Masters of the artistic universe

On The Courtauld’s 75th anniversary, Robin Simon looks back at its colourful and distinguished history

The Tate Gallery …sorry, I’ll start again. ‘Tate’ spent £100,000 a few years back just to lose its ‘the’. Staff are strictly instructed by the gallery’s Oberkommando to refer to it according to the brand name, as in ‘I’m at Tate’. It sounds as if they come from Mars — or Yorkshire. It doesn’t work, and I enjoy the announcement on the Victoria Line at Pimlico which gets it all wrong: ‘Alight here for the Tate Britain.’ The Courtauld Institute of Art turns 75 on 6 October this year and has also undergone a rather expensive ‘brand refreshment’. There is the usual accretion of ‘logos’ and the like, but the advisers involved have resisted dropping the definite article (‘Courtauld’, tout court) as threatened at one point, although they may have gone too far the other way. We shall now have ‘The Courtauld’, as in ‘Her Majesty The Queen’ (the brand favoured by The Queen Herself). In such ways The Courtauld (sic) tries to move with the times.

It has been an independent college of the University of London since 2002, and retains its place as the pre-eminent centre for the study of art history in the world, larger and even more international in its intake than it used to be, but just as demanding in its scholarship. It did not start out like that. The institute emerged out of one of those amateur but serendipitous schemes at which the British excel. In 1932 it began in Samuel Courtauld’s own house in Portman Square, where his astonishing Impressionist collection was on view. Not any old townhouse, of course, but Robert Adam’s finest, complete with such unusual academic features as a gilded Ballroom (full of books), Music Room (more books), Etruscan Room (staff common room) and Marble Bathroom (secretary).