Chronicle of chaotic genius: the story of Bryan Robertson

There was a brief moment, back in the 1960s, when Bryan Robertson was the most influential tastemaker in Britain. Meet the most influential director the Tate never had

Bryan Robertson, the best director the Tate never had

The Life of Bryan: A Celebration of Bryan Robertson

By Andrew Lambirth

Unicorn Press, 384pp, $69.99 (HB)

There was a brief moment, back in the 1960s, when Bryan Robertson was the most influential tastemaker in Britain.

Brilliant but unreliable, ebullient but infuriating, Robertson ran the Whitechapel Gallery from 1952 to 1969, harnessing a post-war surge of creativity that spread from England and Paris to New York and Australia.

Cultural insiders call him the greatest director the Tate never had, as Andrew Lambirth’s new book reminds us — a fate that seems inevitable in retrospect, even if Robertson’s elevation that job had once appeared like destiny.

But for all his eccentricities, of which there were many, Robertson will long be remembered as a pioneering impresario whose passion for art left a mark that still reverberates today.

Paul Huxley, one of the many artists to benefit from Robertson’s support, spoke at his funeral in 2002: “He was a life-enhancer, a sensualist, a connoisseur, an entrepreneur.”

Robertson’s tenure at the Whitechapel transformed a provincial east London gallery into a major landmark.

The Life of Bryan

He was always a step ahead: he introduced London to Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and other big names from America.

His JMW Turner show in 1953 was the first major exhibition of the artist in a public gallery since the artist’s death a century earlier.

He was early to recognise the talent of young artists, among them Bridget Riley and David Hockney.

And he wrote beautifully, always hungry to communicate his love for art. He told Lambirth he was drawn to “clarity and composure and balance”, transcending life itself.

“That’s why I’ve always adored Matisse, Bonnard, all that stuff, and a lot of the Americans, and for heaven’s sake a lot of the English when they got going and cleaned their palettes.”

His curatorial philosophies are worthy of study in themselves, but there’s another reason we should remember him in this country. Robertson was a fervent champion of Australian art, especially Sidney Nolan, Roy de Maistre and Arthur Boyd, all of whom received solo shows at the Whitechapel, and a young Brett Whiteley. The latter was a particular favourite. Whiteley was 21 and largely unknown when Robertson first came across his work in London. Entranced by the work as well as the man himself (“the Shirley Temple disguised as Holden Caulfield of modern painting”), he rushed to include three Whiteley abstractions in his new exhibition, Recent Australian Painting. The Tate, which was slowly putting together an Australian show of its own, bought one of those pictures, making Whiteley the youngest artist ever to have work purchased by that gallery.

Robertson was famously loyal. He remained in awe of Australian art well beyond London’s brief explosion of interest in 1961. And he admired Whiteley, too, describing the discovery of Brett’s work as “one of the great moments in my life in any studio”. (The connections endured to the last: in June 1992, as the artist prepared to checked into the NSW south coast hotel room he would never leave, his mother was in London, dining with Robertson.)

Robertson had many artist friends, and his encouragement knew no limits. “I can truthfully say that there’s not a single painter or sculptor whose work I enthused about, whose work I didn’t know long before I got to know them,” he said. “You can’t know somebody who you like personally but can’t stand their work, you can’t do it.

Instead of a biography, about which he thinks his subject would have been “aghast”, Lambirth has assembled a compilation of material (interviews, letters, essays) as a “celebration” of Robertson’s life. The result feels incomplete, and a little forbidding to readers not already in the loop. Robertson, despite his apparent reluctance, deserves the rigour of a fully realised biography, one that draws these threads together into a comprehensive narrative. That said, there is a certain logic to the way this book is presented, given the messy unpredictability for which Robertson was known.

Friends recall dinners that run absurdly late, or Robertson failing to show up at all. The curator was notoriously bad with deadlines, money and commitments, but his charm and generosity made it hard to stay angry with him for long.

Institutions, of course, are less forgiving. Robertson’s failure to secure the top job at the Tate after John Rothenstein’s retirement in 1964 — it went instead to Rothenstein’s deputy, Norman Reid — is explained in part by the political games that track such high-profile positions. At the Tate, Robertson’s vision would have been welcome, even thrilling, but it’s not hard to predict how his administrative shortcomings, already widely known, would have led to trouble. (David Sylvester, a rival curator, went for the job too. While they both used Henry Moore as a reference, only Sylvester had asked permission to do so.)

As it happens, Robertson later considered moving to Melbourne as the director of the National Gallery of Victoria, but changed his mind at the last minute. What a wild ride that would have been.

Ashleigh Wilson is the author of Brett Whiteley: Art, Life and the Other Thing and On Artists.