The Grade I listed Queen Anne townhouse in North Pallant in the city of Chichester, for the past 20 years the home of Walter Hussey’s collection of modern British art, has been closed while undergoing a major extension project. I have been following the fortunes of Pallant House since the late-1970s, when I lived locally. Once it opened in 1982, I visited regularly and watched the development of the collection with interest, particularly the addition of the Charles Kearley Bequest in 1989. At that point, the collection was a little gem of 20th-century art — mostly British, with some European additions. Now it has received a further boost. The house has reopened to universal acclaim with an £8.6 million contemporary wing, built to house the substantial collection of Professor Sir Colin St John Wilson, more familiarly known as Sandy, distinguished architect of the British Library.
Designed by architects Long & Kentish in association with Wilson, and financed by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the generosity of individual benefactors, the new wing effectively quadruples the available gallery space in Pallant House. This light and airy modern building is a delight to visit, and, unlike most new art galleries, has been designed to show art to best advantage. Thus it makes considerable use of natural light, through a system of roof shutters, and concentrates on providing a sequence of gallery spaces that offers a sympathetic context for hanging paintings. The results are impressive.
Sandy Wilson’s collection numbers some 400 works, many of them major paintings by friends and contemporaries such as R.B. Kitaj and Peter Blake. It’s not every day that a considerable modern architect gets to design a gallery for his own collection, but then it’s rare for an architect to care much for art. Most see it as competition or, at best, a kind of sophisticated wallpaper. Wilson is very different: he understands art, and he loves it. He’s also a very fine architect. Inevitably, comparisons between the new building and the British Library will be made, and even Wilson admits that ‘out of the corner of the eye you can see one or two connections’, particularly in the use of natural light from above, but Pallant House has an identity all its own. From the moment you walk into the foyer, all is friendliness and welcome. The ground floor is reserved for public services and activities, so in front of you are the library and prints room, as well as the excellent restaurant with adjacent courtyard garden designed by the Chelsea gold medallist Christopher Bradley-Hole.
Proceed upstairs and into the old house to begin your tour. Rooms 1 and 3 contain the historic collections, including such treasures as the Amberley Panels and a portrait bust of Charles I, before room 2 introduces us to the contemporary, with a magnificent staircase installation of mussel shells and velvet by Susie MacMurray. In room 4 the collection proper begins, with a display entitled ‘Britain and Post-Impressionism 1860–1925’. The Sickert holdings are particularly strong, an artist collected by both Hussey and Wilson, and augmented by other loans. A lovely painting from c.1915, ‘Maple Street, London’, is hung with Wilson’s Sickert ‘Jack Ashore’ and the drawing for it. A smashing Ginner watercolour of Hampstead Heath hangs nearby with a very green back-garden by Spencer Gore. In this room are also Kearley’s Severini, a tiny Cubist Derain still-life, Ivon Hitchens’ early ‘Curved Barn’ and an absolutely entrancing little Gertler landscape, ‘Near Swanage’. Quite a mix, but the various bequests complement each other surprisingly well to give a distinctive flavour of the period.
Upstairs again and into room 5 for ‘Landscape and Still-life Painting Between the Wars’, which includes a great blue basket of lemons by Christopher Wood, a watercolour of Wittenham by Paul Nash (and an etching of Dymchurch), a strong Matthew Smith and two more splendid Sickerts — one of Pulteney Bridge in Bath, the other ‘Chagford Across Fields’. Edward Wadsworth is represented by a very beautiful limestone quarry in tempera, and Ethelbert White comes out rather well in an ink-and-wash wooded landscape. Two Paul Nash wood engravings are evocatively paired with a couple of Graham Sutherland etchings. Room 6 is devoted to Surrealism, and Dalì’s Lobster telephone and a tiny Magritte remind us of what might have been. (Procrasti-nation lost Chichester District Council the Edward James Collection of Surrealist art — it was auctioned off instead.) In this room is another Paul Nash, and nearby a striking self-portrait by Eileen Agar, indicating their romantic as well as stylistic closeness. There’s a fine sheet of Henry Moore drawings, a couple of Paolozzi photo-montages and interesting works by Tunnard and Armstrong. It begins to be a problem what not to mention.
Room 7 deals with Church patronage in post-war art, Dean Hussey’s special area, including another version of Sutherland’s ‘Noli me Tangere’ (there’s one in the Cathedral), a forged and pierced iron relief by Geoffrey Clarke and a poignant early Crucifixion by Craigie Aitchison. Eric Gill’s community at Ditchling, also in Sussex, is the subject of the next room. David Jones stars here, with an exquisite drawing of a leopard and a chalk-and-watercolour landscape. In room 9, Wyndham Lewis leads the way to international Modernism, with a tough interior with figures, ably supported by Ben Nicholson and a couple of domestic-scale Moores. So end the galleries in the old house. As we move down some steps into the new building, the pace changes. A painted bronze Dhruva Mistry guardian sculpture points the way to room 10, a large galleria with an astonishingly rich compilation of Sixties work, mostly by British Pop artists. Here is a powerful group of early Blakes (including ‘Siriol’ and ‘The Beatles, 1962’), soft objects by Claes Oldenburg, key paintings by Kitaj and Caulfield. There’s a 1970s Hodgkin of Sandy Wilson’s house in Cambridge, a dauntingly politicised Colin Self painting of women and nuclear bombers, and Richard Hamilton’s iconic ‘Swingeing London’.
There’s almost too much to take in, especially when you venture into the Lecture Room, where the reserve collection is hung densely on the walls. (This does, however, mean that most of Pallant House’s extensive holdings are currently on display.) Spot the Coldstream view from the kitchen window, or the little Sutherland of a track in the south of France. Cecil Collins, de Maistre, Clough and Ceri Richards are all here, while nine Ivon Hitchens paintings are hung like postage stamps between a couple of cabinets of pots. It’s a wonderfully unprecious room, and full of surprises. The remaining half-dozen galleries chart the development from neo-romanticism (a Craxton and a couple of fine early Freuds, together with a superb bombed church by Piper) through abstraction to renewed figuration. There are a few gaps — no Roger Hilton or Gillian Ayres, no Allen Jones or Leon Kossoff — but there is so much else that one can hardly complain. Very good things by Nigel Henderson and Eduardo Paolozzi, by Bomberg and Auerbach, by Andrews, Willing and de Francia, round out an immensely impressive tour through Mod Brit. A well-illustrated paperback, more accompanying book than catalogue, is available at £12.95. In its new incarnation, Pallant House has just become my favourite venue for modern British art.
Modern British Art: The First 100 Years Pallant House Gallery, Chichester, until 24 September.
Comments