Would you trust G4S with a van Gogh?

Who wants to trust G4S with this?

It’s amazing what constitutes ‘public services’. We might be used to thinking in terms of the likes of emptying the bins and education and health care, but many more things that we take for granted come under that label too.

And many of them are increasingly under threat.

But amid the ongoing, ideological rush to sell off anything and everything – even at a cut price, as the Royal Mail debacle showed – it’s easy to forget that our culture is a public service, and it’s also under threat.

Libraries have been facing cuts for years, with politicians revealing an utter lack of understanding about the service by suggesting that volunteers could run them.

When I was doing my ’O and ’A levels at girls grammar schools in the 1970s and into the ’80s, becoming a librarian was something that was considered a good career, requiring a proper degree.

When did that morph into, ‘oh, some local volunteer can do it’?

Now that’s not an attack on volunteers, but it begs – or should beg – the question of when and how running a library ceased to need the level of education, training and skills that it did previously.

Is the writing on the wall for quality of visitor experience?

Inevitably, such an approach doesn’t simply deskill, but in doing so, it reduces the actual service. And that illustrates how little the service is understood and valued in the first place.

Now, it seems, plans are well under way to privatise visitor services – including security – at London’s National Gallery.

The gallery – just one of many such institutions that helps draw millions of tourists to the capital every year – points out that funding from government is falling, and that it needs to increase retail and commercial activities, including opening for some groups outside normal hours.

Even accepting all that, it’s difficult to see how privatisation will help – all it does is involve a private company that needs to make a profit. And one of the first things to happen when that’s the case is that wages are hit.

Claims that terms and conditions will be protected are meaningless, as has been illustrated in Doncaster, where venture capital company-owned Care UK made the right noises before taking over a contract for the care of vulnerable people with learning disabilities – and then, when the ink was barely dry on the contract, decided to slash the pay of the people who do the actual work of caring, start employing any new staff on minimum wage and deskill the workforce by, among other things, ordering staff to stop dealing with medical or violent situations and call 999 instead.

In other words, the profit is privatised and the debt socialised.

Should gallery staff know about the exhibits?

And then, of course, there’s the issue of slashed pay leading to more people needing in-work benefits – so the taxpayer is forking out to subsidise the profits of the private company.

The deskilling of the Doncaster workforce will be replicated at the National Gallery, as the Ministry of Curiosity blog, an “insider’s guide to London’s museum-centric life” explains that a lower-paid workforce will mean, “for the gallery and public, a transient workforce with less knowledge and expertise”.

The blog also makes a very interesting link between the recent decision to allowphotography in the gallery and the plans for privatisation.

According to the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), similar privatisation processesat the Imperial War Museum has led to experienced staff leaving, and anincrease in the use of zero-hours contracts.

The nation's favourite painting – left to the nation by Turner

The idea of putting security for some of the world’s greatest art treasures in the hands of the likes of G4S should be enough to horrify any sentient being.

What could possibly go wrong?

After all, the likes of G4S, Serco and others have great form on all manner of things, from security itself, to proving incapable of organising a piss-up in a brewery (or the 2012 Olympics, as they were known), to overcharging and false charging for services provided (or not).

But in this case, the atmosphere has been sullied further by union reps being hit witha gagging clause by the gallery – even though named reps were quoted in the press during disputes at the gallery in 2010 and 2012, with no apparent problem.

Of course, this isn’t the only bit of the “family silver” that is being primed for sell-off – the country’s entire road network couldbe threatened too.

And the National Gallery it’s far from being an isolated case of how our culture is being dumbed-down, devalued and sold off.

In Manchester, for example, funding has been cut to the People’s History Museum – the only museum in the country dedicated to the history of ordinary, working people.

Profit fodder?

On a more general basis, moving further and further toward a low-wage economy is neither good nor sustainable for the economy, as shown by recent figures from the Office for Budget Responsibility, which revealed that, in spite of record levels of employment, tax revenues are down, and theneed for in-work benefits (including housing benefit) is up.

There may come a point when museums and galleries have to look at charging for entry – again.

