Mandergate: meanness and magnanimity

The Wolverhampton Mander scandal rumbles on, with, as far as I’m aware, no resolution yet in sight. RBS and Delancey seem well dug in. But for those who still care (I hope you do), here’s a few new thoughts …

Mandergate on Facebook

Please call in at our brand new Save-the-Hepworth Facebook page, and please – pass it around far and wide. While you’re there, it would be good if you could click to like the page, which will help boost the headline support figure. An online petition is also a possibility under discussion – news of that if and when.

How do you flog a million pound sculpture?

Perhaps not at Sotheby’s, it’s been suggested to me. The seller’s commission of 20% or thereabouts would be a distinct disincentive, certainly, while the similar buyer’s commission would deter any sane purchaser. After all, why pay a person in a suit £400,000 plus between you to bang a gavel when you could do a deal down the pub with no such overheads? And if the seller’s fee is negotiated downwards, the recent practice, apparently, is for the difference to be pushed onto the hapless buyer.

Sotheby’s flog off a Giacometti for – gulp – £65m in 2010. The ‘Walking Man’ looks about as happy as the purchaser, who was saddled with a £7m buyer’s premium.

I’m told that the million plus figure bandied about for Wolverhampton’s Hepworth has actually been offered to RBS / Delancey by a serious enquirer, so forget scanning the auction catalogues – a private sale seems rather more likely, and – for all we know – may already have happened. Unless, of course, as suggested last time, Rock Form will be stashed away in the RBS Art Vault for the foreseeable, to accrue still more value.

Why should the Scots have all the best sculptures?

Saved for the nation – the Scot Bot ‘Rock Form’. Could Wolverhampton borrow it for a bit, please?

Here’s a nice image of another casting of Rock Form in the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, looking oddly bluish in this shot. Along with a second Hepworth bronze, this has been there for nearly 40 years, almost as long as Wolverhampton’s version. After the artist’s death, the two were loaned by the Hepworth Estate to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, then housed at the Botanic Garden. Last November they were acquired for the nation via the government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme, the Gallery’s director commenting that “it is wonderful that they can remain here indefinitely”.

Wonderful indeed. What a contrast to the main chance meanness pursued by RBS, custodians of the Wolverhampton Rock Form, and Edinburgh neighbours to the Gallery and the Botanic Garden! (And still 80% owned by you and me, I’d remind you.) Is a little magnanimity too much to hope for? How about a long term loan to Wolverhampton City Council, with Rock Form to resume its pride of place in the Mander Centre?

According to recent reports, RBS boss Ross McEwan admits that his company still faces “significant conduct issues,” adding: “Trust in this industry has been so eroded, I think it will take at least five years to get it back …” I believe that Mr McEwan is famous for his optimism.

Centre: a casting of ‘Rock Form’ – maybe the Wolverhampton one – apparently ready for departure in the Hepworth studio.

The Mander scandal: “Give us back our statue, say shoppers”

Yes, I know. Mandergate has hijacked this blog a bit. But bear with me. It’s important. And normal service will be resumed asa decently p. For earlier instalments on Wolverhampton’s vanishing Hepworth sculpture, go to “recent posts” (right), or see here, here and here. For bigger images on this post, just click.

“I have heard the message loud and clear. RBS cannot start to claim to be a bank that always treats people fairly unless we stop doing those things that erode trust.”
Ross McEwan, Chief Executive RBS, The Guardian, 10 Feb 2014

RBS: compulsive art hoarders!

Here’s an angle that, stupidly, I missed earlier. I hadn’t realised how fond banks are of accumulating art, whether for investment, decoration or just plain bank swank. And it turns out that RBS – Mander Centre owners – have notorious form in this area. In late 2009 RBS (bailed out by 45 billion and 80% taxpayer owned, you may recall) was revealed to be sitting on the largest corporate art collection in Britain, thousands of items including a Lowry, a Hockney, a Caulfield, a Paolozzi and a Joshua Reynolds. According to The Guardian hundreds of works were in storage against only one out on loan, despite the bank’s earnest claim to be sharing its goodies with galleries and museums. The Guardian’s report is here, and BBC Scotland’s here. Google will find you many similar.

Andrew Graham-Dixon plays the banker to salute RBS’s “social responsibility strategy”

An immediate PR counter offensive promised an end to inappropriate hoarding; public access would be provided, as reported in The Scotsman, and works would be sold off, as quoted by Bloomberg. Interestingly, even plausible art pundit Andrew Graham-Dixon was wheeled out on The Culture Show to reassure angry taxpayers that RBS were “bending over backwards to make their real treasures available to the public” (his words) and that “the so-called RBS art scandal is just a red herring”. In the seven minutes of his feature, Graham-Dixon barely bothered to look at the art, but he did do a lot of pratting about in an amusing bowler hat pretending to be a banker. He has had better moments.

