London,

A Curious Wellcome

By Brian Sewell, Evening Standard  10.09.07

Exactly a decade has passed since Deanna Petherbridge, then the distinguished Professor of Drawing at the Royal College of Art (a post that no longer exists), mounted an exhibition devoted to artists and anatomy. This, The Quick and the Dead, was perfectly at ease with its subject, emphatically scientific and wonderfully and beautifully tempered by the many considerable artists who, before the invention of photography, recorded flesh and bone, sinew and organ, birth and death, through their individual aesthetic sensibilities. We witnessed the extraordinary beginnings of anatomy as art in the hands of Leonardo, Michelangelo and D¸rer, and followed its course through the 17th and 18th centuries when the great anatomist was as famous as the greatest actor or operatic castrato, his cutting and dismantling of corpses a performance constantly in demand. We stood in awe of Italian waxworks whose makers had made a man's flayed penis and testicles a work of art, and sublime Netherlandish draughtsmen who threw open the mysteries of the womb. And we realised that to the not wholly dispassionate artist (for passionate interest must have been the inspiration of his response to things so grisly) anatomy was as interesting and important as to the anatomist himself.

Three years later, in October 2000, the Hayward Gallery mounted a rather larger exhibition, Spectacular Bodies - the Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now. To many of us it seemed an unsubtle expansion of Professor Petherbridge's exhibition with scant recognition of the ground that she had broken - though that is a painful issue out of context here; it is enough to say that it made us even more familiar with the subject but in greatly increasing the prominence of exhibits by immediately contemporary artists, emphatically demonstrated their irrelevance. Contemporary artists are interested not in the refinements of anatomy, not in the workings of the human body, but in any ghoulish aspect that can be conjured from them, any frisson of horror and distaste; they contribute nothing of any significance to the long but now desuetudinous partnership.

I make this point with some fervour, for we now have another exhibition, indeed a revived and renewed museum, in which art and anatomy (and surgery and medicine) are brought together, and again the work of contemporary artists has been peppered over it, pointless interventions that add nothing to any of the arguments, lending the business only the irrelevant celebrity of Warhol, Gormley and half a dozen others on whom the famous 15-minute rule has already been exhausted. This is the Wellcome Collection, the extraordinary accumulation of specimens, curiositiesequipment and things of often very slight medical or aesthetic interest gathered by the philanthropic pharmacist, Sir Henry Solomon Wellcome. Born in America in 1853, and sole owner of the English pharmaceutical business Burroughs Wellcome in 1895, he was as rich as Croesus and as curious as the proverbial cat. A classic example of the anally retentive collector, he bought worldwide faster then he could unpack, in duplicate, triplicate and umplicate, some say more than a million objects, others twice that number, his intention always to create a museum of mankind, medicine, myth and art. It was as though, a hundred years too late, he thought himself a man of the Enlightenment with wealth enough to rival the range and riches of the British Museum (from which the Natural History element had only recently been detached), and indeed he was buying in competition with it and other such institutions in Belgium, France and Germany.

It is in the thread of medicine and its history that the singularity of the Wellcome Collection lies, but even in this we have the sense of wayward enthusiasm rather than a disciplined academic approach, the sense that - as with Charles Saatchi - here was a collector so avid that he did not know whether he needed, or even wanted, anything until he owned it, and only with possession could he decide that it was relevant. The customary processes of connoisseurshipand classification seem never to have been carried out, and that Wellcome himself was capable of academic rigour is much to be doubted. The building in Euston Road to house the Collection was opened in 1932 but was scarcely known to the public by the time it closed in 1938 as preparations for imminent war were made. Wellcome died in 1936, his vision for the Collection largely unrealised; it has never since made much of a mark in the whirligig of London culture, and if we have any impression of the man and his view of medicine as an anthropological science, it is through that part of the Collection lodged since 1976 in the Science Museum in South Kensington.

To most of us the re-jigging of 183 Euston Road is something of a surprise, and with pleasurable anticipation raised to match the razzmatazz of publicity, a disappointment. The premises are handsome, a genteel blend of the fashionably spare with the richness of tradition, but after so many preliminary revelations about the myriad strange and beautiful artefacts, the display seems sparse and confused, the victim of not enough space, too much conscious design, a seeming fear of burdening us with knowledge, and an overwhelming desire to amuse rather than inform.