But our history and our culture should not be seen as commodities, existing for the financial of the few, but unavailable to the many.

Plans to privatise huge numbers of jobs at the National Gallery are, at best, short sighted.

At their worst, its yet more evidence of an ideologically-based knowledge of the price of everything – and the value of nothing.

• 38 Degrees currently has two petitions running related to this topic:

No privatisation at the National Gallery

Restore funding to the People’s History Museum

The shock of the modern

Wheatfield and Cypresses; van Gogh

Art is addictive. After nine months in which I’ve probably visited more galleries and exhibitions than in any comparable period in my life, I now want the occasional dose.

On Friday evening, with three and a half hours between the end of my working day and the beginning of the play I had a ticket for that evening, I headed down to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square for a top up.

It’s huge gallery; so labyrinthine that a map is vital. The first time I visited was right at the beginning of the 1980s.

I was studying for an art ‘A’ level at the time, and I made a point of going to see Jan van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait, which had already become my favourite painting after studying it in class. Painted in 1434, the detail staggered me, together with the ‘joke’ of the artist reflecting himself in the mirror on the wall behind the couple.

It wasn’t that I only liked old pictures – I loved the sheer photographic gloss and perfection of photorealisim and hyperrealism – so for me, that picture was a 15th-century example of something as close to that as it was possible to be.

Sunflowers; van Gogh

Amazingly, there were so few visitors that day that I could actually get really close to it – close enough to marvel at the detail.

But elsewhere, there was a revelatory moment lying in wait. The Impressionists at their most chocolate boxy were always going to delight me, but what really took my breath away was van Gogh’s Sunflowers from 1888.

I didn’t like modern art. I simply couldn’t see – couldn’t ‘get’ – anything that was beyond the clearly and obviously figurative.

It’s probably hardly surprising then, that while I could draw impeccably, I had the devil’s own job of being able to take a drawing an develop it beyond the obvious and photographic.

And I’d thought little of the likes of van Gogh. But that day, I suddenly got a least a little bit of the sense of the texture and the colour.

I’ve loved the artist’s work since.

A few years ago, I did an Open University humanities foundation course. One of the sections concerned art, and included a documentary about a Jackson Pollock painting.

Girl on a Divan; Morisot

It used computers to strip away each layer of pain, illustrating that there was a balance to the work – that it wasn’t just random drizzles, and that each layer added something without which the final piece would not work.

It was a step forward in ‘getting’ modern art – at least the non-figurative variety.

Then, this summer, something struck me.

Memory had long suggested that we didn’t really study any modern art at school. But memory had been playing tricks.

Because I started to recall that, however such it was that I had forgotten that part of the course, the reality was that I had studied the Fauves – which presumably means Matisse. I remembered suddenly that I knew the word and had known it for decades, because and I had first heard it at school.

How extraordinary the human mind is.

I’m currently reading Matisse: The Life by Hilary Spurling – not least because that, when he gained the burst of energy or inspiration that, in effect, led to the creation of Fauvism, he was in Collioure.

Bathers at Asinères; Seurat

Looking at reproductions of some of the paintings – in particular, at Open Window, Collioure from 1905, and it was with a dawning of what he had been doing. Because now I saw the light and recognised it.

And then I started to see colour as I hadn’t before – to look at it for its own sake, if you will.

Maybe that’s the key: Like Matisse himself, in a way, I needed the revelation of the south.

Anyway, with the time to spend on Friday evening, I headed to the gallery, armed with the knowledge, gained from a search of the website, that it has one Matisse – Portrait of Greta Moll, which was painted in 1908.

However, in my enthusiasm, I’d missed the little link for ‘key facts’, which also revealed that it is “not on display”, and therefore spent some time trailing from room to room, double checking whether I’d somehow missed it.

Still Life with Mangoes; Gauguin

However, it was never intended as a visit for just a single picture, but one in which to return to the most modern works on display.

Speeding past the Canalettos and the Hogarths, I found myself in a large room with the Turners – something else I’d not given much consideration to in the past.

This time, I stopped and looked. And started to wonder why on Earth I’d always preferred Constable. You can see why the likes of Matisse felt they owned something to the former: they don’t appear to have found anything from the latter.

