Fancy an Edvard Munch spatula? The gift shops trying to save our galleries
Searching for a stocking filler for the artistic soul in your life? How about a Rosetta Stone face mask? Or one with Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire? Or Titian’s Diana and Actaeon? All are available from the British Museum and National Gallery shops. There’s even a bottle of Hokusai hand sanitiser.
Still, you can hardly blame the galleries for wanting to get something out of Covid, when Covid has taken so much from them. It has been a torrid year for the arts. Our museums, galleries and artist’s houses will have rummaged down the backs of their Chippendale chairs and Louis XV sofas and found only pennies. Even before Covid, galleries were in a bind. Whisper that maybe, just maybe, museums might charge for entry – and be howled out of town. Venture to suggest an auction of the collection and you might as well sell off your soul. Dare to take dirty oil or opioid money and protesters scale the portico. Host corporate events, stage catwalk shows, fill the halls with banqueting bankers and stand accused of supping with the hedgie devil.
As it happens, I don’t share these qualms. Filthy lucre can make glorious art. See the Medici, the Gonzagas, the Bourbons and co. It’s academic now anyway. Good donors or bad donors, for the foreseeable future, glad-handing, air-kissing and schmoozing are off.
The Treasury arts bail-out will keep some keels above water, but the trouble with leaks is that a craft will take on water, however much you bail. Government largesse cannot last. So, sink or swim? Or in the case of the rubber ducks (King Tut Duck, Churchill Duck, Samurai Duck, Viking Duck…) sold in so many galleries: float on a gift-shop tide? When you write your wish list this Christmas, call on the gift-shop elves. The gallery shop is more vital than ever to the survival of our cultural institutions.
It’s not the big beasts I worry about – the British Museum, the National Gallery, the Royal Academy, the V&A, the Tates – it’s the smaller places where every scone and postcard counts. Back in May, I ordered a Barnett Freedman Alphabet mug from Pallant House in Chichester. Pallant House is one of our best small galleries, unfailingly punching above its weight with clever, entertaining exhibitions. I wanted to do something, however token, to show my support. I thought it predictably feeble that the National Portrait Gallery had failed to get their online shop open, while a modest independent had turned on a sixpence and was drumming up orders.
Nicholas Higbee, owner of Pallant Bookshop, tells me that, initially, “like every other retail business, we were stunned by the lockdown. The Barnett Freedman exhibition had only opened three days before, so we had a bookshop full of new and exciting stock, but no customers!” When Pallant House closed, Higbee had no access to shop, stock or even computers. The furlough scheme was a “lifeline” giving him time to think, move to a temporary office, make a packing room and rejig the website. In May, the bookshop became an online business and I became the proud owner of a new mug. Some staff came off furlough and at the end of each day they queued at the Post Office with parcels of orders.
I ask Higbee, now back to bricks-and-mortar business, if there’s a balance to be struck between the cheap ’n’ cheerful and the tasteful, but perhaps less accessible. “I know what you mean,” he says. “I can remember seeing Edvard Munch’s The Scream on a spatula...” Higbee has always resisted “going down the road of fridge magnets and rubber ducks”. For the current Gilbert White exhibition, Pallant has commissioned woodcuts and screen-prints from the artists Angie Lewin, Alice Pattullo and Jo Sweeting. Higbee wonders if gift shops might have more sales success “if they steered clear of some of the ‘naff and nasty’ and produced more thoughtful products which better reflected their own unique collections”.
This is certainly the approach of Laura Pryke, retail manager and buyer for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge. Pryke faces a particular challenge. Kettle’s Yard, former home of the collector H S Ede, is a place of subtle beauty where works by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Ben and Winifred Nicholson, Alfred Wallis and Christopher Wood live with pebbles, stones, feathers and ferns. Novelty pencil sharpeners are unthinkable.
I ask Pryke about the fine line between “in the spirit of” and “slavish imitation of”. She tells me: “Kettle’s Yard is so much about the atmosphere, the light...the pebbles.” Pryke seeks to capture these “intangible qualities.” You can buy potpourri inspired by Ede’s own blend: sandalwood, lavender, incense from various monasteries – and the secret ingredient, “quite a decent helping of Cognac”. Pryke has had success with cuttings from the houseplants. “It’s such an easy way for people to get a little piece of the Kettle’s Yard in their own homes.”
Social distancing is difficult. The oldest part of the house was once three slum cottages and the rooms are hardly big enough to swing a key ring. Visitor numbers are necessarily down, says Pryke. “Every time someone buys something in the shop or on our website, it helps to secure our future.”
With visitors severely restricted, Charleston in East Sussex isn’t financially viable. “In a normal year,” says Jennifer Grindley, head of marketing, “Charleston earns over 80 per cent of its income through ticket sales to the house and garden, exhibitions, festivals and events, and through secondary spend in our shops and café.” Charleston receives no public subsidy and has lost over ￡1.5 million. The online shop has been its only source of commercial income since March.
Illustrator Caroline Kent of Scribble & Daub has designed letter-pressed and hand-painted notecards inspired by flowers in the Charleston garden which have been printed at local workshop Adams of Rye. Every advent calendar, every sheet of wrapping paper, says Grindley, “is a wonderful way of helping charities like ours which have had a terrible year”. What’s more: “you will be introducing your favourite museum or gallery to a relative or friend.”
Every gift you give is a gift to a gallery, too.