A guillotine blade and a Chinese torture chair constructed from the blades of swords and knives smack of Madame Tussaud's along the road (does it still have the Chamber of Horrors of my childhood?); if they have a place in the Wellcome Collection it must surely be not as a couple of isolated objects but as part of a study of the means that men have used to execute each other, to most of which there must be medical or physiological aspects worthy of enquiry (do hanged men ejaculate?). Napoleon's toothbrush alone is nothing but a curiosity, an accident of ownership, a relic, but as an exhibit in the history of dental care it might gain useful weight - where, the sane man asks, are the toothbrushes of George Washington (whose wooden false teeth have a place in such a context), Oliver Cromwell and the Great Eliza? Charles Darwin's walking-stick - what has that to do with anything? A brass corset? An iron chastity belt? A lock of hair from the head of George III? These are fit only for what the authorities of the Collection proffer as serious attractions.

One section of the current display is devoted to the heart but the science and surgery tail off into a survey of amatory and theological allusions, crude votive offering and devotional images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin, the flaming, bleeding, held-in-hand hearts of the ecstatic saint, and so irrelevant a painting of Thomas probing the wound of Christ that one wonders if the curators have the foggiest notion of what the action means - it has nothing to do with the heart.

Elsewhere the confusion is much the same. With surgical knives and saws, elegantly decorative, coldly functional, and with forceps by the dozen arranged in glass cases, there is no indication of date or place of origin, no hint of how these tools developed or how early they came into use. With terracotta casts of ears, breasts, feet and genitals we are, I imagine, in the field of prayer for incurable malfunctions but no information of any kind is immediately obvious; it may, however, be concealed behind a cupboard door in the ubiquitous panelling, inaccessible to children, for to the designer it seems that the explanatory label is an anathema and must be hidden. Of this nonsense the visitor swiftly wearies; the immediate proximity of information is essential in a didactic exhibition. Without it the vitrine of prosthetic limbs is reduced to a macabre work of Neo-Surrealism and the brace of clysters to a snigger of recognition - yet clysters played so important (and so public) a role in medicine in the Age of Reason that they deserve an exhibition to themselves.

This raises another point; without labels the visitor assumes that everything he sees was Wellcome's property, but there are many borrowings, too few of which raise the intellectual or aesthetic levels of the exhibition. The curators should borrow more and better. There are far superior terracotta penises in the Thorwaldsen Museum in Copenhagen, and in the British Museum there are those of wax collected by Sir William Hamilton (the so-called big toes of St Cosmo) that reflected the sexual ambitions of their female purchasers and thus fit perfectly with Wellcome's interest in the byways of his field. Not far from Fulda, in Germany, there is an encyclopedic museum devoted to the clyster, and the British Museum has a remarkable number of decorated gourds through which the Congolese administered enemas a century ago, collected by the admirable Emil Torday.

As far as paintings are concerned - and there is a whole wall of really wretched daubs and inn signs that demonstrate the haplessness of Wellcome's eye - these the curators should ditch and concentrate on proper exhibitions of the many considerable paintings of anatomists and surgeons that litter the history of Western art. The only picture on view worth a second glance is a thing of mawkish sentiment by the little known Enrique Simonet y Lombardo, in which a pathologist contemplates the heart he has removed from a beautiful female corpse; this, when it hung in the museum of Malaga, bore the title The Broken Heart but is now called And She Had a Heart. Add a brace of Rembrandts, a couple of anatomies by Eakins, and medical subjects by a host of French Salon painters - then the curators really would have an exhibition.

As newly presented, however, the Wellcome Collection seems a haphazard agglomeration of worthless objects accumulated by a magpie mind that from time to time remembered that its prime interest was medicine. In its wilful mismatching of subjects and disciplines, I sense something of the same cussedness as was evident in the Barnes Collection in its golden days - but Albert Barnes at least had an eye for quality when he hung meat saws with Picassos and a wheel jack with Impressionist drawings (if only Wellcome, buying at the same time, had also bought Cézanne, Soutine and Renoir by the dozen). As a medical museum experience the Wellcome Collection is no match for the Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields, established in 1799, and as an aesthetic experience it is no match for the La Specola Museum of wax anatomical models founded in Florence in 1771 by the Grand Duke of Tuscany - nor for the similar models in at least three Italian universities. As it stands, it is - apart from the sections devoted to modern medicine and surgery (in which, between the enemas and the public lavatories, I spied the unfortunate notice "Help yourself to a Stool") - no more thrilling than a trawl through the junk shops and auction rooms of Worthing and West Wittering.

• The Wellcome Collection is housed at 183 Euston Road, NW1. 020 7611 2222, www.wellcome collection.org.

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