» Colin McKenzie interview
Andrew Kay Meets Charleston Trust Director Colin McKenzie in the kitchen of the most famous farmhouse in Sussex
Charleston Farmhouse was the rural retreat of the Bloomsbury set, a group of artists, writers and free thinkers whose often radical ideas, works and life-style choices delighted the art world but often shocked the nation. In 1916 artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant moved to Sussex with their unconventional household. For 50 years this farm house became the country base for a group of artists, writers and intellectuals. Clive Bell, David Garnett and Maynard Keynes lived at Charleston for considerable periods; Virginia and Leonard Woolf, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and Roger Fry were regular visitors. Bell and Grant decorated the house in their own “Omega Workshop” style and their, and their guests and friends, lives and romances crossed in a way that was sometimes stranger than fiction. In 1986 The Charleston Trust was formed to restore and preserve this extraordinary home and the artworks in it, many painted directly onto the walls and fixtures. Totally self-sustaining, it has become one of the jewels in our county’s rich history and a place of pilgrimage for art and literature lovers the world over.
I met Director Colin McKenzie on a cold January afternoon and we sat by the Aga in the kitchen, one of the rooms not included in the regular tour, where he described how he came to be at Charleston and the passion that drives the team that keep this small but extraordinary museum going from strength to strength.
What study led you to this field of work?
I studied Art History at Sussex. Charleston Farmhouse opened when I was a student back in 1986, so I was aware of it from the moment it opened to the public. My tutor described it to us and it sounded fabulous. He told us that it had been restored “down to the cigarette butts in the studio”. A group of my friends and I used to drive out here in a Fiat 850, so I got to know the area very well. In the back of mind I thought that Charleston would be an amazing place to work.
After university I thought that I was god’s gift to the art world. I thought I would walk into organising exhibitions for the Tate. Fortunately I had taught myself to type, two fingers to start and worked up, I entered the art world through a back door. I was the first male secretary at the Barbican Centre. It was brand new and a very exciting time to be there and I joined the fund raising department that had recently been set up.
“It’s most lovely, very solid and simple,with perfectly flat windows and wonderful tiled roofs. The pond is most beautiful, with a willow at one side and a stone or flint wall edging it all round the garden part, and a little lawn sloping down to it, with formal bushes on it”
- Vanessa Bell
Were you immediately attracted to fund raising?
It was 1988 and fund raising for the arts was very new with less than thirty people doing it in London. Now there are thousands. I did say goodbye to being a curator, I was promoted after one year and at the end of my second year at the age of 24 I had become head of fund raising for the Barbican, Europe’s largest purpose built art centre. I stayed seven years and worked on many big international festivals; art, theatre and music. Huge fund raising tasks.
What drew you away?
The job of being fund raiser for the National Gallery, one of the five greatest art collections in the world. One of my mentors described the friends organisation too that also brings money in. We now do venue hire, it’s early days but we have space for marquees and we have huge barns that make great spaces for concerts and parties. Obviously we cannot use the actual farmhouse for events but the grounds are very beautiful. It’s an element of what we can offer that will grow slowly.
Does Charleston get any public funding?
No, none. We did get grants from the Arts Council for our Small Wonders Festival, a specific event based grant. But no funding for the day-to-day running.
How many people work here?
There are 12 permanent staff and then during the season 20 paid guides, plus shop and café staff. During the May festival there is a cast of thousands. There are also a huge number of volunteers, about 6,500 hours of volunteer time and that makes so much of what we do possible. I was always warned against volunteers in my previous jobs but these are talented committed people who do an immense amount of important work, conserving books, recreating rugs, acting as stewards. It has certainly changed my opinion of the value of volunteers.
When is Charleston open to the public?
From Easter to October, this year is a long season. There is a huge amount of planning that takes place in the closed season, marketing, print, the May festival. Our literary festival is very strong and we get very large audiences, 300 to 400 people at most events. This year we have Salman Rushdie,Marina Lewycka, Grayson Perry, Tony Benn, Simon Jenkins and very excitingly, Gore Vidal.
