Sir Nicholas Serota
Born 1946. Read economics at the University of Cambridge from 1965-8. He became increasingly interested in the visual arts and architecture. Started visiting Kettle's Yard in the summer of 1966 and took up History of Art in his second year. He remembers borrowing a Henri Gaudier-Brzeska drawing from Jim Ede. Upon leaving Cambridge he went to the Courtauld Gallery, then the Oxford Museum of Modern Art. At the time of interview he was Director of the Tate Galleries. He corresponded with Jim Ede for some years after he left Cambridge.
Interviewed: 2008-04-17By: Robert Wilkinson
Length: 25 mins
Media: On 1 track on CD with summary and full transcript
Interview id: MYKY08
Jim's generosity to students in the 1960s
View: Transcript Theme: Jim Ede
He was astonishingly welcoming to people who knew very little. You know, one might have felt that because he was so steeped and at that point of course he had been living with this material and living in that world for forty years in different ways, you might have thought that his... that he would have been slightly aloof or distant, in fact, quite the opposite.
He continued to be, all the time I knew him, formidably curious about art but also about your reactions to art. I remember him standing in front of a Gaudier-Brzeska drawing, asking me what I felt about it and so on. At that time, very early on, he was even lending things to people to take back to their rooms. I can remember buying... not buying, borrowing... a Gaudier drawing. That stopped, more or less the time when the thing became more professional, more or less the time I was there, but I think I did manage to borrow one thing for a short period. But it was that kind of willingness to bring you into his orbit and to listen to what you had to say even though he had probably heard those kinds of reactions many, many times. It was about sharing, really, I think that that was the extraordinary thing about Kettle's Yard overall. You had this sense of going... obviously you were going into someone's house and it was a privilege and you were aware of that but he made you feel very welcome.
Direct link to audio: .mp3
