A Man Who Is Too Busy To Retire

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32072, 21 August 1969, Page 1

A Man Who Is Too Busy To Retire

Mr W. S. Baverstock,;' the retiring director of : the Robert McDougall Art Gallery, is worried about how he is going to make his retirement an accomplished fact. His successor has been appointed, and an official farewell will be held tomorrow, but Mr Baverstock is still up to his old-world cravat in work. He describes himself as a one-man band, and his studio-style office, crowded with paintings, sketches, empty gilt frames, books, catalogues and folders, is a battlefield of projects “under action.” His two desks are so overflowing with material that his typewriter has to be parked on a small side-table, and he confessed yesterday that he. had not even started to I

assemble his possessions for ' removal. “I’ve got a few cartons out there,” he said, nodding towards another room, “but I’m just too busy. I don’t want to linger on, but because of this year’s programme of exhibitions and openings I’ve been unable to complete my work. “I can’t leave yet, with all this to do. I want an opportunity to get on with the job of documenting the collection. It’s not been a leisurely job here, and the day-to-day running of the gallery, together with special exhibition (we’ve had nine this year), have not left me any time for this sort of thing.” Mr Baverstock was invited to be honorary curator of the McDougall gallery in 1948, when he was secretary of the Canterbury Society of Arts at its old gallery in Durham ! Street. He did both jobs I until the end of 1959, when

he was made the McDougall gallery’s first full-time director. He feels that he has often been made the scapegoat for criticism of the City Council’s administration of the gallery. As he points out, he has never had a professional assistant, and grants for improvements have been largely non-recurring. “To make this a livelier gallery we’d need a special general purpose room added to the building,” he said. “And anyway, a lot of this liveliness that the young people want shouldn’t take place here. “The McDougall shouldn’t be a swinging, go-go sort of gallery. The Canterbury Arts Society can do these sort of things at its new gallery—they’re within its legitimate scope. “Our thing is to have the civic collection on display for the people and visitors to see

it—representative works of art from the important periods. Ephemeral work shouldn’t be included, in my opinion, and it’s very hard to judge what is not ephemeral of what is being done today.” Mr Baverstock believes that the organisations responsible for showing art today should be more selective. “There are too many art exhibitions,” he said, particularly one-man shows. “The door of seif-expres-sion has opened and anything can happen in the name of the arts. Incomprehensibility, although not intended, is often the result. Visual art was said to be an art of communication, but today the lines of communication have in many places broken down—and all this in the name of art and culture. ; . - “One thing I hope to escape from to some extent when- I leave is the use of

the word ‘culture.’ I am sorry that Herman Goering has been proved not to have said ‘When I hear the word “culture” I reach for my gun.’ “The word is too glibly and freely used by people who are fostering the incomprehensible and the non-com-municative in the visual arts. “Although it is hard to set a standard, there should be a standard set by those responsible for showing art The Arts Society lets its gallery for one-man exhibitions at all levels, and it will be blamed for the standard of the work shown. It will appear that they are fostering it, when in fact they are just letting the gallery.” Many of the sketches on the wall of Mr Baverstock’s office at the gallery are caricatures done by him in the 1920 s and 30s, when he was honorary caricaturist to the Christchurch Savage Club.