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Appointed in 1938, Sir John Rothenstein was the first director of the Tate to embrace modern art, mounting a series of daring exhibitions and procuring a procession of audacious masterworks that, in the words of one contemporary, ‘completely knocked the stuffiness out of that veritable institution.' So why, since he died in 1991, has his name become a byword for reactionary conservatism? The answer is that from the outset of his career, Rothenstein refused to bow to the patriarchs of the avant-garde. In the 1920s, while they were busy decrying the figurative tradition, Rothenstein was championing a brilliant generation of artists whose work remained firmly rooted within it. In the 1930s, w...
John Rothenstein, son of Sir William Rothenstein, the celebrated portrait painter, was born in 1901, four years after the Tate Gallery had been founded as the national gallery of British art. When Rothenstein took over as its fifth director in 1938, the Tate was in serious trouble: after 1917 when its remit was extended to include the national collection of modern foreign art, the confused dual purpose had placed an intolerable burden on those required to manage an institution still partly controlled by the National Gallery. Furthermore, it had no purchasing budget from the Government and was bound to accept often inappropriate pictures imposed on it by the Royal Academy under the terms of t...
A survey of British painting and sculpture.
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Appointed in 1938, Sir John Rothenstein was the first director of the Tate to embrace modern art, mounting a series of daring exhibitions and procuring a procession of audacious masterworks that, in the words of one contemporary, 'completely knocked the stuffiness out of that veritable institution.' So why, since he died in 1991, has his name become a byword for reactionary conservatism? The answer is that from the outset of his career, Rothenstein refused to bow to the patriarchs of the avant-garde. In the 1920s, while they were busy decrying the figurative tradition, Rothenstein was championing a brilliant generation of artists whose work remained firmly rooted within it. In the 1930s, whi...
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