I've just visited Kettle’s Yard, a house in Cambridge, once home to the art curator Jim Ede and left by him to the University in 1966. Actually, it started out as 4 cottages, knocked together to form a coherent whole by Jim and his wife, Helen. I'm interested, not just in the collection it contains, but in how it works as a house and what visitors take away from it. In whether the house itself is important, or just the art.
Jim and Helen first came here in 1957, looking for a space to live but also primarily a space to share the collection of modernist paintings and sculpture they had acquired as friends of an influential group of 20th century artists in the '20s and '30s. It's hard to describe it simply without making it sound rather dry and Kettle's Yard is anything but dry. Perhaps its best to return to Jim Ede himself, describing what visitors should expect
"a continuing way of life from these last fifty years, in which stray objects, stones, glass, pictures, sculpture, in light and in space, have been used to make manifest the underlying stability."
For the generation that lived through the First World War, that sense of stability was central to survival and remembering that helps you realise how vital the atmosphere of peace and tranquillity, which is one of the house's outstanding gifts, would have seemed.
Kettle's Yard had a thorough Heritage Lottery funded makeover last year, so now there's also room for the modern visitor essentials of a shop and a cafe as well as extended galleries and learning spaces. What I wanted to know was whether adding all these commercial facilities has diminished the intimacy of the experience of the visitor. Visitors are organised into timed groups, so when you turn up, you will probably have about 20 minutes to wait until the next group sets off. Just time for a cup of coffee in the sunshine, then, or a browse in the shop where you could snap up the detailed guidebook (though there are reference copies in the house). The appointed time arrives, the group gathers and is led up to the front door, we knock, a pause and then we are welcomed in by a smiling (but patrician) lady guide. Exactly this welcome was offered by Jim to hundreds of Cambridge students when they came round in the afternoons to talk with him about the collection. A brief introduction pointing out one or two highlights and you are on your own. We wander at will, but, since nothing is labelled, ask for enlightenment from one of the knowledgeable guides. When the bell rings again, the group is asked to make its way upstairs so that the new arrivals will feel the appropriate intimacy of that welcome through the door into an apparently empty house. It was busy when I was there, but it worked perfectly. You immediately understood that this was a house, loved as a home as much as for display. Even the brief wait at the front door as, unbeknownst to you, the previous party trails out of view, seems appropriate, after all, how often when your bell rings do you find yourself momentarily detained?
Inside, the lack of labelling is frustrating. You can't ask about every object but I found there wasn't a single one I didn't want to know more about or at least identify. I know I missed many great delights just because I was distracted by something else at the time. I'm sure Jim Ede would have said that prior knowledge does not help you judge a work of art. I'm reminded of the curator of the (wonderful) Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest who refused to label anything, believing that embroideries, wood carvings and pottery should be allowed "to speak to visitors from the walls". To which you can only scream "but what's it saying?". At Kettle's Yard, unless you are very confident in your knowledge of art history, you whisper nervously "Is that Alfred Wallis? (or Henry Moore? or Barbara Hepworth?).
Jim Ede and his wife Helen lived here until 1973, when the house was officially opened to the public by the University of Cambridge. His last visit was in 1977 to add a print to the collection, carefully placed on the wall and then left for good. He died in 1990 but had not returned. By then, Kettle's Yard had really become a gallery as much as a house. As a visitor, you move from the intimacy of the cottage spaces into a grand modernist top lit long gallery which overlooks an equally commodious space on the ground floor. This extension was built in 1970 and is arranged so that all the artworks are around the edges gallery-style. These feel more like public than family spaces.
But it is still a house and there is something rather wonderful about the way it opens out, perhaps a little as Jim Ede's personal vision of the place as a public gallery opened out as the time to leave drew nearer. The cottage rooms are tiny and filled with carefully placed objects; a head by Henry Moore by the bed; a spiral of perfectly round pebbles on the table; the blue of an Alfred Wallis ship at sea to admire from the loo. The interiors are white and supremely simple. Each object has its own space. I'd like to have had the couple's communications system between the bedrooms pointed out - they could call down to each other through a little hatch - it would have brought them alive a bit as people. Because at its heart this is a gallery; a gallery of one man's taste. The furniture is simple and vernacular with Windsor chairs and 17th century oak. The collection is strong on Alfred Wallis, Christopher Wood, Ben and Winifred Nicolson and particularly Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, whose estate Jim acquired after the sculptor was killed in the First World War. It is an extraordinary collection with all the great names of British art in the early 20th century, many of which suit the scale of the 1970's gallery extension best but it feels like a privilege to see it because the sense that it was a home is still strong.
If it did nothing other than make you fall in love with the work of Gaudier-Brzeska, Kettle's Yard would be worth the pilgrimage, but it does more than that. I believe that, because it is a home, it makes you think about one particular individual's taste and enjoyment of beauty. It's intimate and personal in a way that a public gallery never can be. And because of the way the Director, Andrew Nairne, and his team have chosen to organise their visitors, the new facilities have not diminished your personal experience one jot. Other houses with timed tours might want to pay attention.