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00:01In November 2021, Glasgow hosted the COP26 Environmental Summit.
00:08And when Glasgow invites the world round for tea,
00:11there's only one place to hold the party.
00:14Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum.
00:25Kelvin Grove is Glasgow's treasure palace.
00:31Home to an extraordinary array of art and artefacts
00:35from across the world and across time.
00:44I'm Lachlan Gowdy. I'm an artist.
00:47And I grew up here in Glasgow.
00:53Kelvin Grove is a place I've returned to all my life
00:56to look, to learn and to wonder.
01:03It's Glasgow's most important cultural institution.
01:10For me, though, when I was a child, this was only ever the art galleries.
01:14And I loved it.
01:16And I wasn't alone, because Kelvin Grove is the most visited museum in the UK outside London.
01:23And for many Glaswegians, there's a real sense that this place is our front room
01:28where the family heirlooms that belong to us all are put on display.
01:34This building had a huge influence on my life.
01:37It was the single most important building in helping shape my ambition to become a painter.
01:43So, in many ways, it's a building whose art made me.
01:47There are many treasure vaults in Glasgow, and this one belongs to me.
02:03It's where I keep the work of my father, the painter Alexander Gowdy,
02:07and some of my own early drawings.
02:13For over a century, Glasgow museums have held an annual art competition.
02:19And every year, from about the age of 12, I entered it.
02:25Somewhere in all this, I think, are my prize-winning drawings.
02:32Where would they be?
02:37Ooh!
02:39Oh, I'd forgotten about this one.
02:42Kelvin Grove entrance hall, what does it say?
02:45Lachlan Gowdy, age 14.
02:48It's not very good for 14, Lachlan, honestly.
02:51Ooh!
02:53Now, here's one of Kelvin Grove's biggest stars.
02:57Dun, dun, dun!
03:00Sir Roger!
03:04Sir Roger!
03:05Looking good!
03:07I think I won a medal for this one.
03:10Well, at least I should have, because it's a really good drawing.
03:13I'm still quite pleased with that.
03:15I think that my dad and I went to Kelvin Grove together
03:19to choose what I was going to draw that year for the art competition.
03:22My dad was an artist and he taught me a huge amount.
03:27And we used to go to the art galleries together, not regularly, but every so often.
03:33And it was in the art galleries that he introduced me to many of his favourite paintings and artworks
03:39that had been formative when he was a young art student.
03:41And somewhere in here is a painting by my dad of the two of us in front of Kelvin Grove.
03:56Aha!
03:58My dad liked to paint on a small scale.
04:00A small scale.
04:01Aha!
04:03Oh!
04:08Oh, okay.
04:12So.
04:14Here we go.
04:15And I remember when Dad painted this, he did my portrait of me in the studio in about 20 minutes.
04:31And it was one of the first times that I realised quite what an extraordinarily capable artist he was.
04:38I was so jealous.
04:40He got me.
04:42Boom!
04:43Just like that.
04:46This painting was a tribute to Kelvin Grove and the important role it played in both our lives.
04:56In 1901 Glasgow hosted another global event, an international exhibition that celebrated the city's industrial power.
05:05The newly built Kelvin Grove was to be its centrepiece.
05:09At its opening, the Lord Provost described it as a palace of dreams.
05:15There's no other museum in Britain that looks quite like it.
05:19And I always have the sense that somewhere there's a wind-up key that would set the whole thing in motion.
05:25There are two things that any Glaswegian will tell you about Kelvin Grove.
05:36And the first is a bonkers myth that the whole building was constructed back to front and nobody realised until the architects turned up to inspect the finished museum.
05:46The second thing, though, is real, and that's that inside Kelvin Grove Art Gallery and Museum has a very distinctive perfume.
05:55Smell that, you know, in the 40-odd years I've been coming here, it just hasn't changed.
06:07It's a mixture of varnish, brasso, bit shortbread, and just a hint of that musty smell you get at the back of an old wardrobe. It's wonderful.
06:18And another thing that hasn't changed at all is the subject of my favourite drawing, still standing exactly where I left him.
06:26Meet Sir Roger the Elephant, my old friend. I like to think of him as a bit of a leathery old grandad that we've all been visiting since around about 1902 when the museum opened.
06:44And I promise you, if you treated your grandad the way the world treated Roger here, well, you'd get in a lot of trouble.
06:50Not much is known about his early years, but by the 1890s he was in captivity, touring the UK in Bostock and Womwell's travelling menagerie.
