to Honeyman’s canny decision to acquire image rights as a condition of sale, a continuing source of profit for the city).

The request was accepted by a majority vote, though two voices were raised in opposition. One complainant thought the length of the loan would deprive the citizens of the opportunity to view the work for too long. The other worried about the danger of damage.

He was mindful, perhaps, of a 1961