page_title: James Bolivar Manson
section_title: Director of the Tate
hierarchical_section_title: James Bolivar Manson / Employment at the Tate / Director of the Tate
context_page_description: James Bolivar Manson was an artist and worked at the Tate gallery for 25 years, being its Director 1930–1938. In the Tate's own evaluation he was the "least successful" of their Directors. His time there was frustrated by his stymied ambition as a painter and he declined into alcoholism, culminating in a drunken outburst at an official dinner in Paris. Although his art policies were more advanced than previously at the Tate and embraced Impressionism, he stopped short of accepting newer artistic movements like Surrealism and German Expressionism, thus earning the scorn of critics such as Douglas Cooper. He retired on the grounds of ill health and resumed his career as a flower painter until his death.
context_section_description: Manson had a minor accident, which delayed his taking up the post of Director of the Tate by a month, until August 1930. According to the Tate web site, he was "the least successful of Tate's Directors." His own artistic ambitions had not been fulfilled, he had an unhappy marriage and he drank to excess; he suffered from depression, blackouts and paranoia; and he had long periods off work sick. Kenneth Clark described him as having, "a flushed face, white hair and a twinkle in his eye; and this twinkling got him out of scrapes that would have sunk a worthier man without trace."
  During his time as Director, there was no annual funding for acquisitions from the government; he had to decline Camille Pissarro's offer to loan his painting La Causette as the gallery lacked funds for transport and insurance. Manson complained to his friend, Lucien Pissarro about the conservative taste of the trustee board—which had rejected a work by both Monet and Renoir—although he himself was averse to Post Impressionist work, neglecting London shows by artists such as Van Gogh and Matisse, until he had no option but to accept two oils by the latter in 1933 as part of a bequest.  The same year, he and the Trustees rejected a donation of four William Coldstream paintings and two Henry Moore sculptures, and, in 1935, declined to buy Matisse's Interior with a Figure for £2000, turned down the loan of Picabia's Courtyard in France and also  the offer of a gift of three Roger Fry oils. In 1938, Manson asked Sir Robert Sainsbury if the Tate could borrow a study of Eve by French sculptor Charles Despiau. Sainsbury assented on condition that the gallery also showed the 1932 "Mother and Child of my friend Henry Moore." Manson's response was, "Over my dead body."
  Although Frank Rutter, a Sunday Times art critic, praised advances in the gallery's position on art since its foundation, others—notably Douglas Cooper—who were familiar with contemporary European avant-garde art, such as Surrealism and German Expressionism (which was not represented at all in the Tate) considered it "hopelessly insular". Manson preferred to put on a popular show of Cricket Pictures, coinciding with the 1934 Ashes tour, and in 1935 substituted an exhibition by Professor Tonks for a proposed Sickert retrospective.
  The high points of his "irregular and dull" exhibition programme were centenaries, in 1933 of the birth of Edward Burne-Jones and in 1937 of the death of John Constable.  Other achievements accomplished during his term of office included a formal change of name from "National Gallery, Millbank" to "Tate Gallery" in October 1932, the planting of cherry trees outside in 1933, the installation of electric lighting in 1935 and extra toilets. Manson was on the 1932 Venice Biennale British selection committee, as well as staging shows in Brussels in 1932 and Bucharest in 1936.
caption: Tate Britain in 2004 (renamed from Tate Gallery in 2000).
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