Iwona Blazwick

by Anthony Gardner

In 1939, the Whitechapel Gallery was approached by a group of local trade unionists with an idea for an exhibition. 'They said, "We have a young artist who wants to raise consciousness about the Spanish Civil War",' says the gallery's present director Iwona Blazwick, ' - and it was Picasso. It was the only time that Guernica has ever been shown in Britain. Apparently Picasso asked that everybody who could do so should bring a pair of boots, and leave them in front of the painting to be sent to Spain.'

Such fascinating excursions into twentieth-century art history will be very much of a feature of the expanded gallery when it reopens in spring 2009. For the first time, there will be room to display the Whitechapel's archives, including letters, photographs and drawings relating to 107 years of exhibitions. Among the other additions will be a reading room, a space for major installations, and an extra exhibition area given over to borrowed art collections. ('We don't have one of our own,' Blazwick explains, 'and there are some very important ones in Britain that have no home - the British Council's, for example, and the Government's.')

Given that the East End of London has long been a landing ground for immigrants, it is appropriate that the gallery's director should be of Polish extraction - 'Blazwick' being an Anglicisation of Blaszczyk. But her own odyssey has been thoroughly British, taking her from her childhood home in Blackheath to Exeter University, the ICA and Tate Modern, before her arrival in the East End in 2001. Of the places she has worked, it was the ICA that had the greatest influence on her: 'There was an amazing roster of people. I remember a talk there with Edward Said, Marina Warner and Frank Kermode - and that opening out from art history into politics and intellectual debate made a huge impact.'

The Whitechapel's expansion has been made possible by acquiring the building next door to the gallery - a lending library considered surplus to local people's requirements now that they have 'ideas stores' to go to instead. 'In my first week here I had to sign the contract to buy it for £1 million, which was quite terrifying,' says Blazwick. 'But I spoke to my former colleagues at Tate and they all said, "This is the opportunity of a lifetime." So having at first thought this would bankrupt the Whitechapel, I was emboldened.'

The library and gallery were in a sense sister buildings, for it was the example of the library's founder Pasmore Edwards that persuaded another Victorian philanthropist, Canon Barnet, to create the Whitechapel Gallery, with the aim of bringing culture to one of London's poorest areas. But though only five years separate the buildings, they were designed in very different styles (Arts & Crafts for the library, baronial for the gallery); and the challenge for the architects has been to unify the two. The budget for the whole project is £13 million, with part of the money coming from the European Regional Development Fund.

'I think one of the key aspects of the Whitechapel is that we work with institutions right across Europe all the time,' says Blazwick, 'and what's interesting is the enormous impact of the EU on local art scenes. I've just been looking at what's going on in Dublin, and it's extraordinary; and in Poland you have suddenly not one but twenty really major artists emerging after years of being on the margins. These are really exciting new phenomena, and we need to support the exchange and presentation of that.'

Does she think that it is still possible, in this global age, to talk in terms of national art movements? 'I don't think artists say to themselves, "I am an English artist". Artists have always moved around the world, but now there are more collaborations and big networks. There's an amazing exchange between Glasgow and Copenhagen, for instance.'

She believes that Europe has a long way to go, however, in terms of equal opportunities for women, which is why she set up the MaxMara Prize for female artists three years ago: 'Only two Turner Prizes have been won by women, yet 50 per cent of art students are female. In a world which is still really chauvinistic, we need more examples of independent women contributing to the creative life of our society.'

Are women curators similarly discriminated against? 'I think it depends where they are. In Britain they do very well, but on the Continent it's more difficult - though there are some very successful ones in Switzerland, Spain and Italy.'

Asked to name the exhibitions she herself is most proud of, she chooses the Whitechapel's figurative history of modernism, Faces in the Crowd, and On Taking an Everyday Situation, which was part of Antwerp's programme as European Capital of Culture in 1993: 'We invited sixteen artists to come to the city and each create a site-specific work inspired by its history or architecture or some aspect of the environment. It was the first time I had curated something that didn't simply involve going to an artist's studio and saying, "Let's show this". I had to learn to make films, make tiles, and look after live African birds.'

To these skills may shortly be added that of short-order chef, for the refurbished gallery is also to include a restaurant. 'Part of the ambition is to help the environment around here, which has always been quite hostile,' says Blazwick. 'We want to create light and life in the evenings.'

To the best of her knowledge, none of Whitechapel's redevelopment has been paid for by the CIA. But if some spy dollars were to turn up in the gallery's bank account, it would probably not be the first time.

'This was where Mark Rothko, Jackson Pollock and Robert Rauschberg all had their first exhibitions in Britain,' she explains. 'The shows came out of the gallery's relationship with the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and there's a lot of evidence to suggest that the CIA funded those programmes. It was all part of the great Cold War movement to support American art abroad, and particularly abstract expressionism, which was seen as an encapsulation of the idea of freedom of speech and the rights of the individual. Why this was all done covertly, I don't know; but let us not forget that the CIA at that time was run by Ivy League graduates - and they were people who really understood the power of art.'

© Anthony Gardner. All views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of, and should not be attributed to the European Commission.