• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

McAlister immediately agreed to meet him for lunch.

The business of donor fishing was at best frustrating for McAlister, like rowing upriver for a week and coming back with minnows. On the rare occasion when he managed to land a contributor, one or another of his department heads would be at the door, cap in hand, with plans for a new play by a Nordic iconoclast, a seminar on chastity in Pop, or a Bavarian film festival. There was never enough money to go around, certainly never enough for what McAlister hoped would be his final project: refurbishing the archives, which had never been properly cared for. Over the years former senior staffers had felt it necessary to remove archival material in the belief that it needed protection or was part of their own private papers. One had even removed a visitors’ book containing sketches and signatures by Picasso and Hockney. This valuable volume later found its way to the British Museum’s library.

McAlister was aware of other such potential improprieties—nothing that verged on the criminal, but there was simply no excuse for the lack of a system to identify and maintain the archives. Thus, he was especially pleased to find someone who shared his concern. “I felt very lonely in that regard,” he recalled.

He and Drewe met at a fashionable Soho restaurant. Drewe was punctual and impeccably dressed. McAlister was a gourmet and mushroom hunter, and they both took their time with the menu and the wine list. Right away, McAlister felt that they had much in common. Drewe was a man of the Left, a former official with the Atomic Energy Authority who had quit after Margaret Thatcher began to privatize government programs. He accused her of wreaking devastation on the arts and sciences with her denationalization campaigns.

McAlister was no Thatcherite either, and complained to Drewe that while bastions of the art establishment such as the Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum still enjoyed government beneficence, the ICA got chicken feed.

Cultural historians well understood official Britain’s arm’s-length relationship to the ICA. Ever since its founding in a small L-shaped room on Dover Street in 1947, it had been a constant irritant to the arbiters of art. When cofounder Herbert Read called for public funding, the prickly George Bernard Shaw declared that such funds “would be better spent on hygiene, since hygiene [and] not the arts was responsible for the improvement in the nation’s health over the preceding hundred years.”9 But the ICA’s early members, who included Henry Moore, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, Peggy Guggenheim, and Dylan Thomas, believed that the institute stood as a beacon to those who wanted to create and debate new art forms. The ICA organized poetry readings and “conversation nights” with Le Corbusier and “Bucky” Fuller, and opened a bar where patrons could buy a snack and a drink and discourse until dawn on the new postwar aesthetics.

“It felt like a railway stop,” Dorothy Morland told an ICA historian. 10 “People passed one another without realizing that some would one day be famous and some would change the face of art beyond all recognition. But as with every station, everyone was in a hurry.”

Over the years the ICA became a relatively safe haven for avant-garde artists from all over the world. In 1959, during a “Cyclo-Matic” demonstration of the mechanical nature of art, the Swiss Dadaist Jean Tinguely set up a machine operated by cyclists that dumped fifty pounds of drawings on paper onto the street. In the sixties, during an era of sit-ins and protests and the first stirrings of conceptual art, a young Australian artist taking part in a Destruction in Art symposium stood by the roadside waving an animal corpse and spattering the pavement with blood.

That same decade, the ICA moved to one of the more incongruous locations it could have found anywhere in Britain: a Georgian mansion on the Mall, a few hundred yards from Buckingham Palace. There, it held symposiums on horror comics, television