Spotlight: Hugh Lane The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893–1915, by Morna O'Neill

New Book Spotlight: Hugh Lane

Professor Morna E. O’Neill, Wake Forest University, introduces the subject of her new book Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893-1915, and discusses her research into his work and legacy with PMC Editor Baillie Card.

Born in Ireland in 1875, the art dealer Hugh Lane died aged only forty when German torpedoes sunk the Lusitania. In between, with little formal education and scant training, he orchestrated high-profile sales of paintings by Titian, Holbein and Velasquez, among others, as he assembled collections for a Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and a collection of Dutch paintings for Cape Town in 1913. His career suggests the singular way that an art dealer might shape the early phases of an art museum at the beginning of the twentieth century and the diverse meanings that can accrue to works of art in local, national and global contexts.

BC: The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art was an ambitious and groundbreaking institution—what were Lane’s aspirations when he founded it?

MO: Lane’s aspirations were many and often conflicting! One of my favourite recollections of him, by the artist Henry Tonks, declares: “he did not care twopence if people came in to see his pictures, he would be quite content if they came in to keep themselves warm.” Although many critics have described the funereal association of museums as the place where culture goes to die, Lane believed that museums like the National Gallery of Ireland and modern art galleries were vital entities. They presented important examples of beauty and cultural achievement that provided education, inspiration, and enjoyment for a general public. In particular, Lane declared his hope that the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art would nurture “a distinct school of painting in Ireland”.

BC: What hand did Lane have in the installation of works there, and in the decoration of its galleries?

MO: He was preoccupied with every aspect of the installation and decoration of the galleries, from the placement of the paintings to the arrangement of furniture and flowers. His aunt Lady Gregory recalled that Lane gave her and other ladies flowers at the opening of the gallery and directed them to pose in certain corners to add to the “decorative effect” of the pictures. Lane planned to display his collection of modern art amidst a decorative programme of scenes from Irish legend. By doing so, I argue, he positioned his French Impressionist pictures as part of a decorative tradition that included Celtic art, thus fusing them to an Irish identity in unexpected ways.

Antonio Mancini, Sir Hugh Lane (detail), 1904. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh October 2018 — No. 10 5

BC: When the new gallery was opened, how did the public respond? What about Irish artists and art critics, in particular?

MO: We could say that the public response was mixed: while some praised Lane’s gift, and his selection of paintings, others puzzled over the nature and meaning of this new institution. All of the works in the gallery (285 of them) were gifts or promised gifts from Lane as well as artists and other benefactors. The best-known group, the French Impressionist paintings purchased by Lane, were part of a group of thirty-nine works known as “the conditional gift”, to be given to the city once they established a permanent home for the collection. As caricatured by Max Beerbohm in 1909, the connoisseur Lane was a kind of magician, pulling Manets and Monets out of a hat. This trick baffles his Irish audience, who appear both rural and provincial. The men wear the wide collars of farmers, and the woman cover their heads with scarves. They are either wide-eyed with horror or stoically unimpressed . . . Beerbohm intuits the complaints of Lane’s critics, who suggested that Ireland was not prepared culturally or socially for modern art and that public money was better spent addressing issues of sanitation, for example, or public housing.

Max Beerbohm, Sir Hugh Lane Producing Masterpieces for Dublin (detail), 1909. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.

BC: You write about Lane’s involvement in building historic and modern collections for two public art galleries in South Africa. How did colonial politics impact his curatorial work for those institutions?

MO: Colonial politics determined every aspect of Lane’s work for these two institutions. His success in Dublin brought him to the attention of Lady Florence Phillips, whose husband had banking and mining interests in South Africa, and she asked Lane to assemble a collection of modern British and French art for the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1910–11. The collection of modern art would articulate South Africa’s relationship to the British Empire in both local and global contexts in the decade after the Second South African War (1899–1902). With his work in Johannesburg complete, he turned his attention to assembling a gallery of seventeenth-century Dutch art that would unite Boer and Briton through “the representation of the art in which the Dutch and English first met in spirit”. Lane’s museums were supposed to heal the wounds of war by drawing upon notions of a shared cultural heritage amongst the white populations of South Africa. Yet the dealer himself recedes in this episode; he is no longer the central organizing force but rather the conduit who tries—and at times fails—to shape the ambitions of others, especially his donors.

BC: You describe Lane as a dealer, collector, philanthropist and curator, who highlighted the intersections between the art market and art museum. What does his example bring to discussions today about commerce in public art galleries?

MO: In 2010, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles made headlines by naming the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch as director. But when Hugh Lane was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1915, there was little complaint. Lane had cultivated a close relationship with the gallery, donating several works to their collection in the decade before his appointment, and he agreed to donate his salary to its acquisitions budget. Recent commentators were scandalized by the way the Deitch appointment laid bare the intersection of the art market and the art museum, especially since the art market tends to put a price on a work of art, while the art museum protects the work of art as priceless. In his life and work, Lane’s actions affirmed the ideal of the art museum: art is worthy of display for the benefit, enjoyment and education of the public. Lane’s actions, and the debates they generated, resonate powerfully today because they remind us to protect the ways in which the museum can and should articulate a regime of value beyond the market.

BC: Throughout the book, you give attention to individual works of art and the stories they tell about Lane’s collecting. Is there a particular painting whose story you feel really illuminates Lane’s complex position in the art world?

MO: Philip Wilson Steer’s A Chelsea Window (1909). With Hugh Lane’s guidance, Lady Florence Phillips purchased this painting in 1909 as the first work acquired for the Johannesburg Art Gallery. (A story circulated that she traded in a 21.5 carat blue diamond ring to purchase this and two other paintings.) In Steer’s painting, the young woman gazes upon the globe while the fingers on her right hand play upon its surface, perhaps an evocation of place finding, emphasising the role of globes and maps in envisioning the intertwined projects of exploration and empire. Sitting at her window with the south bank of the Thames as a backdrop, the woman at A Chelsea Window seems to contemplate the commercial, industrial and financial connections that brought her to South Africa. The dreamy look of the young woman gives no hint of Steer’s own disdain for Lane’s involvement with the Johannesburg Art Gallery project: as he wrote to Lane, “I’d rather be poor in London than rich in Johannesburg.”

Hugh Lane is a Paul Mellon Centre publication, which was released by Yale University Press in September 2018.

Philip Wilson Steer, A Chelsea Window (detail), c. 1909. Johannesburg Art Gallery, presented by Florence Philips.