07:02And then in May 1897 he came to live in a zoo in Glasgow's Cowcaddens. I can't imagine he was very impressed.
07:11And after three years of Glasgow's rather less than tropical climate, poor old Roger here got, well, understandably perhaps a little bit grumpy.
07:22And the zookeeper then took what to us is an astonishing decision. He decided to hire a firing squad to do away with Roger.
07:30And then he sold tickets to the execution. Apparently you can still see one of the bullet holes in them.
07:37As a boy, it wasn't just Roger that fired my imagination. The art collection here at Kelvin Grove was built on old master paintings donated to the city by wealthy Glasgow merchants and industrialists.
07:57This is Rembrandt's Man in Armour, possibly the most valuable artwork in the collection at Kelvin Grove. It's certainly my favourite.
08:08It was painted around 1655, but I first got to meet this chap 325 years later when I was a boy in the 1980s.
08:17And it really is the first work of art by anyone other than my dad that I felt inexorably drawn towards.
08:28I remember how in my dad's studio in the evening when my parents were watching TV, I used to dress myself up in velvet cloaks and draw portraits of myself.
08:38Trying to channel the spirit of this great painting, the dramatic lighting and the sort of moody stare.
08:48And ever since that very first encounter, I've spent my entire life desperately trying to learn how one could paint like this.
08:59Rembrandt was in the habit actually of starting his images, not by painting the whole canvas white, but brown.
09:10And it's part of the secret behind the sort of rich, smoky quality of so many of his greatest paintings that every image starts in darkness.
09:21And Rembrandt works around this. He deepens some shadows and then he would start to introduce increasingly lighter layers of colour, just like he was pulling a ghost off the surface of the canvas.
09:38Rembrandt's man in armour was painted late in his career, when he was going bankrupt. His collection of armour was about to be sold off.
09:46Today, Kelvin Grove has one of the most important collections of armour in the world. Rembrandt would have loved it here. I certainly did as a schoolboy.
10:01War, conflict and heroism have always been a favourite subject for artists. And I remember as a boy, the thrill of encountering paintings at Kelvin Grove that represented Scottish heroes and brave Highlanders.
10:20But as an adult, I find it striking how often iconic Scottish paintings illustrate a narrative of tragedy and defeat in the face of unbeatable odds.
10:35The massacre at Glencoe and the last of the clan reinforced stereotypes of brave Highlanders, loss and heroism that became fundamental to a 19th century idea of Scotland.
10:51In the neighbouring gallery is an unassuming exhibit that tells a very different story about Scotland's past.
11:07Situated in such a grand gallery, surrounded by objects and artefacts of global significance, you'd be forgiven for walking past.
11:18But this piece of folded fabric sitting quietly at the bottom of this cabinet is actually a pair of silk women's trousers.
11:27And the catalogue entry describes it as loot from Lucknow.
11:32In 1857, Indian soldiers in the city of Lucknow rebelled against their British commanders.
11:40Highland regiments were sent in, led by a Glaswegian, Sir Colin Campbell, to violently quash the uprising.
11:49This is a trophy of war, perhaps grabbed by Highland troops.
11:54Those kinds of men who were portrayed in art and literature at the time as brave and dignified warriors.
12:03We don't know who these trousers belonged to, but whether the owner was alive or dead.
12:11Their presence here in this gallery really is as much of a Scottish tragedy as those scenes depicted by those stirring Victorian paintings.
12:21One of the challenges for a museum like Kelvin Grove is to find ways to face up to some of the more difficult aspects of our nation's history.
12:36Coming back to the museum in adulthood, there are some things I see differently.
12:42This is a very dull portrait of a very rich man.
12:53His name was Arthur Connell and he was a pillar of the establishment.
12:58He was a magistrate and the Lord Provost of Glasgow between 1772 and 1774.
13:07And Arthur looks like a decent enough chap, doesn't he?
13:11I can almost imagine him sitting in the front pew at church on a Sunday morning.
13:16But the fact is that Arthur's respected status and his wealth had a great deal to do with an object exhibited in the neighbouring cabinet.
13:29And that, and the story behind it, is anything but decent or worthy of our respect.
13:38It's a copper coin minted in 1788 for the owner of a plantation in Barbados,
13:44at a time when the African slave trade was a major source of labour on sugar plantations in the Caribbean.
13:51This side of it looks cheerful enough. It's a decorative pineapple.
13:56But what you can't see is that on the other side, there's the representation of an African slave
14:03wearing a crown and feathered plumes.
