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GLASGOW: Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum
Written by SeeGlasgow   
Wednesday, 07 May 2008

For over a century Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was loved by millions and was the most visited museum in the UK outside London.

 

For over a century Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum was loved by millions and was the most visited museum in the UK outside London. 
 
From July 2006 it will seduce a new generation of visitors when it re-opens after its three-year, £27.9million refurbishment. 
 
History of Kelvingrove
 
Glasgow’s fine art collections had been housed in the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street since Archibald McLellan’s death in 1854. Industrial Collections were displayed from 1870 in the Kelvingrove Mansion which was built for Provost Patrick Colquhoun c1783, perhaps to designs by Robert Adam. It was situated where the skating rink now lies in the park. Despite the building of a new wing in 1876 for other items such as history and natural history, both the Kelvingrove Museum, as it became known, and the Corporation Galleries of Art were considered overcrowded and out of date.

A large international exhibition was held in Kelvingrove Park in 1888 to raise funds for a new Art Gallery and Museum.  The profit of £41,700 was increased by extra subscriptions to well over £100,000, enabling the Association for the Promotion of Art and Music to go ahead with their ambitious plan for the new building.  Kelvingrove was designed by architects John W Simpson and E J Milner Allen, winners of the open competition declared in 1892.

The Glasgow International Exhibition of 1901 was held to celebrate and inaugurate the new Art Gallery and Museum building. It opened on 2 May and closed on 9 November, was visited by over 11 million people, and yielded a profit of £39,000.  It was reopened as a museum in October 1902.

Since its opening in 1902, the Kelvingrove Collection has been recognised as internationally significant, holding high quality collections across the entire array of museum disciplines - European and Scottish Art arms and armour, natural history, Scottish and Mediterranean archaeology, world cultures and of course the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style artists.  The collection and building was valued at £565million when refurbishment work began three years ago.
 

Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum By Mark O’Neill, Head of Arts and Museums, Glasgow City Council
 
The Victorians had a great love of art and Victorian Glaswegians even more so.
 
When Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum opened in 1901 it was a superlative institution - the last and greatest achievement of the civic museum movement in Britain.
 
Reflecting the pride, wealth and cultural ambition of one of the Victorian era’s great industrial and trading cities, the new museum aimed to encompass the entire world of art, history, archaeology and natural history. 
 
By the time it closed for restoration just over 100 years later, it was one of the most visited museums in Britain attracting more than one million visitors per year.  These included 300,000 tourists, 420,000 Scots day-trippers and 300,000 Glaswegians.
 
Throughout its 102 years it had also added to the marvellous objects the city owned in 1901 to produce one of the greatest civic collections in Europe.  When it closed 4,000 objects were on display from the most important areas of the collection including:
 
  • Italian and Dutch Old Master paintings
  • French Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings
  •  Late 19th and early 20th century Scottish art, including the work of Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the ‘Glasgow Style’ school of artists
  • Ancient Egypt – unusually well documented objects collected from professional excavations to which the museum subscribed in the 1890s
  •  Aspects of the history of Scotland – and of Glasgow’s impact on the world
  •  West of Scotland Archaeology – including Bronze Age burials and life on the River Clyde in the Stone Age
  • Natural history of Scotland and the world, from prehistoric fossils to birds in local gardens, and from kangaroos to elephants
  •  Art and artefacts from dozens of cultures all over the world to which Glasgow traders, missionaries, soldiers and engineers had travelled
  • Arms and armour, second only to the Royal Armouries in quality and range
 
When Kelvingrove reopens in July 2006, after a three-year, £28 million restoration, all this will have been redisplayed to spectacular effect to provide a museum for the 21st century in a stunning Victorian setting.
 
In approaching Kelvingrove’s refurbishment, museum staff set themselves the challenge of doubling the number of objects on display to 8,000.  So inspiration was sought all over the world to find new ways of displaying and interpreting familiar favourites and innovative techniques in architecture and design to maximise the exhibition space.
 
