I have no wish to take any sort of credit for the idea, but regular readers of this weekly bulletin from the frontline of arts advocacy will have been as delighted as I was to read in Tuesday's Herald that the new president of RGI (the Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts) has her eye on the McLellan Galleries for a showpiece exhibition in 2014 when the athletes are in town.
Although I am certain that our newly elected councillors will make all the politically correct noises, I imagine there were some sharp intakes of breath when Karin Currie raised the issue. It was certainly interesting to learn that Bridget McConnell had contrived to have the building excluded from the property portfolio of Glasgow Life when the semi-autonomous culture and sport body was set up.
As I wrote in this column at the start of April, it is a scandal that this purpose-built city centre art space lies unused while the pictures that its creator purchased and bequeathed to Glasgow to go in it form a crucial part of the exhibition of Italian art which is this summer's reason for making a special visit to the Art Gallery and Museum at Kelvingrove.
A contributor to our letters page on Wednesday from the leafy West End of the city, writing in support of Ms Currie's idea, suggested that, as well as hosting an RGI exhibition, Archibald McLellan's palatial rooms might also house works from the collection of the National Galleries of Scotland. I suspect our correspondent may have been mischievously revisiting the proposal for a National Gallery of Scottish Art (and possibly Design) some 20 years ago when, if memory serves, an option to have a Glasgow branch of the National Gallery at the McLellan was overtaken by grander plans to create a new building, of which nothing came.
It is still a good idea, and surely one that is relatively economically achievable. An alliance of the National Galleries of Scotland and the RGI also has a certain appeal. The NGS trustees have a policy of not charging the people of Scotland to look at the art they own, unlike Glasgow Life, which wants a fiver to let you see McLellan's Italian collection.
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