Five years on, has RBS kept its promises and shaken off the hoarding habit? Far from it, according to this worrying report in the Daily Record in February this year. Only a few low value items have gone, and the value of the bank’s art holdings is still estimated at £20 million. RBS claims that collecting art is “not part of their current business direction”, but also insists that “the best works will remain within the bank’s estate”. Miserably, when approached by the Public Catalogue Foundation in 2009, RBS declined to participate by making details of their collection publicly available.

This may put the Mander Hepworth incident in a different light. If RBS / Delancey won’t say what their options are, they can hardly blame us for fearing the worst. Despite some pushing by Mark Carney and Vince Cable, RBS boss Ross McEwan has played down speculation that the bank might relocate southwards in the event of a vote for Scottish independence in just two months’ time. If Wolverhampton’s Hepworth is not sold off, where will they keep it? At this rate, it seems not beyond the bounds of possibility that it could end up as the key valuable stashed away in the RBS art vault over the international border in an independent Edinburgh.

Speaking out: Mandergate in the press

After an initial period of silence, the city council spoke out on July 14, in the form of a forthright press release by Councillor Elias Mattu, cabinet member for communities, calling publicly on behalf of the city Labour Group for the return of the Hepworth:

“I am calling on the current owners to either return the sculpture immediately, or publicly reassure the residents of our City that it will not be sold for their personal profit by providing them with the date we can expect to see it back on public display again.”

The 2003 unveiling [Express & Star]

On the back of this the Express & Star was enabled to beef up its rather timid first effort with a splendid headline the following day – “Give us back our statue, say Mander Centre shoppers” – and a revival of their fine 2003 shot of Dr Sophie Bowness and the late Anthea Mander at the unveiling of the refurbished sculpture and time capsule – a great image, in which the sculpture looks extraordinarily powerful and alive. It’s not exactly a “statue”, but never mind; the thought’s the thing. When I last looked, the article had 450 likes.

Meanwhile Dr Chris Upton of Newman University has been busy in the Birmingham Post, with a scathingly witty column headlined “Between a rock and a hard place”:

“People used to arrange to meet by ‘the thing with holes in it’. Unfortunately, in an ultimate extension of Hepworthian style, the holes have now taken over completely. That is, the sculpture has vanished.

Should I be worried about this? I know that the Mander family are – they were instrumental in getting the Hepworth to Wolverhampton in the first place.

Delancey’s website tells me they ‘take a lateral approach to direct property investment’, and plenty of other things I don’t understand. I have a firmer grasp of modernist art. But I shall be keeping my eye on the hole where the Hepworth ought to be. At present this particular piece of public art is anything but public.”

So Mandergate moves into the public domain. Let’s hope there’ll be plenty more where these came from.

Tweaking the record

I’ve always seen evasion as a form of deceit. But perhaps I’m plain naïve. In business, it seems, anything goes short of the litigious. So it’s been instructive to watch Delancey airbrushing out the embarrassments.

In a previous post I highlighted their financial support of Pallant House gallery in leafy Chichester, which hosted a fine show of Hepworth drawings at around the same time that Delancey were heaving the Mander Hepworth onto the forklift in less leafy Wolverhampton. Interesting then, that the latest version of the “Community” page on Delancey’s site is now restricted to organisations they’ve supported in the last year only; conveniently, Pallant House has slipped off the bottom of the list and is nowhere to be seen.

First version: your sculpture is showing …

That’s better!

The rather groovy artist’s impressions of the 2017 revamped Mander Centre also featured in an earlier post. The earliest versions of these included a little “before” image for comparison in the lower left corner; one of these, unavoidably, included the prominent shape of the Hepworth sculpture. In the later version, as issued to the press, this embarrassment has disappeared.

Finally, while we’re on evasion, let’s revisit the Mander’s much quoted statement that

“The sculpture was removed on the advice of our insurers, for safe keeping prior to development. The majority of the redevelopment will take place on the lower level, where the Barbara Hepworth sculpture was located. As such, the current landlords were advised by insurers that this valuable piece be removed and stored securely off-site.”

Seems reasonable. But “prior to development” is the key phrase here; when is the work actually due to start? All a bit vague. Helpful then, that supervising architect Trevor Colman was interviewed on Wolverhampton City Radio at the announcement in February, his comments preserved on YouTube:

Trevor Colman: “… starting on the site next year …”

“It’s really now got to the point where it’s able to be announced because we’re starting on the site next year to complete in Summer 2016 with the department store to fit out and be open for trading by Christmas 2016.”

