Douglas Hall Author & Editor

Douglas Hall, OBE BA FMA, was born in London of Scottish parents in 1926. After war service from 1944 to 1948, he graduated from the Courtauld Institute in 1952, and immediately entered the museum profession as Keeper of the Rutherston Collection at Manchester City Art Galleries, becoming Deputy Director in 1958. After the opening of the infant Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in 1960, he became its first Keeper in 1961, a post he retained until retiring in 1986.From the outset Hall faced many contradictory circumstances. The 60s decade, the beginning of the revolution in contemporary art, might have suggested a purely avant-garde museum on a German model. The Trustees, who saw the Gallery as a forward extension of the National Gallery of Scotland, took a different view. In early years shortage of staff, comparative isolation and low funding for travel, exhibitions and acquisitions greatly restricted activity. With the gradual relaxation of these limitations the foundations of the great collection of today were laid and seeds sown that later blossomed into massive gifts and bequests and the expansion into the fine pair of buildings that house the Gallery today.By both necessity and inclination Douglas Hall steered a line between the avant-garde fervour of some colleagues elsewhere and the conservatism of the Scottish art establishment. Hostile to attributing celebrity and cult status to artists, he pursued some unfashionable interests. His interest in the Polish emigres stemmed partly from this, partly from the well-remembered Polish army presence in Scotland during the war. Hall's non-partisan history makes him a proper advocate for marginalised artists of any kind.