40 years on, it’s still a delight (note addendum, as at 21 March)

 In 1983, when the Burrell Collection opened to the public in Glasgow’s Pollok Park, I was a hack interested mostly in guitars, records and religion, with side orders of cinema, Tolkien and those White Gold Wielder books by Stephen Donaldson. I was a troubled boy.

But the Burrell was the place to go on a South Side Sabbath, and from the moment I entered that glorious sprawl of sandstone and glass, I was hooked. Not so much by the art and antiques, but the building itself 

Barry Gasson’s brilliant incorporation of forest and parkland into the structure, along with huge lumps of ancient masonry, brought a tremendous sense both calm and momentous occasion: you felt you were in a place focussing the world’s attention, your gaze, on objects that remained somehow enigmatic and largely unexplained. And everything else was somehow diminished, lessened. It was a place of magic magnification.

And the chairs down in the basement café! Those amazing oak and leather Bjørge Morgensen designs, most recently seen in the TV series Borgen and worth around £2000 apiece these days. I loved them then and now, because some are still proudly there, in the main and gloriously calm atrium. Unrestored and in perfectly patina’d condition. Comfy too.

And an example resides in my house in Shetland, via the Brae Hotel, which for some unknown reason was also equipped with Morgensen ‘Spanish’ chairs. I was gifted one for my 60th birthday by former owner Joe Rocks when they were being disposed of.

But on this week’s visit to the sparkly, still wondrous Burrell, while loving the building perhaps even more than 40 years ago – and the seating arrangements – the contents revealed themselves far more clearly and powerfully

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I can’t remember having such a powerful reaction to a work of art as I did to Cezanne’s Le Château de Médan, which you can eyeball from millimeters away, not since crossing Paris twice to do the same thing to Van Gogh’s The Starry Night at the Musée d’Orsay (another box of magic, all the better for once having been a railway station). At the refreshed Burrell, framing and lighting have been massively improved. Some of the interpretative stuff is very good, but the politically correct men-viewing-women sequence seemed unnecessary and oddly prurient. The video panels may give work to actors. Otherwise, I hate them with a vengeance. Good to see some of the staff playing the bairns’ touchscreen tables, though.

Exemplary scones and quite good coffee in the restaurant, where the Morgensens have been replaced with higher, less slouchy affairs. Only the car park, patrolled by no-mercy wardens, seemed problematic. I paid a reasonable £2.90 by smartphone but one elderly lady was in tears at having been ticketed.

And there was so much to ponder, and wonder at. The sheer crazed breadth and depth of Sir William’s obsessive acquisition and hoarding. There are objects like the Chinese pottery or Cretan oil containers I could gaze at for hours. Imagining the hands that carved or painted. The Whistler. That Degas.

The building holds and clarifies, nurtures and enlightens. I loved it then and I love it more today, despite the videographic nonsense. What a privilege to be there.

ADDENDUM, 21 March.

Jackie Kemp got in touch to point out that the Norwegian-Australian architect and academic Brit Andresen, with John Meunier, was one of those behind the original design of the building, though both Andresen and Meunier left for academia before the project was completed. It’s worth reading this piece about the £68m refurbishment, under the direction of John McAslan, which I may have downplayed, or ignored in the piece above. But I strongly refute the idea that “the people of Glasgow never took the building to their hearts.” That is nonsense.

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