And then the Monets and the Manets. I’d had a substantial (if brief) dose of Manet at Easter, so appreciated them differently, and there was also a Berthe Morisot, Girl on a Divan, from 1885.

Hillside in Provence; Cézanne

Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières, dated 1884, is one of the gallery’s most famous canvases.

It wasn’t actually a pointillist painting, since the artist hadn’t created that style when he painted this, but he did incorporate some dots into the picture.

I’d seen it previously, but never realised just what a luminous quality it has.

Paul Gauguin’s Still Life with Mangoes from 1891-96 was seemed to radiate with the same lessons about colour that I’m learning from Spurling’s book.

Of the Cézannes on display, Hillside in Provence (1890-92) is beautiful in it’s light and colour.

And again, looking at it anew, I could start to appreciate the breaking down of the painting style and the capturing of something different from the merely ‘photographic’.

Les Grandes Baigneuses (1894-1905) is a very different canvas, with the artist setting out to reinterpret he sort of nude in landscape that had been painted by Titian and many more.

Les Grandes Baigneuses; Cézanne

The gallery had acquired in 1964, but I don’t remember seeing it before, and it’s so striking – in terms of colour and composition: look how the eye is drawn.

You can also quite clearly see the link to Matisse here, in both the simple way in which the figures are conveyed and the use of colour.

And then there were the van Goghs – and what turned out to be two very special treats.

First, Two Crabs (1889) is on loan from a private collection – exactly the sort of reason to visit nearby galleries on a regular basis so that you catch such gems.

The colour is sumptuous, while the varied brush strokes used to convey the textures are fascinating.

And then, A Wheatfield with Cypresses from 1889.

Two Crabs; van Gogh

Now this has been on display for a long time – and I’ve seen it more than once before. But somehow, on Friday, the colours seemed to take on a new intensity and vibrance.

Sometimes, a painting is so famous that you possibly don’t even really see it in all its glory because you can’t see beyond its reputation.

And suddenly, this had a 'wow' factor about it, with its swirling, curvaceous quality, and its wonderful hues.

The moral of the story is that you can never stop learning or seeing anew.

There might also be a second moral – the chance to repeat the old saw that travel broadens the mind, not least when it comes to appreciating art.

Art – with a capital A

One of the joys of visiting new places is the chance to visit museums and see art you’ve never seen before – or at least not outside the pages of a book.

Brugge was never going to be an exception to that after I’d read about the city’s Groeningemuseum. Small perhaps, but holding a very important collection of paintings by some of the Flemish Primitives, it went straight onto the list of ‘absolutely must visit’.

From a personal perspective, it’s an interest that goes back to my teens, when I was studying for an art A level.

At the time, we lived miles from any major galleries or museums, and I don’t recall ever visiting anywhere on holiday that was any better blessed.

Like music, art was a love that developed independently of my home life. My parents had accepted, since childhood, that I was good at drawing. So when teachers at my first grammar school asserted that I had the ability to go on and make art a career, they seemed entirely accepting of that.

I should point out that the path laid down for me was not really Art with a capital A – the bohemian, shivering-in-a-garret and painting naked people while swilling absinthe sort of thing.

It was always going to be rendered at least vaguely respectable by the insertion of commerce into the equation. In other words, I was being set on a path to becoming a graphic artist.

Much as I loved drawing, by the time we arrived at the point of laying down the academic foundations for my career, I had concluded that graphic art was not for me.

I felt, with a predictably overstated sense of teenage melodrama, that I the soul of a fine artist but none of the ability to do more than copy faithfully what was directly in front of me.

Yet a capacity that I derided in myself (and at one stage, several of my still life drawings hung around the school) was central to why I fell in love with Jan van Eyck (c1395-c1441) the moment we were introduced to The Arnolfini Wedding.

It was, I rapidly surmised, medieval super-realism.

Until a couple of years ago, I’d seen precious little by the Flemish Primitives apart from that particularly famous work of van Eyck’s, which hangs in London’s National gallery, and which I’ve visited more than once.

