I CANNOT, surely, have been the only Herald reader checking the dateline on the front of Tuesday's paper this week. No, not because we were again voting on remaining in Europe (I was just too young to cast a ballot in 1975, since you ask), but occasioned by the banner strapline beneath our masthead promoting Phil Miller's page three story: "Kelvin Haul", it read, "Art from Edinburgh heads west to Glasgow." Inside, Miller's exclusive was headlined "Picasso and Dali works may move to Kelvin Hall gallery" as he revealed that discussions are ongoing for the redeveloped building across the road from the city's Art Gallery and Museum in Kelvingrove Park to become a Glasgow home for some of the collection of the capital-based National Galleries of Scotland, as well as the neighbouring university's Hunterian Museum archive.
Those of us who have been following The Story of the Arts in Scotland for a wee while were overwhelmed by a tsunami of deja vu on reading this, as well as a justifiable ripple of accompanying cynicism: we'll believe that when we see it. For back in the final decade of the last millennium, there was about five years of will they/won't they when it looked as if the Edinburgh hegemony on the housing of the national art collection might actually be broken. The timeline ran roughly as follows.
In August 1991 the National Galleries proposed the establishment of a National Gallery of Scottish Art. Edinburgh and Glasgow squared up. The Second City of Empire proffered seven locations including the Sheriff Courthouse in Ingram Street, somewhere next to the new Concert Hall, a Clyde waterfront plot where STV now lives, and sites on Glasgow Green and in Bellahouston, Pollok and Kelvingrove Parks. The capital countered a few months later with a list of eight. They included the New Street bus depot, Donaldson's School on the march from Haymarket to Murrayfield, the GPO building in Waterloo Place, and the Dean Education Centre across the road from the existing Gallery of Modern Art. (See what they did there? I'm not sure Glasgow did at the time.) By the end of 1992, the decision had been whittled down to a choice between Glasgow's Sheriff Court and the Dean, but by June of '93, Glasgow's bid included designs for a new building in Kelvingrove Park by star architects Terry Farrell and Sir Norman Foster, as well as Page & Park's plan for the Ingram Street building, and the NGS plumped for a new building in the park.
Then the whole focus shifted to what sort of gallery it would be, with "Scottish Art" replaced by a National Gallery of Art and Design – "a sort of Musee d'Orsay for Scotland" – with side options of a theatre museum, a gallery of photography and film, and a less specific NGS branch gallery on the model of Tate Liverpool. By March 1996, when Glasgow was having a visual arts jamboree in defiance of not winning the title of UK City of Visual Arts and gearing up to be UK City of Architecture and Design in 1999, an architectural competition was being launched to transform the city's central post office building in George Square into the proposed National Gallery of Art and Design. Absolutely none of this came to pass of course, although the Dean did become an extension of the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art.
Here's the thing though: the dynamic people with ambitions for Glasgow back then would be less than impressed by the city now settling for Edinburgh's loan of a few pictures, even if they are by Dali and Picasso.
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