Combining curatorial knowledge, educational expertise and public interests, staff selected the most interesting objects and groups of objects and have told their stories in self-contained displays.
 
The vast museum used to be difficult for visitors to navigate, but this new approach provides a map to greater understanding. 
 
In all there will be 22 themed galleries:
 
East Wing
 
  • Art Discovery Centre
  • Dutch Art
  • Every Picture Tells a Story
  •  Expression (East Court) 
  •  French Art          
  •  Italian Art  
  •  Looking at Art
  •  Looking at Design.
  •  Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style
  •  Scottish Art: the Glasgow Boys and Scottish Colourists
  • Scottish Identity in Art
 
West Wing
 
  •  Ancient Egypt.
  •  Conflict and Consequence.
  • Creatures of the Past.
  • Cultural Survival.
  • Glasgow Stories.
  •   History Discovery Centre
  •  ‘Object Cinema’ (Artic Lives).
  •   Environment Discovery Centre.
  •   Life (West Court Parade of Animals & Spitfire)  
  •  Scotland's First Peoples.
  •  Scotland's Wildlife.
 
  • Study Centre
 
Most museums provide only one type of experience, or at most two – children’s and adult galleries.  However, the display philosophy of the new museum is based on an understanding that people learn in lots of different ways and want to experience objects in different atmospheres and moods.
 
Visitors can choose between highly interactive galleries, which encourage handling and discussion, and a quiet, reflective study centre which provides more than 1,500 objects for anyone who wants to delve deeper into the concepts and ideas presented in the main galleries.
 
The museum’s great art collection, with masterpieces by Rembrandt and Van Gogh, Monet and Botticelli, Turner and Whistler, will be presented in classic galleries – but far more accessible than ever before.  For example, visitors will be able to experience what a painting would have looked like in the flickering candlelight of a Renaissance chapel, with period music adding to the atmosphere!
 
The Mackintosh and the Glasgow Style gallery will also be a highlight, displaying the city’s important collection of furniture, designs and interiors by Charles Rennie Mackintosh and works by his ‘Glasgow Style’ contemporaries in one, comprehensive spectacle.             
 
As well as exploring the human capacity for creativity, Kelvingrove also recognizes a capacity for destruction.  The sword is presented as both a work of art and an instrument of death,, while Renaissance fencing manuals and works by a survivor of Belsen concentration camp explore the realities of human conflict.
 
Flexibility has become the museum’s watchword.  Each gallery will exhibit between four and eight self-contained stories on opening – a total of 100 in all.  And because they are self-contained, each can be changed without the expense of redisplaying entire galleries.  The intention is that from 2008 three or four will be changed each year.  This means the museum will evolve over time, remaining fresh and exciting.       
 
As if all this wasn’t enough, the building itself is a star.  More than 100 years of industrial soot and grime has been peeled away to reveal glowing, golden sandstone which has not been seen by anyone alive today.
 
In addition, dozens of earlier modifications and intrusions into the building have been reversed or removed to restore original vistas.  A subtle architectural lighting scheme has been introduced to highlight the wonderful colonnades and ceilings.  The lower ground floor – hitherto devoted to stores, workshops and offices – has also had a spectacular makeover to provide a quality temporary exhibition space, an education suite and wonderful café with views to Kelvingrove Park.
 
In keeping with the cutting-edge facilities offered throughout, Kelvingrove’s distinctly Victorian amenities have been upgraded and replaced to improve access for people with disabilities and to cater for the legions of families expected to descend on the attraction in its opening season.
 
Glasgow has a population of 600,000 who between them make one million visits to the city’s 12 museums each year.  Add to that the museum’s status prior to closing as Scotland’s most popular free attraction, and you can see why its reopening is one of the most eagerly anticipated cultural events of 2006.       
 
Further Information:
 
 
 
Courtesy of SeeGlasgow.com . 
 
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