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Whitechapel Gallery set for £13.5m revival
Louise Jury, Chief Arts Correspondent18 Nov 2008
THE Whitechapel Gallery will turn to its pioneering past when it re-opens after a £13.5million expansion next year.
Turner Prize nominee Goshka Macuga is taking Pablo Picasso's painting Guernica - shown at the Whitechapel in 1939 on its only visit to Britain - as inspiration for the first of an annual series of commissions.
Guernica showed the Nazi German bombing of the Spanish town during that country's civil war.
A permanent gallery will show the Whitechapel's archive. The first display will be about the Whitechapel Boys, artists including David Bomberg, Mark Gertler and Isaac Rosenberg, who contributed to the Vorticist movement in the early 20th century.
The transformation involves moving into the old library building next door, creating an extra 78 per cent of gallery space and staying open all year round. At present, it has to close for the installation of exhibitions.
The gallery will unveil a restaurant, bookshop and education facilities when it opens next April.
Director Iwona Blazwick said it would have "much broader appeal".
Reader views (1)
The loss of our local Library was a tragic blow to the whole community of Whitechapel. It has always been an area with limited cultural resources the old Library was the one resource used by the whole community, rather than the art gallery, which is supported by a very specific demographic and ethnicity.
The land on which the Library stands was purchased by public subscription following a local vote in the parish to establish a public library. The building was constructed by the generosity of the American Philanthropist John Passmore-Edwards (1823-1911), the first of many that he paid for in East London. He donated nearly 5000 volumes to the new Library, which also contained a now lost Museum collection.
The Library passed into the clutches of Tower Hamlets Council who following a 'consultation' process (in which no one was told they were voting to close their Library and get an 'Ideas Store' instead) sort to abandon the Whitechapel Library and hand it over to the Art gallery next door. The reason given by council officers was that money was not available to bring the Library up to standard with disability access but there was money for the art gallery to do it.
The loss of our library to our art gallery not only restricts a cultural asset to a narrow section of the community and appropriates from the original, universalistic and utopian vision that it physically embodied, but also has an interesting sub-text - do not think for your self, just look at the picture.
- Dm, Whitechapel, 18/11/2008 13:06
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