Sunday 14 February 2016

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London




It’s a bit off the beaten track in terms of London’s art scene, but the Whitechapel Art Gallery is not difficult to reach and it offers a fresh perspective on contemporary art.


A potted history of the Whitechapel Art Gallery

The Whitechapel Art Gallery, in London’s East End, was the result of a well-meaning attempt to bring culture to the working classes at the turn of the 19th/20th centuries. This was a desperately rundown area in which it was thought by some people that the low morale of the population was because they were deprived of the finer things in life that people in other parts of the capital took for granted, including art and culture.

The developing Arts and Crafts Movement, led by William Morris, had a local presence in that C R Ashbee set up his Guild and School of Handicraft in Mile End Road, which is the eastward continuation of Whitechapel Road. It seemed an obvious step to set up an art gallery in the area, and this was done in 1901, in a building designed in the Arts and Crafts style.

The gallery was hugely popular from the outset, with some 200,000 people attending the original exhibition that included works by John Constable, William Hogarth and the pre-Raphaelites.

The gallery had a major extension in 2009 when the next-door Passmore Edwards Public Library closed and the Art Gallery was able to take over its space (the frontage remains as it always was).


Visiting the Gallery

Access to the Whitechapel Art Gallery is very easy, given that one of the entrances to Aldgate East station, on the District Line, is literally next door to the Gallery. Access is also made easy by the fact that admission is free, just as it always has been, although donations are gladly accepted!

One huge difference between the experience of today’s visitor and that of an original 1901 patron is that there are no Constables or Hogarths on show. For one thing, the gallery is devoted to contemporary art, and for another it does not have a permanent collection, being instead a set of display spaces for temporary exhibits.

The Whitechapel Art Gallery consists of a linked set of rooms of different sizes, with the usual arrangement being that an artist can exhibit their work in an appropriately sized space that is not shared with that of another artist.

The visitor who is used to galleries such as the National Gallery will find their expectations challenged when visiting the Whitechapel Art Gallery. That is because the media on display go beyond just paintings on walls or free-standing sculptures. Images may be displayed on screens, or videos looped on TVs or smaller display units, with the sound available via headphones. When you stop to watch and listen to a video you may become part of an art installation yourself, as your presence will then be visible to other visitors as you sit in the middle of a gallery floor or on a dais.

The exhibitions generally remain in place for several months at a time but do not change all at once. This means that there is always something new to see if you visit at different times during the year.

The experience of visiting the Whitechapel Gallery will certainly be memorable, especially if it challenges the visitor to revise his/her assumptions about what constitutes art. It is unlikely that one will leave the building without having had one’s perceptions challenged, even if one has not fully understood, or even liked, everything that one has seen.


© John Welford

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