Next year? That’s next year as in 2015? Colman says this at 1.10 on the video and repeats it later. So the sculpture was removed at least seven months before the earliest start date? I’ve heard of safe keeping but that’s ridiculous. But of course, what may be coming up a lot sooner is the impending sale of the Mander Centre – minus the Hepworth, it seems.

“Prior” to redevelopment, yes. Also “prior” to the Day of Judgement, if it comes to that …

The Mander’s missing Hepworth: out of darkness cometh … Sainsbury’s?

Wolverhampton’s wonderful Barbara Hepworth sculpture, Rock Form, has stood bravely in the Mander Centre for 46 years – until asset managers Delancey yanked it out a few weeks ago under cover of the Mander’s future redevelopment. My last two posts tell the shameful story – here and here.

For the last month and more, the owners and their associates have sat with lips zipped, cleverly managing not to deny that the Hepworth may be sold off. And it’s not just my enquiries that have been stonewalled – every objector has met with the same. The future for this important piece of Wolverhampton’s heritage remains completely in the dark.

Coincidentally, just as the Mander Hepworth has disappeared, the huge new Wolverhampton Sainsbury’s has opened for business, with “at its heart” (as the Express & Star put it – actually on a small patch of grass by the entrance) a brand new artwork commissioned by the supermarket.

Out with yesterday’s meaningless abstractions …

… and in with today’s bright new corporate sculpture!

Out of darkness cometh light (the city motto) is an eight metre column of stainless steel, designed by Planet Art of Pelsall, who seem to specialise in monumental stuff for supermarkets. The cornetto-ish shape is oddly reminiscent of 2012’s Olympic torches; round the base are cut simplified shapes of vanished smoky industrial buildings, from which extend trees that blossom into an Escher-style frieze of escaping birds.

There is a certain portentousness about this symbolism. I was a bit stuck on what the birds might represent, apart from, well, er, birds. But according to artist Julie Edwards they symbolise hope for the future. This must be what Sainsbury’s bosses think public art should look like. I’ve seen considerably worse, I have to say. But I’m not quite convinced that Out of Darkness will still be standing proudly in 46 years’ time. With all due respect to Planet Art, is this what the City gets in exchange for its disappearing Hepworth? And is it a fair exchange?

But perhaps Mander / Delancey / RBS could take a leaf from Sainsbury’s book? If the Hepworth goes for a million pound Burton, why not silence the objectors by filling the empty space in the revamped shopping centre with a mega-impressive sheet-metallic thingumajig, symbolic of the aspirations of a reinvigorated post-recession corporate Britain? I’d suggest a base of stylised closed doors from which extend the arms of hatchet-wielding asset strippers, releasing flocks of pound signs taking flight.

It would be a vast improvement on that fuddy-duddy old Hepworth anyway. Those timeless curves and negative spaces, that grace and balance – after all, what did they mean?

 

The missing Wolverhampton Hepworth – “Outrageous!”

Outrage

My post of June 11 flagged up what looks like the imminent loss to Wolverhampton of the city’s fine Barbara Hepworth sculpture Rock Form (Porthcurno), which has stood proudly in the Mander Centre shopping mall since 1968 – but is now mysteriously removed “for safe keeping”. The post prompted this heartfelt comment from Sir Nicholas Mander:

“Outrageous and truly sad! The previous generation of my family were proud to sponsor one of Barbara Hepworth’s most striking mature works, Rock Form, and installed it in the certain hope that it would be enjoyed by the town in perpetuity. Surely a matter of trust when the Manders company was stripped and sold after 225 years of life, work and activity in central Wolverhampton.”

Deep silence

Now you see it …

Meanwhile all enquiries about the owners’ intentions have met with a significant and deafening silence. Understandable that the owners, Delancey and RBS, might be cagey – but the city council? Emails to Councillor Elias Mattu [cabinet member with responsibility for cultural services] brought this on 6 June:

“Hi Richard. Sorry for getting your name wrong … However, I have already asked Keren Jones [assistant director for partnerships, economy and culture] to look into your concerns and report back to me and your good self as soon as possible. Please stay in touch. Kind regards …”

All very promising. But since then, despite my polite prompts, not a word from Keren Jones, and even chatty Councillor Mattu has been struck miraculously dumb. Why the nervous clamming up? Would a little squabble about a sculpture really put off a serious purchaser for the Mander Centre? Hardly, one imagines, but that scenario could be a prevailing perception, and certain people may have become a bit jumpy …

Big profit

… and now you don’t! But the ghostly white rectangle left by the plinth has resisted all attempts by Mander staff – I kid you not – to scrub it off.