There is also a huge amount of conservation work going on in the winter. Not only the art and contents of the house but the house itself, the grounds and gardens alone take an amazing amount of upkeep. We have a full time gardener and team of volunteers just to deal with that.
Each year we try to create new reasons for visitors to return so we actively look for interesting loans of works of art that are connected with the house and the people that lived here. This year is the 30th anniversary of Duncan Grant’s death so we have gathered some really great works from both public and private collections by him at his very peak. There will be six or seven major paintings.
The house also needs to rest, we need to take paintings off the wall to let air circulate. And putting the house to bed, the process of closing down at the end of each season, takes several weeks. At the end of March you start taking the acid-free tissue off things and as the garden comes to life so does the house, spring inside and out. There is also a sense of keen expectation amongst the staff.
We also spend the winter months planning events for the following year; talks, visits and exhibitions in our exhibition space. One of the challenges for an organisation like this is to bring in the next generation of visitors. Children can relate to the house through the children who grew up here, it is a dream like space and one that modern children might never experience. The house has always been about creativity, as a visitor when the Bloomsbury set were in residence you would most certainly be told to bring work with you, and if you didn’t you would be given something to do.
Is there a significant art set like the Bloomsbury Group today?
I think there probably is but it will only be seen in retrospect. There is certainly not the cross-cultural crossover that this place had, you don’t get the exchange of ideas. One of the regular residents here was Maynard Keynes. He was an incredibly powerful political figure but he was a man who also found the arts incredibly important. During the Second World War he managed to persuade the government to spend £100,000 to buy old master paintings from a studio sale at Degas’ Atelier in Paris. They sailed over on a military gunboat and bought all these great paintings for the nation. The story goes that the gun boat actually made a great deal of noise as a distraction whilst they negotiated the purchases.
One of Duncan Grant’s descendants came to visit last season and chatted to one of the guides who said that I was bound to want to meet them. I met her and asked if he was a figure that was much talked about in her family. “Oh no,” she said: “He was a black sheep”. I asked if that
was because he was gay and she said: “No, because he was a pacifist”. The Bloomsbury set were very great and radical thinkers and their circle of friends included great writers like T.S. Eliot and E.M. Forster as well as painters and politicians. The first ever public reading of Eliot’s The Waste Land was at the dining table here at Charleston. They were the moving force behind the major post impressionism exhibition of 1910. It was an exhibition that created far more controversy than the Young British Artists exhibition in 1992. Their exhibition ended up causing fights.
Is Charleston in a good position to survive?
Yes, it will thrive. As a small museum it punches so far above its weight. The festival shows this with the calibre of people we get here. We have managed to acquire two major works of art, both bought for the house. The fact that we can make acquisitions like Vanessa Bell’s ‘Icelandic Poppies’ is proof of our viability. And we have two Sussex Phd students working with us, one on the collection of books in the library and one on the gardens. Only now are other museums like this starting to look at those ideas and to imitate them. And we have major figures in the art world as trustees – at every level of this organisation we are successful and that is a joy. It will always be tough as an organisation without an endowment but that makes us more active – because we have to be.
In the future we very much want to be able to develop the potential of the buildings in order to enable us to do what we do already but much better. I would love there to be a full time auditorium space here. And to have some workshop space because I feel that this was such a creative space and I want to allow that creativity to continue, anything form painting and drawing, decorating furniture, childrens’ workshops and we definitely intend to expand what we do educationally.
We also need to expand the café space and be more ambitious there. To be able to offer a wider range of refreshments that will draw people and at the same make a valuable contribution to our running costs. We would also like to increase our exhibition space and be able to put on a scale of exhibitions that we just cannot do at the moment.
So are you here for life now?
I’m here for as long as I can see. There is so much that I want to do and so many projects that I want to introduce. It’s a great team of very passionate people working here and its certainly a place that gets under your skin.
Charleston Festival 16 – 25 May 2008
Booking from 1 March
see the website for full programme www.charleston.org.uk
Call 01323 811626 for details
Charleston Farmhouse opens for the 2008 season on
19 March, Wednesday – Sunday
Call 01323 811265 for visitor information
or visit www.charleston.org.uk
