Tote's Treat

An 1892 Punch cartoon showed a servant of Her Majesty's Treasury waving aside a bearded gentleman with a bundle of pictures. The caption: "Much obliged, but we are a nation of shopkeepers. We don't want any art today, thank you." The snubbed picture-pedlar, as every Punch reader knew, was a Lancashire-born sugar baron named Henry Tate. He had just offered 60 contemporary paintings to Britain's National Gallery--and had been turned down. Five years later, he retaliated millionaire-fashion by building Britain a brand-new gallery and throwing in his collection as a bonus.

The Queen's Approval. Queen Victoria herself drove past and ordered the carriage slowed while she put on her spectacles to favor Tate's treat with an approving stare. The gallery--looming like a giant white stone wedding cake above the trees at Millbank--was destined to become almost as familiar a London tourist-haunt as Madame Tussaud's waxworks. Last week, the Tate was celebrating its 50th anniversary with a crowd-pulling show from its own storerooms, which boast Britain's best collection of English painting (including a fine group of Blakes) and of modern art.

Founder Tate always liked a picture that told a story, so the gallery began with such contemporary favorites as Sir Luke Fildes' The Doctor, Lord Leighton's The Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead, and Millais' drowned Ophelia (his model: Mrs. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who posed fully gowned in a tub of flower-littered water).

Utrillo's Revenge. Tate planned his treat as a show place for living painters. But there were a few reaches into the past by one director, who could not stand the way some living artists were working. Cherubic James Bolivar Manson, who was director from 1930 to 1938, once inspected two lumpish sculptures by Hans Arp and Brancusi at the request of British customs officials and advised them not to classify such horrors as art. (He finally reconsidered and the sculptures were let in.) Manson also once noted in a catalogue that Painter Maurice Utrillo was "a confirmed dipsomaniac . . . to his death." Utrillo, on his feet and sober as an avenging angel, sued and won a public apology.

Puckish John Knewstub Rothenstein, the Tate's present director, is a man given to pastel-colored shirts and the adjective "delicious." He is all-out for modern art. During the war, Rothenstein packed most of the Tate's treasures off to rural hiding places, then busied himself with the acquisition of over 600 new works, including some by British Modernists Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore, John Piper. The gallery was bombed (only six of its 34 rooms are usable now), but attendance has climbed to more than double prewar. Rothenstein realizes that much of what he buys will soon be outdated. His main problem is what to do with yesterday's "moderns." He doesn't want the Tate to be cluttered up with them. Rothenstein's fond hope: that some of his modern paintings will eventually be good enough to crash the National Gallery, as Sir Henry Tate's original collection was not.

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