In a Merseyside car park eight-year-old children are cheerfully debating surrealism in front of works from a national collection which include a Turner, a Barbara Hepworth and a photograph of Claude Cahun pretending to be a stone monolith.
There is also a beautiful 1918 John Nash landscape of a cornfield and Peter Kennard’s powerful photomontage of cruise missiles poking out of John Constable’s Haywain.
Listening to the children debate the works, it all feels completely normal, but of course it is anything but.
The works from the Tate collection have been gathered together for what is a mobile art gallery. For 10 weeks an articulated lorry will tour the Liverpool city region with the simple aim of making great art accessible to everyone.
About 5,000 schoolchildren are expected to visit what is a UK first and a version of a project which began life in France.
Kennard, one of Britain’s most important political artists, was at the launch on Wednesday to give his support.
“I just think it is so vital to get work out from the gallery, and the idea of designing something that can be used by kids and different groups is fantastic,” he said. “This is like a voice from the future in the present.”
After the gallery visit the children move to a nearby space to do their own versions of the works they have seen.
Kennard, also a professor at the Royal College of Art, threw himself into offering advice. Little of it was taken, he said.
Awkwardly, none of the children were inspired to make angry anti-war photomontages with most opting for their version of Nash’s gentle rural idyll.
The mobile museum is a collaboration between Tate Liverpool and Art Explora, an international art foundation. Its founder Frédéric Jousset, an entrepreneur and philanthropist, said its mission was to make art accessible to all and for good reason.
“I believe that the children will keep long-lasting memories of their experience and hopefully will bring their families later on,” he said.
“It’s with the core belief that art makes us better people. Art fosters curiosity. It’s an agent of social mobility. It creates unique bonds between communities and across generations. Art and artists have the power to inspire change and transform the way we live together.”
It was also true, he said, that despite the best efforts of museums and galleries there was still a cultural divide between “those who have interest and access to arts and culture and those who are left behind.”
Helen Legg, the director of Tate Liverpool, agreed that many people on Merseyside would not be persuaded to visit the gallery.
“We know that a lot of communities don’t make it to the museum because they don’t have access to a car or public transport may not make it easy.
“There are also perceptual barriers … how is it going to feel in there for us? Will we get told off if we don’t know what the rules are?”
The mobile museum project was about meeting people on their own turf, she said.
The mobile museum has 21 artworks and is defiantly free of any sense of dumbing down.
It is a version of the Radical Landscapes exhibition shown at Tate Liverpool in the summer of 2022. Towards the front of a lorry, behind a black curtain, is seating for visitors to watch a video work by Superflux titled Mitigation of Shock.
The Merseyside tour will take in communities in St Helens, Knowsley, Wirral, Sefton, Halton and Liverpool.
When Art Explora pitched the idea to Tate Liverpool, Legg said she said yes straight away.
Of course touring works from a national collection in a lorry does bring an element of jeopardy but organisers point to the French experience. The mobile museum concept was created in 2011 by MuMo (Musée Mobile) and had yet to encounter any security issues.
Legg said: “I think we can trust our communities to respect the works that are on show.
“Of course there are restrictions around the use of works in the national collection and that’s appropriate because they belong to everybody in the country. It’s Tate’s job to protect them so we’ve been very careful about how we mitigate risk.
“But I honestly don’t think there is a risk in bringing these works to people who actually own these works. The people here own these works, just as you and I do.”