14:06And written underneath that are the words, I serve.
14:11It's obscene, really.
14:16And this coin was a product of a society for whom human life was equivalent to coins like these.
14:25Human life was seen as a commodity, it could be traded.
14:30Life was currency and life was cheap.
14:34In one way or another, coins like this helped to fill Arthur Connell's pockets.
14:41Because Arthur was a wealthy sugar merchant.
14:46And his elegant clothes and the Glasgow mansion that he lived in
14:51were paid for using money earned from slave labour.
14:55So the story that lies behind this painting really, for me,
15:01transforms a pretty unremarkable portrait into a hugely important historical artefact.
15:09Because this painting allows us to look history in the eye.
15:14To meet someone who enabled and profited from slavery.
15:20And to accuse them, really, of being complicit.
15:24I don't think we should hide images like this away.
15:27Sculptures, paintings that represent problematic moments from our past.
15:32I really do think that we should confront them.
15:39The relationship between art, wealth and power has always been a complicated one.
15:45Glasgow's journey towards the 1901 International Exhibition and the opening of this great museum
15:52was driven by coal money and steel money.
15:55And money earned through the tobacco and sugar trades.
15:59Art can play a powerful role in the way we imagine our past.
16:04But sometimes the picture of history that artists paint can be deceptive.
16:10There's no other painting in Kelvin Grove that tells a bigger fib than this one.
16:21Vincent van Gogh's flame red hair and staring green eyes
16:26have come to embody what we think a volatile and bohemian artist should look like.
16:32Possibly because he painted over 35 extraordinary self-portraits in his lifetime.
16:39And until 1928 this was thought to be one of them.
16:43But it isn't.
16:45This is a portrait of Vincent's flatmate.
16:48His name was Alex Reid.
16:51And he was a Ouija.
16:53That's a Glaswegian, by the way.
16:55Reid was an art dealer who came to Paris in 1886 and worked with Theo van Gogh, Vincent's brother.
17:04Together they lived in an apartment in Montmartre, which is where this portrait was painted.
17:10This portrait was probably painted very quickly on a piece of cardboard,
17:16the outline drawn directly in paint.
17:20And the colour kind of stabbed onto the surface using a very thin and stiff brush.
17:27But Vincent van Gogh wasn't some kind of wild impetuous painting fiend.
17:32No, when you get close up to this painting,
17:35you can see an artist really thinking forensically about how to use colour.
17:41And he thought a great deal and was heavily influenced by contemporary theories on that subject.
17:49So you can see in this painting how he strategically places a whole range of reds and greens alongside each other.
17:56Colours which, technically speaking, really get on each other's nerves.
18:01They fight for attention.
18:04Those little stabbing marks that cover the whole painting
18:07create a kind of visual rhythm and energy that seems to bring this painting to life.
18:13And even though the way that van Gogh is using paint is an abstraction,
18:18it gives me an even more convincing sense that there's a living, breathing human being
18:23lying underneath all this mark making.
18:26In the portrait, Alex Reid looks like a rather wily fox.
18:35And back in Glasgow, in 1889, he set up a gallery.
18:40For the first time, paintings by Degas, Monet, Renoir and Pissarro,
18:45all the artists Alex had hung out with in Paris,
18:48started appearing on the walls of Scottish mansions.
18:52It's because of van Gogh's flatmate and the bequests of his millionaire clients
18:57that Kelvin Grove now owns one of the most significant collections
19:01of French 19th century art in all of Europe.
19:04It was the fantastic Mr Reid who helped create a Scottish art supergroup.
19:16Samuel John Peplow, John Duncan Ferguson, FCB Cadell and Lesley Hunter.
19:23Four painters inspired by the French avant-garde.
19:29They would become known as the Scottish colourists.
19:34But J.D. Ferguson was, in my opinion, the most exciting painter of them all.
19:39And here we've got two portraits that were painted within a year of each other.
19:44The first is of an American artist named Anne Estelle Rice.
19:48The subdued colours, the buttery handling of the paint,
19:52and the bold use of black were distinctive features of Ferguson's style at the time.
20:01But this is what happens when you spend a few months in Paris in 1907,
20:05hanging out with the Fauves, the wild boys of the French avant-garde like Matisse and Derain.
20:11This is a portrait of Bertha Case, another young artist who J.D. Ferguson used to lounge around with in the cafes of Montparnasse.
20:20But unlike the earlier portrait, we can see here that J.D. Ferguson is doing everything he can
20:26to break apart the illusion of a nice harmonious composition.
