In another world, the Royal Academy would be holding its annual Summer Exhibition right now. Instead, it now hopes to open today, following an almost four-month closure, yet another cultural casualty of Covid-19.
For Rebecca Salter, the first female president of the illustrious institution in its 251-year history, her role has changed somewhat during the pandemic. Her visits have, for the period of social isolation, demanded she walk through the gallery as she muses: “there’s something very odd about a picture that’s locked away, with nobody to look at it. It was as if they’d been abandoned. I couldn’t have that.”
For Salter, the gallery’s saving grace has been its loyal cohort of 100,000 Friends, who provide around one third of the gallery’s income. This is especially salient as the gallery is currently facing financial losses of around £1 million a month. Her fear that Friends would cancel their membership was unwarranted as she notes: “because they’ve stuck by us. I feared at the beginning they would cancel wholesale. Instead, all I’ve received are wonderful letters saying: ‘Why would I do that?’ ”
Yet the return to the gallery may prove as testing as the pandemic. Salter notes: “we will still be losing money when we reopen, because with the new regulations [timed ticketing, one-way routes and so on] capacity will be 20 per cent.”
There is still reason to hope. The Summer Exhibition has not been cancelled, simply delayed until October. As Salter states: “We were determined to make it happen,” concluding “what we’ve discovered in this strange period is that whatever happens, we can make it work.”