So it was with great interest, if not great expectations, that I popped in last Friday to see Nick Pitt, Mander Centre Director. Nice office, wonderful view over the city, nice coffee, nice conversation. A very nice man, actually. But not giving much away, simply advising objectors to contact asset managers Delancey’s, further “up the food chain”.

Though Nick did insist that no decision about a sale has yet been made.  But in that case, why whip out the Hepworth long before the redevelopment had even been given planning approval? And why clam up? Nothing may yet have been minuted, but you can hardly blame us for suspecting a definite intention to sell.

Rock Form was bought from Barbara Hepworth for the Mander in 1968 by its architect Stanley Sellers, who died last year (and so is no longer in a position to object to its removal), at the reduced price of £4000. Someone who ought to know tells me that at auction it could fetch well over the million pound figure recently bandied about. Even allowing for the seller’s commission, that’s not a bad profit.

Refixing an asset?

But does Wolverhampton really have to kiss its Hepworth goodbye? The city’s on its uppers these days, and asset stripping its best piece of public art is just another kick in the teeth we can do without. Hepworth’s and the Manders’ intention was that the sculpture should be enjoyed by Wolverhampton people, not by Saudi or Russian billionaires. There are two possibilities:

Judging by the artist’s impressions, the redeveloped Mander Centre will look a bit big on bland and a bit short on inspirational. Surely those whitened acres of horizontal perspective could use a focal point, a familiar marker with a bit of verticality, something iconic, something symbolic of Wolverhampton reborn and reinvigorated, the Centre past and the Centre future? Seriously, what could be better than Rock Form, whose curves and voids are both heritage-ancient and space-age-futuristic, with a popular “retro” flavour that brings the ‘sixties into the 21st century? Stanley Sellers chose well when he picked it from Hepworth’s St Ives garden. It’s just right for the Mander, and the Mander will look sadly bereft without it. How many other shopping malls do you know with something of this quality – something to be proud of? I mean, have you seen the kitsch in the Trafford Centre?

Corporate Social Irresponsibility

Plan B: if there’s no place for the Hepworth in the Mander, shouldn’t it move to Wolverhampton Art Gallery? With recent panic talk of bins unemptied and libraries down to 15 hours a week, the idea of coughing up a million is unlikely to go down too well with the council, even with an Art Fund sub. But the Hepworth was bought at a mate’s rate in 1968, and if they can’t house it, the least its custodians can decently do is to find it a new home locally on a similar basis. Counting inflation at RPI rates the £4000 paid in 1968 would be a tad over sixty grand in today’s money. That seems about the right price to me. And the massive kudos that this act of generosity would bring to the beleaguered Evil Empire at RBS would surely be a bargain in the circumstances? After all, RBS managed to find not one million but £576 million for bonuses in 2013.

Delancey’s March 2014 Corporate Social Responsibility policy document is proudly packed with all the right noises – “avoiding commercial short termism”, “high quality spaces that people enjoy” and so on, and lists all the community arty things they support, including Dulwich Picture Gallery, The Wallace Collection and Pallant House Gallery, no less. As it happens, the Pallant’s exhibition of Hepworth drawings has just finished. Accompanying that exhibition, by a fine irony, was a talk by Dr Paul Bowness, Hepworth’s grandson, whose sister Dr Sophie Bowness, with Anthea Mander, re-unveiled Rock Form in 2003. So as Delancey’s right hand was subsidising Hepworths in upmarket Chichester, their left hand was ripping out the Hepworth in downmarket Wolverhampton …

Reading between the lines, I’m not so sure that disposal of the Hepworth is quite a done deal – yet. Rock Form is not actually on the van to Sotheby’s as we speak, but those of us who would like to see it stay in Wolverhampton, where it belongs, will need to do some button-pushing before it really is too late, and we may not have long. Here are some possible buttons …

Steve Burgin, Retail Asset Management Director, Delancey – steve.burgin@delancey.com

Tim Haden-Scott, Property Director, Delancey – tim.haden-scott@delancey.com

Nick Pitt, Mander Centre Director – Nicholas.Pitt@mandercentre.co.uk

Councillor Elias Mattu, City Council Cabinet Member, Leisure & Communities – Elias.Mattu@wolverhampton.gov.uk

Keren Jones, City Council Assistant Director for Culture – Keren.Jones@wolverhampton.gov.uk

Corinne Miller, Head of Wolverhampton Art Gallery and Museum service – Corinne.Miller@wolverhampton.gov.uk

Councillor Roger Lawrence, City Council Leader – labourleadersoffice@wolverhampton.gov.uk

Keith Harrison, Editor, Express & Star – claire.hancox@expressandstar.co.uk