20:30So you've got these furious areas of rapid brushwork.
20:33You've got broken outlines.
20:35You've got a real sense that J.D. Ferguson wants you to think things are falling apart.
20:40Here is a figure that's in movement.
20:45The Fauves built on Van Gogh's achievements.
20:47They searched for pure colour in unexpected places
20:50to create a kind of alternative, heightened version of reality.
20:55Ferguson was the first British artist to reinterpret the innovations of French Fauvism in his own work.
21:05This was radical.
21:08And even in the 1950s, when Kelvin Grove acquired this canvas,
21:12it challenged many people's idea of what a painting should look like.
21:17It's perhaps surprising, however, that the artwork that has caused the greatest commotion at Kelvin Grove
21:29isn't some wild experiment with Fauvist colour.
21:32It was this.
21:36Salvador Dalí's Christ of St John of the Cross drew angry public protest
21:41when it was acquired by the city of Glasgow in the 1950s because of its huge price tag.
21:48But it's become the most famous and most reproduced painting in the Kelvin Grove collection.
21:56I recently overheard a fellow Glaswegian telling his son,
21:59Dali was a proper nutter, so he was.
22:02But by Dali's standards, this really isn't a painting that sets out to shock.
22:06There are no dripping clocks or elephants with spindly legs.
22:11The surrealism is really subtle.
22:14Christ's hands aren't nailed down.
22:17They appeared to be magnetised weirdly to the crossbeam.
22:21And yet, the scrunched up appearance of those fingers
22:25conveys a real sense of profound agony.
22:29And the landscape at the bottom of the painting isn't the Holy Land.
22:32It's Port Ligat on the Spanish coast where Dali actually lived.
22:37But the biggest mind-bender, I think, in this whole painting
22:40is that we are looking at Jesus from his Dad's perspective.
22:48We're plunging down into this subject.
22:52This is a God's eye view.
22:54People have been painting crucifixion scenes for centuries.
23:02And yet Dali's composition appears to achieve the impossible.
23:06He finds a way for us to re-see one of the most reproduced moments in art history.
23:13There are so many things in this museum that make us re-see the world in startling new ways.
23:23And there is one final artist in the Kelvin Grove collection whose work has this effect on me.
23:28Images, again, of suffering from an unexpected perspective.
23:39From the concentration camps of World War II.
23:42Marion Grant was 17 years old turning on 18 when...
24:10World War II began.
24:13And I don't know what you were doing when you were 17 or in your early 20s, but...
24:20You know, you were not a witness to...
24:25In all likelihood, anything.
24:28As awful and apocalyptic and beyond the human imagination as the scenes that...
24:38She came to draw and sketch in her young years.
24:44These watercolours were painted in Bergen-Belsen in 1945.
24:51The artist was a young Jewish woman from Prague who had spent much of the war imprisoned in forced labour camps and at Auschwitz.
25:01Marion Grant sketched and documented scenes of cruelty that were part of her daily life.
25:14She was drawing people who had ambitions and ideas about how their lives were going to be spent.
25:24And not one of them imagined that their precious time on this earth would be finished, ended, terminated in an interwoven pile of carcasses.
25:42Because that's the word and that's what this documents.
25:46It is the dehumanisation of our fellow man and woman into a ragged lump of bones and flesh.
25:56And she has objectively selected her palette of blues and crimsons and ochres and yellows.
26:05In the same way that we saw Rembrandt work his palette.
26:09In the same way we saw Van Gogh think about his colours.
26:12Marion Grant is an artist trying to translate what she could see into colours that our eyes would receive.
26:19And in the process alert our brains to understand what at first sight we can't really comprehend.
26:29These images are of phenomenal art historical importance.
26:34Rembrandt, Goya, all the greats, these sit alongside those artists in their ability to communicate something very, very, very profound about a human experience to the viewer.
26:48It's shocking.
26:53It is...
26:57It is a powerful witness of a story that we all think is very, very far away.
27:18Kelvin Grove is a place where many complicated stories come together, where history and the imagination meet.
27:37In museums like this the past becomes a very immediate experience.
27:42These exhibits can inspire us, change the way we look at the world, or even remind us of things we might otherwise choose to forget.
27:51This building, the art and artefacts contained here have an enormous power.
27:58A power to impact us in that first encounter, but also to reverberate across history and to shape our future.
28:07For me, that is the wonder of Glasgow's treasure palace.
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