Mark Glazebrook: art publisher, gallery director and critic
(Steve Oliver)
A portrait of Mark Glazebrook by David Hockney, done on December 14, 1999, in pencil and white crayon on grey paper, using a camera lucida
Mark Glazebrook was, from the 1960s until his death, a true, and certainly lively, ornament of the English art world.
As engaged as he was engaging, ever consumed with enthusiasm for the project of the moment, he would come to distinguish himself variously as a publisher of artists’ prints, public gallery director, teacher, art historian, artist, dealer and critic. He was an irrepressible figure — no one in his company was ever at a loss for something to say, for he would scarcely allow them the opportunity to speak.
Through all his successes and misfortunes, which came to him in fairly equal measure, the face he presented to the world was never less than brave and cheerful. Tomorrow, for him, was always another day.
His time at the Whitechapel Gallery, which he took over as director in 1969, saw him at the peak of his public career. His predecessor, Bryan Robertson, who in the 1950s and 1960s had brought the Whitechapel to international eminence, was the hardest of acts to follow, yet Glazebrook immediately set his own mark, indeed making the biggest of splashes, in inviting David Hockney to put on his first retrospective exhibition.
The two had long been friends, having first met at the annual Young Contemporaries student exhibition of 1960, when Hockney was still at the Royal College of Art, and they were to remain friends to the end.
“He bought the best painting from my first show, Play Within a Play,” Hockney recalled. “Dear Mark, he was always a gent; one of the old school.”
Reginald Mark Glazebrook was born in 1936, the youngest of four brothers, at Fiddlestone Wood, the house that his father, Reginald Glazebrook, had had built in Cheshire. In 1945 his father, who had enjoyed considerable success on the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, bought Brynbella, the house to which Dr Johnson’s friend, Mrs Thrale, had eventually retired, at St Asaph in the Vale of Clywd, and there Mark grew up.
He was sent to school, first to Bilton Grange, a vast Pugin pile near Rugby, and then to Eton, where, under the direction of the art master, Wilfrid Blunt, his interest in the visual arts first blossomed.
National Service with the Welsh Guards followed. During selection for training as an officer, he was required to deliver a lecture to the troops. He chose, perhaps unwisely, to speak on Picasso.
On coming down from Cambridge, where he had read history at Pembroke College, he went on to the Slade School of Art in the hope of being a painter, but never completed the course. He was to remain throughout his life something of a painter manqué, and would continue to draw and paint whenever he could — the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street, West London, gave him a one-man show in 2000. In the event his frustration in that direction was to be vented, if not altogether assuaged, in his wider and more varied career in the visual arts.
He would prove to be that rare professional within the field, in approaching the work in question not by way of critical theory or art-historical scholarship, though he had both fully at his command, but through the work itself, and in entirely sympathetic relation with the artist.
After leaving the Slade he was taken on by the Arts Council, then, in the early 1960s, still very much the small enabling and encouraging institution it was set up to be. There he worked under the aegis of Gabriel White, its then director of visual arts, who became for him a most valued friend and mentor. At the same time, working from home, he, with Joseph Studholme and Paul Cornwall-Jones, set up Editions Alecto, which grew into one of the most successful publishers of contemporary artists’ prints of the 1960s and 70s. Its inaugural board meeting, a heroically bibulous affair, took place beneath the early Hockneys in his sitting room.
Glazebrook’s first marriage, to Elizabeth Claridge, had ended in divorce in 1969. In 1974 he was married to Wanda Osinska, and their often tempestuous union was to last for the next 26 years. Through her he acquired first an interest and then a deep knowledge of Polish art, besides a lasting love for Poland itself.
His two years at Whitechapel were followed by four years with the Bond Street dealers P&D Colnaghi, as head of its modern English department. But then he was to leave the UK altogether. In 1975 he took up a post at the San José State University as a lecturer in art history and director of its gallery.
This was to prove a particularly happy time for him, for the tension inherent in his nature, between the conventional and the manifestly unconventional, was considerably eased in the relaxed Californian air. Punk, one of the exhibitions he curated at San José, is particularly remembered as being not just of but even ahead of its time.
On his return to London in 1979 Glazebrook rejoined what was now Alecto Historical Editions, helping Studholme with the launch of its full-colour edition of Joseph Banks’s great Florilegium, the first in 200 years. He then began to deal privately, with a particular interest in modern British painting and drawing, which led him to open his Albemarle Gallery, halfway up Albemarle Street in Mayfair, in 1986. The gallery flourished for a while, in spite of chaotic business methods — one young assistant, on her first day in the gallery, remembered asking to be shown his in-tray, whereupon a drawer stuffed with brown envelopes was pulled open. “And the out-tray?” — that was the drawer below, similarly stuffed.
Glazebrook had taken on a partner in the gallery, and affairs seemed to settle for a while, but with the onset of the recession, the subsequent break-up of the partnership and withdrawal of his bank’s support, Glazebrook was left high and dry and all but bankrupt. The Albemarle closed in 1993, and the house in Bedford Park, which as a young man he had bought with his inheritance, and against which the business was secured, had to be sold.
The following years saw Glazebrook’s fortunes at their lowest ebb. His second marriage eventually foundered, and after being taken in for a year by an old friend, he found himself living in a council flat in Kennington, South London.
But he continued undaunted as ever, working at his painting and his freelance writing and art criticism, notably for The Spectator. And, his membership having long since lapsed, he was persuaded to rejoin the Chelsea Arts Club, which proved to be for him not just a timely haven but an ideal stage for his high-spirited sociability. He threw himself with gusto into the club’s life, particularly its occasional theatricals — memorably so in The Mikado and Guys and Dolls. The club, it must be said, can be a dangerous place for the single, and indeed the married, man, but there he met Cherry Moorsom, who, as his third wife, brought much-needed stability and security back into his life, along with the happiness he had always deserved, and indeed enjoyed.
He read widely, with a deep love for poetry and music, but wore his erudition lightly and, with his wonderful recall, was as formidable a raconteur as he was irresistible. Though never a great sportsman, but somewhat above average height, Glazebrook had a commanding presence, and he took pride in personal physical prowess, though it might be no more than arm wrestling. He ran with the bulls at Pamplona: and once, on the boat to France, he reassured his elder daughter, Lucy, then 7, saying: “Don’t worry, darling, I can swim five miles, more if I have to.”
It is that “more if I have to” that says so much about the man he was.
Glazebrook is survived by his three wives, Elizabeth, Wanda, and Cherry, and by his two daughters and a stepson.
Mark Glazebrook, art publisher, dealer, gallery director, teacher and critic, was born on June 25, 1936. He died of cancer on November 3, 2009, aged 73
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6916313.ece?token=null&offset=0&page=1
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