One Hundred Summers with Vanessa Branson
By Holly Howe
Vanessa Branson has been a patron and active agent in the art world for over 30 years. This summer she published One Hundred Summers – her portrait of a century as it was experienced by her family. (Her brother is entrepreneur Richard Branson). She spoke with our members about the book and her journey through art, including setting up her own gallery in London in the 80s and cofounding the Marrakech Biennale.
On writing a memoir
Vanessa admitted that while she never thought she’d be able to write a book, the process was for her an “extraordinary experience” as she reflected on her life to date:
“The experience of remembering minute by minute, and month by month a period in your life, or all of the periods in your life, has been deeply rewarding…Writing One Hundred Summers reminded me that if you have a full life, one thing leads onto another all the time. Every chapter is interwoven in the next.”
Her first gallery
In 1986 she opened the Vanessa Devereux Gallery in Blenheim Crescent off the Portobello Road (Devereux was her married name). While she knew she would never be an artist herself, she loved art so setting up a gallery when she was 25 was a natural fit:
“I had that perfect balance between knowing artists and then having people who would buy their work, and I really enjoyed selling.”
She remembers it as a fun time though not without its struggles as she worked to cover her costs in the five years the gallery was open:
“We could follow our instincts and we were very light on our toes and we had some remarkable shows in retrospect. At that time nobody else was showing artists from abroad.”
Her key take-aways from the experience were the importance of surrounding yourself with talented people and doing a lot of listening:
“We talked to teachers in art schools, other galleries, and artists. If names were bobbing up that you were hearing from more than one person, we thought ‘that sounds interesting, let’s go to their studio and have a look around’.”
On meeting Tracey Emin
Vanessa was introduced to Tracey Emin through the artist Pete Nevin, who encouraged her to do a studio visit. Emin had recently graduated from the Royal College of Art at the time.
“As soon as you walked in you knew there was something. She was quite pushy, and super engaging and different. I sat with her for the afternoon and I knew she had something very special about her.”
Vanessa encouraged collector Stuart Evans to see her work, and ended up selling one of Emin’s paintings to him. Despite being responsible for Emin’s first major sale, Vanessa is humble about her input, saying that the most important thing is to help young artists get going with their careers.
Taking risks to show a banned William Kentridge
Vanessa decided to exhibit William Kentridge’s work in her gallery, despite the cultural embargo which meant that the South African artist should not be shown in the UK. As a lawyer’s daughter, Vanessa appreciated that Kentridge’s father was a respected barrister “who had defended Steve Biko’s family at Steve Biko’s inquest so I knew he was on the side of good”. The exhibition was a massive success and she subsequently went on to work with Kentridge when she was running the Marrakech Biennale years later.
“We had right on our side and we also had the weight of history. Very soon afterwards the embargo stopped. It has since been proven that the apartheid government wasn’t bothered by the cultural embargo at all – it was much more bothered by economic embargoes!”
The Wonderful Fund
In early 1999, Vanessa was catching up with her friend, art advisor Prue O’Day. They started bouncing ideas around how great it would be to introduce a group of people who had never collected art before to the joy of collecting. They also thought it would be great to put together an art collection that represented the emerging artists of the millennium. Could they bring these two ideas together? Yes! And thus the Wonderful Fund was born.
The project would have a finite period of five years and people were invited to contribute to create the fund. Vanessa and Prue were then responsible for purchasing the works, which were then shown after the fund was completed at the Marrakech Biennale and at Pallant House Gallery.
Again, one of Vanessa’s key drivers was the critical importance in supporting emerging artists, where a sale can make a huge difference to both their career and their life in general in terms of financial wellbeing:
“Having had a gallery myself I knew the immediate effect that if you ring up an artist and say that a piece of their work has sold…it meant that they could pay the rent that month or feed their children. But also it is an endorsement of how they are working.”
And she also delighted in introducing people into the exciting world of collecting art.
A love affair with Morocco
In 2002, Vanessa purchased El Fenn with her business partner Howell James. It was a ruin of a riad in Marrakech, Morocco, and they were inspired to purchase it following the strange anti-Islamic feeling that was pervading the West after 9/11. She explained: “It felt very good to be swimming against the tide and we bought this beautiful old palace that was completely crumbling – it was another challenge.” They did it up and turned it into a hotel which opened in 2004.
She then set her sights on something even bigger: “Quite soon after we opened the hotel, I was listening to George Bush saying ‘you’re either with us or against us’ on Radio 4 on The Today Programme and I was terribly upset by this feeling of being asked to be marginalised between good and bad – it’s such a nuanced situation. So I thought somebody needs to start an arts festival because if you can discuss difficult ideas through the arts – that’s another amazing role that the arts can play. The arts are a very safe place to discuss contentious ideas.” And with that, she decided to found the Marrakech Biennale with Abel Damoussi, which launched in 2005, and was focused around art, literature and film.
Advice she would give her younger self
Vanessa closed her talk with the advice she would give her younger self:
“Have courage – don’t be frightened and be a bit playful and have fun. We only have one go at it and we can get hung up on being worried. Don’t be foolhardy but don’t forget to have fun along the way!”