120 years of the Whitechapel Gallery - seven landmark moments from Picasso’s Guernica to Frida Kahlo
Nancy Durrant
It was just a small thing, really. “The finest art of the world for the people of the East End” - that was the ambition of the first trustees of the Whitechapel Gallery, which rose from nothing on Whitechapel High Street to plans by the architect Charles Harrison Townsend (one of the few English masters of Art Nouveau, responsible too for the Horniman Museum in Forest Hill and the Bishopsgate Institute) to open in 1901, exactly 120 years ago today.
Purpose-built and born out of a philanthropic desire to bring art to the working man (it helped that, unlike most national museums, it had electric light and could therefore stay open late enough for said working man to actually visit), it was perfectly placed in this melting pot of an area, to bring art to people who might otherwise never have the chance to see it, but also to show art that any people might otherwise not see. That’s an intention that its leaders, from its first director Charles Aitken to the current incumbent of the post Iwona Blazwick, have always taken seriously. Here, to celebrate its centenary, are seven landmark moments from the gallery in the east.