Worth the wait: at last, the Welsh National Museum of Art

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Veronica Davies reports on a newly refurbished museum

2011 has seen the final stage of a ten-year programme of refurbishment, rebuilding and extension of the accommodation for the art galleries at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff, at a cost of £6.5 million, most of it raised from private sources and the Welsh Assembly Government.  Since July of this year, the whole of the upper floor of the museum has been dedicated to displaying its art collection, and has now been designated the Welsh National Museum of Art.  At the same time, a new Companion Guide to the collection has been published, showing a selection of 150 works covering painting, sculpture, new media and the museum’s important collection of ceramics, which ranges from 16th-century works to those of the present day.

For those of us who have been regular visitors throughout this time, this has been a tantalizing, indeed sometimes frustrating time, as this ambitious programme has from time to time necessitated the closure of galleries and sending parts of the collection out on tour.  Indeed, it is greatly to the museum’s credit that it has managed to display as much as it has over the last decade.  It has also succeeded in finding space for the prestigious biennial ‘Artes Mundi’ exhibitions, and mounting its own exhibition about the Davies sisters of Gregynog, collectors whose world-class bequest of mainly 19th-century French art is one of the core elements of the collection, a great attraction and sorely missed while a number of key works were on their travels. 

For many museum visitors in Wales, Renoir’s La Parisienne (the ‘blue lady’), part of the Davies bequest, was their first memorable encounter with a painting in a museum setting, and is re-visited with great fondness for this reason.  For many recent visitors, the decision, as part of the refurbishment of the Impressionist gallery, to abandon the ‘safe’ white-cube-like decor in favour of painting the walls a strong blue has been a revelation: we are seeing these familiar works by Renoir, Monet, Morisot and their contemporaries in a quite different way now.

Not only have the existing galleries been refurbished and re-thought, but a whole new suite of galleries have been added by reclaiming what had been administrative spaces for public use, and thus extending the available display space by some 40 per cent.  I was fortunate enough to have a ‘sneak preview’ of these new galleries before the artworks were installed, which allowed me to fully appreciate the high quality of the design and workmanship that had been undertaken to produce a suite of diverse but well-proportioned rooms which are dedicated to the display of modern and contemporary art. 

These range from the paintings of émigré artists such as Josef Herman and Martin Bloch, who found sanctuary in Wales around the middle of the 20th century, to contemporary artists such as Tim Davies, who represented Wales in the 2011 Venice Biennale, and Jeremy Deller, with an installation of memorabilia related to the Welsh rock band Manic Street Preachers, ‘Uses of Literacy’. 

The final room in the new galleries housed an inaugural display of work by Richard Long, and is currently (autumn/winter 2011) showing one of the travelling Artist Rooms exhibitions [see Background info, right] of the work of Joseph Beuys.

The rationale for these exciting and welcome developments is clearly made in the new Companion Guide to the Welsh National Museum of Art, edited by Oliver Fairclough, Keeper of Art at the National Museum Wales, and with a Foreword by Lord Dafydd Elis-Thomas.  The Foreword explains the political context of the first decade of the 21st century in Wales, since the referendum in 1997 that led to a devolution of government from Westminster to a new National Assembly for Wales. This prompted a ‘desire to rebuild cultural institutions not seen in a century’. As a Welsh Open University MA student put it after visiting the new displays for the first time, ‘As a Welsh person I'm proud of the new galleries – onwards and upwards!’ 

Oliver Fairclough’s introductory essay ‘Building a national art collection’ explains the cultural and specifically artistic context of the collection, in particular providing a valuable account of the generosity of collectors and benefactors such as Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, mentioned above, Wilfred de Winton, and more recently, Derek Williams and the Trust created in his memory. 

Works given by the Davies sisters included 19th- and early 20th-century French painting ranging through Corot and Millet, to the Impressionist art mentioned above, and ‘post-Impressionist’ works by van Gogh and Cézanne in particular, as well as sculpture by Degas and Rodin.  De Winton’s love was ceramics, and his bequest of some 3000 pieces formed what is a great strength of the national holding, which continues to grow with the acquisition of works by artists such as Edmund de Waal and Elizabeth Fritsch. Among the contributors to these recent purchases was the Derek Williams Trust, which also makes regular loans of modern and contemporary art works to the museum, and a number of these are currently on display in the new galleries.  Fittingly, one of the new rooms is also named after this generous supporter of art in Wales.

What is clear from recent visits to the Welsh National Museum of Art, and from reading the Companion Guide, is a sense of a renewed interest and pride in the visual arts in Wales. This ranges from the prestigious holdings of fine and applied art given to the nation by Welsh collectors, to work made in Wales, about Wales, by Welsh artists and for Welsh patrons over the centuries.  Thought-provoking connections between past and present can be made both in the galleries and the Companion Guide, for instance the links between 18th-century portraits of the Williams-Wynn family, the one of blind harpist John Parry, paintings both titled The Bard by Thomas Jones (1774) and John Harrison (1840), and Bedwyr Williams’ 2005 photographic work, Bard Attitude, which irreverently interrogates earlier stereotypes of ‘Welshness’.

The growing confidence in a distinctively Welsh visual culture, past and present, can perhaps be underlined by the choice of a detail of Augustus John’s striking and brightly coloured portrait of Dorelia McNeill for the cover of the Companion Guide instead of, say, Renoir’s Parisienne.  This confidence remains undimmed by the present financial situation, which is hitting Wales as hard as any other part of Europe.  Despite a huge reduction in the museum’s purchasing grant, Fairclough insists that the newly launched National Museum of Art ‘is a half-way house.  The creation of a larger and better resourced National Gallery of Wales remains a longer-term objective.’  It is to be hoped that the tradition of generous support and vision that has already achieved so much will rally to answer this call, and that this objective may come to be realized in the course of the next ten years.

A Companion Guide to the Welsh National Museum of Art edited by Oliver Fairclough is published by Amgueddfa Cymru – National Museum Wales 2011. 176 pp., paperback, fully illustrated in colour, £16.99. ISBN 978 0 7200  0613 1

Also available in Welsh: Llawlyfr i’r Amgueddfa Gelf Genedlaethol ISBN 978 0 7200  0612 4