Choice: 21 Years of Collecting for Scotland
Until January 23; RSA Building, Edinburgh

Sir Timothy Clifford is doing what he does best, perhaps for the last time. He’s guiding a reverent group of journalists around his galleries, leaping from work to work in rapturous admiration. “These are all friends to me,” he says, entreating us to share in his intimacy with the oils, marbles and metalpoint drawings.

Choice is Sir Timothy’s swansong; his last exhibition before retirement at the end of January. Starting his career in 1968 as Assistant Keeper of Paintings in Manchester, Sir Timothy worked in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and in the British Museum, before returning to run the Manchester City Art Galleries at the tender age of 32. Six years later he arrived at the National Galleries of Scotland, and despite a number of failed attempts to escape to the V&A, he’s been with us ever since.

It’s hard to know where to start in a gallery packed so full of art, ranging from a 13th century Madonna to the over-sized egg slicer of contemporary artist Mona Hatoum. And these 500 works of art – all acquired during Sir Timothy’s 21 years at the helm of the National Galleries – are just “the very tippy-tip of the iceberg”.

There’s no doubting Sir Timothy’s deep emotional connection with Italian art of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. He eulogises about his marble Bernini bust of dal Pozzo (“a jolly man who liked his pasta”) and explains how its acquisition led to a spate of related purchases (“We stockpiled Bernini. Why not stockpile Bernini?”).

After lingering lovingly amongst his Raphaels, his Titian, his Leonardo, and his famous Botticelli, Sir Timothy sweeps past a single wall of Dutch and Flemish paintings, arm in air, barking the painters’ names without missing a step. Perhaps the gallery’s incoming director, a fluent speaker of Dutch, will take more of an interest in that school. Sir Timothy has never made a secret of his own artistic tastes, leading to mutterings, both inside and outside the galleries, of favouritism.

Sir Timothy, the 12th man to run the organisation in its 150 year existence, argues that if every director and curator pursues their own passions, as he does, the cumulative result will be a collection strong in breadth and depth. While his penchant for Renaissance art is hardly unusual in the upper echelons of connoisseurship (the powers that be have always viewed it as the zenith of art history), it’s not just the paintings of the period that catch Sir Timothy’s attention.

His particular love of the applied arts puts him on the side of the underdog. Plates, chests, medallions and clocks have long been the black sheep of the fine art family, deprived of the kudos accorded to oil paintings and statues. A walk around Choice proves Sir Timothy’s fondness for elaborate, chunky furniture, like the 16th century Venetian chair which grins maniacally at you through its wooden beard.

There are some underdogs Sir Timothy has not sided with. A man with a remarkable talent for putting his foot in it, he once claimed publicly that Scottish art was “a second-rate school”. Attempting to make amends, he proposed a separate gallery of Scottish art for Glasgow, which was widely interpreted as an attempt to evict our native pictures from The Mound.

But it’s impossible to stay mad at Sir Timothy for long. With his boundless (and bounding) enthusiasm, he has insisted on the international importance of Scotland’s art collection, and tirelessly added to it. The National Art Collections Fund have confirmed that they have given more to the National Galleries of Scotland during his stewardship than to any other body. What he has achieved with an annual grant of £1.25 million is nothing short of a miracle, particularly considering that some of it has been diverted to pay for increased running costs.

In a fascinating departure from the Galleries’ usual coy reluctance to put a figure on every painting, the labels in this exhibition do just that. Exact price tags show John Bellany’s masterpiece, Kinlochbervie, bought at a snip for £20,000, and remind us of Sir Timothy’s coup in 1999, when he bought Botticelli's Virgin Adoring The Sleeping Christ Child, from under the nose of its Texas buyer, for £10.25 million. If you go around the exhibition with a calculator and tot up the total, it will come to much more than 21 times the annual grant.

Sir Timothy has achieved this precisely because of his passion. He’s as far from a bean-counter as it’s possible to imagine; day-to-day management issues interest him little. He is a fine art shopaholic, whose personal joy in accumulating a rich treasure trove of art happens to be no bad thing for Scotland.

The exhibition is divided up loosely along the lines of the three collections: The National Gallery on The Mound (Sir Timothy’s natural habitat); the Portrait Gallery on Queen Street; and the Gallery of Modern Art, along with its neighbour, The Dean Gallery.

Until Sir Timothy arrived, at the age of 38, to run the three galleries, each had full control over its own share of the annual purchase grant. After his first attempts at purchases were over-ruled by his keepers, Sir Timothy wasted no time. He had the law changed within the year, allowing the three keepers £100,000 each, and keeping the remaining £1 million in a central pot.

Sir Timothy was now firmly in control of a three-way wrestling match. This explains a lot about the fraught dynamic at the National Galleries, but it also enabled Sir Timothy to set his sights high, bringing home the booty time after time. How else would we get hold of that Botticelli, or the Raphaels, or Canova’s Three Graces?

There are large parts of the exhibition, however, which Sir Timothy can take little credit for. Richard Calvocoressi and his team have assembled a world-class collection of Dada and Surrealist art and archive material, along with a strong emphasis on Austrian and German Expressionism. These are displayed in three carefully curated areas, in sharp contrast with the triple-decker horror vacui of the older collections.

Damien Hirst’s spin painting of 1996 forms a perfect pendant to Howard Hodgkin’s equally vivid Memories, bought this year. At the top of the main staircase, Georg Baselitz’s chain-sawed wooden figure waves a cheery hello to newcomers, while Ernst Barlach’s Das Schlimme Jahr, a sober oak monument to defiance, finds peace amidst the church-like stone walls of the RSA’s Sculpture Court.

There was a time when the stones of the RSA’s façade bore distinct traces of the spray-painted scrawl, “Clifford go home”. After 21 years, we’re glad he didn’t. Every work in Choice is a reason why, along with the creation of the Dean Gallery and the Weston Link. The embarrassing outbursts and the differences of opinion will be forgotten by history, but the paintings, sculptures and bricks and mortar are ours forever.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 06.11.05