La Piscine in Roubaix

[shewhomust]

Tipped off by our friend Sue, we visited the Museum of Art and Industry housed in the old swimming pool in Roubaix.

Unlikely though this sounds, it does make sense. Roubaix is one of those towns which was once industrial and very prosperous, and as the industry failed became less prosperous. So it has a number of wonderful buildings, left over from the glory days, which have survived because it never went through the period of demolition and replacement that continuing properity would probably have caused. Now it is busy reinventing itself as a lively cultural centre. (Does this sound familiar?) Among its neglected assets were the collection from the museum (which had closed down in 1940, during the war, and never reopened), and a magnificent art deco swimming pool. And someone had the bright idea of bringing them together.

This has been beautifully done, with great respect for the original building. THe main gallery is the pool itself, its width reduced by walkways along its length, the original lion's head fountain at one end balanced by a monumental ceramic arch (originally made for an international exhibition in 1913) at the other. Along the sides is displayed the museum's sculpture collection, impressive for quantity rather than quality, but gaining great charm from its unexpected setting. Between the pool and the outer walls, the shower cubicles have been left in place but opened up, the municipal green and cream brickwork providing display cabinets for smaller items, so that you can, for example, look through a group of Picasso's ceramics to the pool beyond. More works from the collection have been hung on the outer walls, and care has been taken to give priority in this area to those with aquatic themes.

Beyond are more conventional galleries, displaying other aspects of the collection, which is - well, uneven might be the best word. An attempt has been made to find a coherent thread, to take the visitor through a sequence both logically and chronologically, but it is clear that the museum has what it has, and the criteria by which it acquired it were not purely aesthetic. Once we'd worked that out, we relaxed into enjoying the show.

The kernel of the collection had no pretensions to fine art at all; it originated in the 1830s with a collection of fabric samples produced locally. It is in this sense that it is still a museum of industry as well as of art. The upper gallery around the pool displays a fraction of these books of samples, and examples of contemporary fashion - the items on display are rotated and during our visit consisted of some rather ugly sixties and seventies gear.

Some of the alleged fine art is clearly here because it is the work of local artists, and depicts local scenes: Rémy Cogghe's Cockfight in Flanders, for example, or the same artist's rather repellent Madame reçoit, in which two servants peer through the keyhole at the mistress entertaining a gentleman visitor. Some must surely have been bequeathed to the museum: I can imagine someone buying it to satisfy their own tastes, but not if they had to answer for their use of public money: Jules Le Roy's kittens playing in a chest of drawers comes into this category (although - thank you, Google, for clearing this up - kittens seem to be what Le Roy did). Naked women are another recurring theme: I quite liked Jean-Léon Gérôme's Slaves for Sale (known henceforth as "Buy two and get a monkey free!", one of Gérôme's many 'Slave for Sale' paintings.

Other favourites: two mysterious paintings b Robert Rougheon, of whom I can find no trace on the net. In The Serpent (illustrated in the brochure), a naked woman dances with a man in a bowler hat in front of two white horses; the horses too are naked, and their saddles lie in the foreground. Behind them, another woman (and yes, you've guessed it) seems to be falling out of the sky. A painting by an artist whose full name I don't have (somebody Vergaert), dated 1911, depicts a working class family contributing to the enrichment of Roubaix (Famille ouvrière participant à l'enrichissement de Roubaix): in the style of a union banner gone off-message, a robed allegorical female accepts coins from a man wearing a vest and carrying a child, while his wife and an older child gaze up at them. Finally, I was very much taken by an Eric Kennington called La Cuisine ambulante - "Costermongers" in English - a mixture of oils and collage on canvas, in which a group - a family group? - of figures are involved in some inexplicable activity, from which one man looks straight out of the picture with great directness; an entirely believable face. Picture here, and it's well worth a look.