piano
Jim's approach to money and fundraising for Kettle's Yard
Denis Murphy
Transcript
We went to the Marlborough Gallery, Jim saw these huge, row after row, of Ben Nicholsons, grey and white, and he was scandalised, you know, 'ten thousand pounds, what nonsense, I can't possibly afford ten thousand pounds'. He didn't buy one that day, although he could have done. We went to buy a piano that day and he didn't like the colour of it, the piano was... he had this idea of music in the gallery, an idea which he backed up. He produced money every day of the week. I'd sit at my desk and I'd get letters from Jim, three or four a day, with money in them, cheques from various people... so before we knew what had happened, he had got money for the exhibition gallery. He conjured it out of the air. He also sold things I suspect - quite a lot of that. Little old ladies buying works of art which weren't numbered or dated or anything. He sold things at auction. He was a wheeler-dealer, anything to achieve his objective and I find that admirable actually.
Preference for the furniture and objects over the artworks
Tom Poster
Transcript
To be honest, the tables and the fireplaces and the beams are as evocative to me as the sculptures, possibly more so, and the chairs, the chairs upstairs, and the other piano upstairs as well, just things like that, and even that toilet through at the back which you can't use, things like that. That is more indelibly printed on my mind probably than any one of the artworks although, actually, in a way probably if you took away some of the artworks or moved them round, I'd probably notice but I've just never... maybe because I went there from so young, I never really looked at it from the point of view of being a gallery and sort of looking at each object and sort of studying paintings. It was just the ambience. It's definitely a whole atmosphere for me and not that I don't love individual pieces but it's the way that they're arranged or in some cases I suppose the lack of obvious arrangement that's so charming. I'm sure it must have all been thought through but it seems, when you first go there, like there are things in places where you wouldn't expect to see them and that, I think, is particularly wonderful.