But then, wandering around the less popular parts of the Louvre one day – in other words, the galleries furthest removed physically from some painting of a woman by some Italian dauber – I found myself gazing at van Eyck’s Madonna of Chancellor Rolin (1435), along with works by the likes of Hans Memling (1430-1494), a German who moved to Flanders, and Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464), whose names I’d last been aware of in those art history classes.

So the Groeningemuseum was always going to be a treat.

And indeed, there were three paintings by van Eyck, who had lived and worked in Brugge (and has a square named after him there, with a statue in it. And a Jan van Eyck cafe).

His Portrait of Christ (1440) struck me as strikingly reminiscent of German painter Albrecht Dürer’s Christ-like self portrait of 1500 – a harbinger of Lutheran ideas of a personal Christ, perhaps?

Van Eyck's messiah is no blond, blue-eyed character. German painter Lucas Cranach the Elder pictured Christ with dark hair in his 1510 painting, Christ Crowned with Thorns. Similarly, the crucifixion element of German artist Matthais Grünewald's 1515 Isenheim alterpiece does not depict a blond Jesus.

The image that has become so dominant in Western representations of Jesus seems to have emerged later.

But back to van Eyck. The portrait of his wife, Margareta van Eyck (1439), is wonderful, as is the far larger Madonna with Canon van der Paele (1436), which also includes a St George figure, thus allowing van Eyck to show off just how well he could paint metal.

So you have a mix of the secular and the religious – and, of course, the place where those meet when living, wealthy patrons want themselves painted into religious scenes.

There are two really important things about van Eyck and all the Flemish Primitives: first, they revolutionised painting by adding oil instead of egg yolk to their colours.

The results have retained a fabulous vibrancy and depth of colour.

And second, their ability to capture the detail of rich, complex textures, particularly on fabric, was just stunning. You know what fabrics are velvet, for instance, because you can see that it’s velvet. You could almost expect that, were you to touch the painting, it would feel like velvet too.

All of which is why the term ‘primitives’ in this case seems utterly absurd.

The Memling and van der Weyden paintings that hang in the Groeningemuseum are also magnificent.

In terms of the former, I was particularly taken by his sepia-toned doors to the Triptych of the Family Moreel (1484), including one of St George slaying the dragon (left).

Death of the Virgin (c1472-80) by Hugo van der Goes (c1440-1482) was also worth seeing.

A subject that was popular at one time, it went out of fashion as the doctrine of the assumption took hold. The last major Catholic depiction of Mary's death was by Caravaggio in 1606.

And there is no shortage of representations of a rather different religious scene.

The most extraordinary must be The Last Judgment (1450-1516) by Hieronymous Bosch (c1450-1516) – the first time I’ve seen a Bosch in ‘the flesh’, so to speak.

And it’s far smaller than you expect it to be, given the amount of detail that he packed in.

Fascinatingly, there are Bosch-like figures and ideas in the 1555 Last Judgment by Jan Provoost (1462-1929) – no cribbing, obviously – which also shows the Pope as one of those on the way to hell (left).

That, together with the 1551 Last Judgment by Pieter Pourbus (1523–1584), used to hang in the Brugge Stadhuis, where it was intended to inspire those making and deploying law to do so well.

And what’s also clear in both these paintings is how ordinary people are portrayed much more naturalistically than the religious figures; you go from looking at the highly stylised to the recognisably real.

There are moments of humour too – albeit unintended. The Master of the Darmstadt Passion, whose Christ Carrying the Cross and Crucifixion was painted in 1450, may have been fortunate in his anonymity.

Frankly, his thief walking to execution is rolling his eyes in such a way that it brings to mind Monty Python’s Life of Brian and the character wondering whether his brother will arrive in time to get him down from the cross this time around.

It doesn’t half make you realise the quality of some of the other artists there.

And that, in a sort of how-do-you-measure-happiness way, it’s good to see some rather poorer art as well, so you don’t start needing to worry that your judgment is shot the moment merely by the simple act of walking through a gallery door.

• In a sort of alphabetical blogging triptych, the B and C of Belgian art forms will follow in the coming days: beer and chocolate.