Rebecca Lyons

Peter Mandler’s The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home is remarkable for many reasons – the breadth of source material and scholarship, the flow of readable text and apposite observation, and the demonstrable interrelationship of politics, the public and shifting attitudes to cultural heritage. The tensions between maintaining or celebrating the past, while acknowledging the present, are carefully contextualised in each phase of Mandler’s chronological survey, noting how the moments of ‘survival’ or success for country houses often occurred when owners or trustees could align with shifting public or political discourse.

How might this play out in the debates and discussions surrounding the preservation and interpretation of a historic cultural institution today? Not a country house, though it was once a splendid aristocratic townhouse, the case study for this interlude is the Royal Academy of Arts, London (RA), founded in 1768.

The history of the RA has much that delights visitors, reminiscent of Mandler’s early Victorians, fascinated with ‘Olden Times’, though it is also a place of contemporary practice, led by artists who comprise the membership of Royal Academicians. The institution, founded in an era of monarchical beneficence and authority,was hierarchical, male-dominated and closed, with new Academicians voted into an exclusive company by their artistic peers. Teaching in the RA Schools was based around the ideals of a classical past given visual prominence in the preservation and display of plaster-cast copies of Greek and Roman sculptures as aids for learning. Embracing the classical tradition and those artists that followed on from it, through Michelangelo and the High Renaissance, was a seemingly immutable pathway, promoting the idea of what English education, indeed civilisation, should be.

By the late nineteenth century, more progressive reforms around the teaching of art in the Schools, the admission of women students, the election of ‘foreign’ honorary Royal Academicians, and the formulation of loan exhibitions had done much to advance the RA mission, but its narrative still remained linear, fixed and exclusive, its history selectively curated. This is what Stuart Hall notes as a process of ‘canonisation’ where those with authority dominate, and where the institution develops ‘a deep investment in its own “truth”’¹ rather than welcoming the discussion, debate, discord and renegotiation necessary to evolve.

Mandler carefully observes the dangers of blurring the vicissitudes of over 200 years of country house history into a ‘single unwavering vision’, reminding the reader that public opinion shifted dramatically at various points covered by his study, rather than this public seamlessly and continuously appreciating heritage. But for Mandler, although it may be ‘fickle’ and ‘changeable’, the public is still characterised as a unified group.² Hall’s lecture, delivered two years later, approaches the idea differently, noting the impossibility of characterising the public as a single group ‘imagined as … culturally homogeneous and unified’.³ If, he argues, the experiences of all the constituent parts of the nation are to be successfully addressed, then the idea of the nation must be something constantly under reconstruction – there can be no ‘one-size-fits-all cultural identity’ and certainly not for the diasporic people who constitute Hall’s primary focus. Hall goes on to advocate for ways in which those involved in the interpretation of heritage locations can revise and recreate their own histories, considering a multiplicity of differing and even contradictory histories with a view to bringing those traditionally viewed as from the ‘margins’ into the centre, while simultaneously allowing for their difference to be respected and preserved rather than assimilated.

Forward twenty years from both texts and the words of Hall resonate even more strongly amid public discourse beset by (sometimes manufactured) culture wars, Conservative government overreach and political manoeuvring. Neil MacGregor noted recently that the National Trust had a multiplicity of sites and therefore could better tell a multiplicity of histories.⁴ He spoke of the envy of the museum director who has only one physical location but seeks to invite the possibility of multiple voices. (It should be noted that even within the National Trust this remains challenging – single-narrative interpretive strategies risk becoming a kind of heritage pot-luck in terms of whose (his)story is selected and whose left aside.)

As the Royal Academy has evolved into a twenty-first-century public gallery and exhibition space, we face the same challenges as many heritage organisations. How do we create a more inclusive space and bring to light narratives of those excluded or erased? And how do we form connections with the audiences of today whose own journeys may involve experiences of cultural neglect? The hurdle of the elite location, of imposing architecture and an exclusive tradition puts much in the way, even setting aside the additional barriers of affordability. Our work engages with many of the same challenges as public history in recent decades – as we lead on acquisitions, display, interpretation and collection care, public programmes and learning activities, we are constantly reviewing the balance of power between those creating the narratives and those ‘receiving’ them. And, in the context of recent world events, we have begun again reassessing how within that we tell our own story.

Ongoing discussions about how to evidence both our decolonial and database research in the gallery has focused on strategies for inviting multiple perspectives into the spaces – considering authorship of labels, proposing multiple choices for voices on audio tours and sustaining an engaging and accessible public programme of events for different audiences – providing a variety of ‘ways in’. In a museum context this is also enabled by ensuring that learning and interpretation teams hold equal expertise to curatorial colleagues, or indeed by redefining the skill set necessary for twenty-first-century curatorship and cultural leadership. As an institution led by artists, these strategies can also be artist-led, opening up even more new and imaginative ways of engaging multiple publics.

In the exhibition programme, such thoughts about institutional histories, moving the margins into the centre and centering the voices of Black and Brown artists, coalesced in the ‘Entangled Pasts’ exhibition that opened in January 2023, the curatorial team comprising voices from outside and within the Royal Academy, artists, academics and curators, led by Professor Dorothy Price. Critically and curatorially acclaimed, the show provided sustained reflection on colonialism and the art establishment, viewed through the lenses of artists themselves, reflections in film, in paint and in sculpture on the experiences of people of colour through time, forcibly uprooted, enslaved, categorised, coerced and controlled by the forces of empire and those who led it, painted it or hung representations of it on their walls.

This was a bold exhibition in a politically conservative moment. Overall visitor numbers were lower than usual, and few sponsors felt comfortable entertaining guests in the spaces. Much of the imperial and institutional history was difficult to witness and in times of reduced household finances and post-pandemic reluctance to return to culture, the ‘public’ did not engage so readily in paying for this subject matter. This could be viewed as a sobering financial outcome for an organisation wholly independent of government funding but there was great institutional pride in this show, the audiences who came overwhelmingly enjoyed the experience, and the numbers of attendees who identified as people of colour far exceeded the usual percentages on record. Our unwavering commitment remains in sustaining that engagement for other exhibitions while also working to convince a more uncertain demographic that the exploration of other histories and heritages invites their participation, that there is joy to be found in discovering and accommodating new narratives.

The way forward for cultural and heritage institutions such as the Royal Academy will require the uncovering of more connections that link the personal to the historical (or art historical) to connect through creativity, and through imagination, so that we participate in reinventing what Hall calls a more ‘global version of our island story’.⁵ Though Mandler’s work did not explicitly engage with diasporic or global majority histories, his conclusions in The Fall and Rise called for that same openness, asserting that our institutions would only survive through adaptability, noting in his final sentence that: ‘other treasures, created and valued by humans, must, like humans, evolve to survive’.⁶