It’s Friday lunchtime. In a hastily contrived press gallery within the
Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, John Leighton is smiling from ear
to ear. The expression is mostly delight, but his evident pleasure is
mingled with just a little relief.
Leighton, the director-general of the National Galleries of Scotland, had, he
admits, suffered some qualms about the Tracey Emin retrospective which has
just opened. But the exhibition is a triumph.
“If I had written a critique of Tracey’s show at the Venice Biennale last
year, it wouldn’t have been favourable,” he says. “But I remember very
strongly her 2002 show at the Staatliche museum in Amsterdam which was
deeply personal, sometimes embarrassing but always emotional and very
touching. It really worked.
“This is even better: there is crescendo and fortissimo, there are quiet
moments in between the screams. When you take it all in, it is quite
symphonic in a way.”
Leighton is standing at the back of the gallery, allowing the artist and two
curators, Patrick Elliot and Simon Groom, to take the stand. Credit where
credit’s due is his philosophy: he sees himself as “a facilitator”, someone
who enables others to make things happen, taking his delight at their
success.
If there is always a sense of Festival celebration in August, this time around
there is as an added significance to the crowd-pulling art exhibitions. A
little over two years since Leighton’s appointment, it is possible to
measure his impact, and appraise his contribution against Emin’s My
Bed and Degas’s L’Absinthe.
Here at the modern art gallery the excited buzz demonstrates that Emin has
created what Leighton calls an “adrenaline rush”. This is contemporary art
as celebrity, a show which will draw tens of thousands through the doors.
That’s the beauty of the Edinburgh festival, Leighton says, and it delivers
for the artist too.
“This city isn’t London, with its noise. There’s always a risk of things
getting lost in London: here’s another Damien Hirst, there’s another Tracey
Emin. By billing it as her first retrospective, and showing in Edinburgh, it
draws more focus,” Leighton says.
Spend time with the director-general and it soon becomes clear that
blockbusters are only part of the mix. Ron Mueck and Douglas Gordon have
enjoyed star billings in the past couple of years but these big temporary
shows “must be rationed”. They can become “an all-consuming beast” which
divert attention from the treasures of the permanent collection.
It is at the Royal Scottish Academy where you will find the show that best
expresses the “core” of Leighton’s philosophy. With its mix of home-grown
artists and French superstars, grounded in the permanent collection, but
enlivened by eye-catching loans, Impressionism and Scotland demonstrates
“what we are trying to do, to show great Scottish art with great European
art and to show how the two interact”.
More than that, the exhibition is “a template for the way we would like to see
the presentation of the collections developing: Scotland in the world, and
the best of the world in Scotland.”
Messages like these resonate up to government level and, though Leighton
professes he “is not a political animal”, there has been an obvious warmth
in his dealings with Linda Fabiani, the Culture Minister, and support from
the First Minister. “They are not just interested in promoting the arts as
‘the best of Scotland’. There is a genuine interest in the international
perspective,” he says. Leighton’s skilful intervention transformed moribund
plans for the refurbishment of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery; now
with £5.1 million from the government, the project is a £17.6 million work
in progress, due to be completed in 2011.
It would be facile to ascribe the sense of revival in Scotland’s art scene
entirely to the new DG. The booming private gallery scene in Edinburgh and
the vigour of Edinburgh College of Art have developed under their own steam;
Glasgow’s vibrant artistic community keeps frothing up without any outside
stimulation. Leighton, though, is widely acknowledged as a catalyst.
His most spectacular success came in February when Anthony d’Offay, a London
art collector with an Edinburgh background, donated his peerless private
collection of modern art to the National Galleries of Scotland and the Tate
Gallery, at cost price.
It was one of the most remarkable acts of philanthropy for a century but
achieved only by endlessly arcane negotiations involving lawyers, civil
servant and politicians at Holyrood and Westminster. At the centre of it
all, the mild-mannered Leighton drew out D’Offay’s inclination to endow the
city he regards as a home from home.
The result is more than 700 pieces from a stellar list of artists: Andy
Warhol, Joseph Beuys, Damien Hirst and the rest. The first fruits will be
seen in public next year in a project called Artists’ Rooms,
when artworks will be fanned out through five museums in Scotland and
galleries across England and Wales. Leighton says: “We’re not going to
pretend that we are in the premier league but from time to time we can play
there.”
He is delighted, too, that Artists’ Rooms connects with the whole
of Scotland. “That gives real meat to the ambition to be much more than just
an Edinburgh-based gallery,” he says. One of the biggest problems now is
simply managing expectations.
Leighton was born in Belfast and his Irishness, he says, gives him an affinity
with Scotland and a clear understanding of the links, for good and bad,
between his home city and central Scotland.
He was brought up in a “houseful of architects” (his father, brother and
sister all went into the profession) and went on to study art history at
Edinburgh. He briefly taught at the university before he was appointed
curator of 19th century paintings at the National Gallery in London. From
1997, as director of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, he acquired a
reputation as an innovator. During his watch the museum established a
collection at Schiphol airport, operated a Van Gogh school bus and planned
the first show to be held in China featuring works by the great Dutch
artist.
Projects like these are more than symbolic. The important thing, Leighton
says, is to provoke a reaction from the public. “Just opening the doors and
letting an anonymous crowd come in doesn’t interest me. You need to set
things up so visitors share the same sort of buzz, and enjoy intellectual
and emotional experiences at a high level. That’s why I’m in this business.”
He is also in business to tackle those questions that never go away for a man
in his position. The most often asked are about Jack Vettriano, the popular
figurative painter who has frequently complained about his lack of
recognition in national art institutions. There are no active plans to
acquire a Vettriano, Leighton says, but he has a completely open mind. “We
are always looking for works which will enhance the collection and tell part
of the narrative of Scottish and international painting. It may well be that
the moment comes when it is fitting to have Vettriano as part of that. “He
certainly has a talent for creating images which linger. I don’t think in
terms of artistic quality they necessarily match with many of the things we’
re showing, but I think that the important thing to be said is that we would
never say never to any artist. I don’t think we have the right to do so.”
That is a matter for the future. For now Leighton can enjoy Emin’s “symphonic”
show, and take satisfaction from her press conference. The artist was asked
to put her own work in a Scottish context: with all the gravitas and decorum
of the Impressionism show, was Edinburgh ready for the riotous output of
Tracey Emin?
“The last group of artists I would ever have wanted to be part of is the
Impressionists. We’re in polar positions,” Emin said, with that curious
twisted smile. “But that’s what’s exciting. It would be wonderful if all the
people who go to see the Impressionists come up here.” Leighton could hardly
have put it better.
Curriculum vitae
Age 49. Born in Belfast
Education Studied fine art at the University of Edinburgh and Edinburgh
College of Art; history of art at the Courtauld Institute of Art
Career Taught art history at Edinburgh before being appointed in 1986
as curator of 19th-century paintings at the National Gallery in London, a
post he held for more than ten years. Director of the Van Gogh Museum from
1997 until his appointment as director-general of the National Galleries of
Scotland in March 2006. Has curated numerous exhibitions, including Caspar
David Friedrich’s Winter Landscapes (1990), Art in the Making:
Impressionism (1990), Seurat’s Bathers (1997) Signac
(2001) and Manet and the Sea (2004), contributed to the catalogues
for the above exhibitions, and published and lectured on various aspects of
19th and 20th-century art
Family Married with two children
smiling from ear to ear
SeyBay, Mahe, Seychelles