![]() At the post-show party Warman’s habitual courtesy was corrected by Princess Margaret: “It’s not ‘Ma’am’ as in ‘smarm’, it’s ‘Ma’am’ as in ‘Spam’.”ĭuring the Serpentine years Warman’s marriage to Anne Guthrie, with whom he had two children, Jake and Rebecca, ended in divorce and he entered into a relationship with the abstract painter Alison Turnbull. It was typically empathetic when he drew a romantic and spiritual connection between the landscape photographs of Thomas Joshua Cooper and the exquisite minimalist paintings of single flowers or dead leaves by Rory McEwen. Daniel Buren’s “Structure for Two Catalpas” – the title was Warman’s – incorporated two trees on the gallery lawn. He must be the only gallery director in Britain to have flushed a woodcock during working hours, and he satisfied his love of nature and the outdoors with a number of shows. The parkland location suited his taste and eclectic interests. His exhibition programme was characterised by its balance and breadth: local/international, youth/age, tradition/novelty. In 1983 Warman was appointed the first “director” of the Serpentine Gallery – his predecessor Sue Grayson, had been “gallery organiser”. Among his commissions were murals by Bridget Riley in Liverpool, remade in 2017 for the Chinati Foundation at Marfa in Texas and Eduardo Paolozzi’s mosaics in Tottenham Court Road underground station. New public art posts in the Regional Art Associations were created and he funded the first public art agencies – the Public Art Development Trust and Public Art Commissions Agency. He established a national scheme for public art and co-funded projects. It was a logical promotion when in 1976 he joined the Arts Council as a Regional Arts Officer, later Art in Public Places Officer, which appealed to his interest in Britain beyond London. He was “stunned and proud” in August 2019 to hear that his son Jake had caught two salmon and a sea trout in three hours in today’s unpolluted Tyne. Tyneside and Northumberland would always be of special significance for him. Renting a house in the hamlet of Settlingstones encouraged walking, fly fishing and bird watching – the latter an enthusiasm since boyhood, which had enabled him at home in the 1950s, when urban sprawl was yet to engulf the countryside north of Harrow, to show his sister Anthea grey partridges. Several undergraduates became friends, among them the curator Robert McPherson and the architectural historian Gillian Darley.Īfter teaching English in Rome, in 1971 he went to Newcastle Polytechnic as a lecturer in art history. His teachers were Anita Brookner, Michael Kitson and, briefly, the dashing young Tim Hilton, future Ruskin biographer. Rural childhood holidays had enhanced his romantic nature, so it was in character that he studied the Romantic Period, 1750-1850. Later in life he defused a London knife fight with the intervention: “Is this sensible?”Īfter Harrow, Warman went to the Courtauld Institute. A boxer and a member of the Harrow rugby team, he was admired for his exemplary tackling. As a boy he was the reverse of this calm image: destroyer of toys, with a nickname, “Greedy Feedy”, for charging his prep-school contemporaries a fee to finish their disgusting school meals for them. “It is never a waste of time to gaze out of the window,” his father once told him.Īlister Warman was born on December 9 1946. Breadth of cultural interest, gentle wit, encouragement of the young and a relaxed approach to life, all bore the paternal mark. Jamie Warman, a distinguished City banker, described his eldest brother having many of their father’s traits, including a “quiet, scholarly manner” and a complete absence of financial ambition. Their eldest daughter Anthea married Peter Stillwell, housemaster of the Grove and the three Warman boys, Alister the eldest, attended the school, a connection set to extend to the fourth generation. The Warmans are something of a Harrovian dynasty, founded by Alister Warman’s father, Mark Warman, a long-remembered head of classics and, aided by his wife “Bobbie”, housemaster of the Head Master’s and then Newlands. Alister Warman, who has died aged 73, was a director of the Serpentine Gallery and the last principal of the Byam Shaw School of Art before it was subsumed by Central Saint Martins, part of the University of the Arts, London.
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