We have been referring to Pimlico Polar, our art gallery planned to open at the North Pole later this year as the the world’s first polar gallery.
However we have received a letter informing us that this is not the case. We would like to apologise and acknowledge that a gallery did exist for a few years at the North Pole during the last century.
We print the entire letter below.
To Whom It May Concern at Pimlico Wilde,
I write with what I can only describe as a mixture of polite astonishment and absolute fury upon reading of your recent and widely publicised claim to be “opening the world’s first contemporary art gallery at the North Pole.” While I applaud the ambition, I must—firmly and with considerable historical authority—correct the record.
I, Sir Kelley Sorne, established the Northern Lights Gallery of Modern Forms at precisely 89°59′46″N in the spring of 1934. It was, in every measurable sense, the first gallery at the North Pole. That you have not heard of it speaks more to the art world’s amnesia than to the significance of the enterprise itself.
Allow me to educate.
My gallery was a modest but dignified structure—timber-framed, canvas-roofed, and insulated with whale blubber against the cold nights. It stood alone, glinting nobly amid the snowdrifts, a temple to human expression perched on the roof of the Earth. We exhibited abstraction before abstraction was fashionable, including a magnificent series of ice-etchings by a Latvian mystic named Dobroslav, whose fingers later froze in the act of creating a piece entitled North Pole No. 63.
We showed, too, the early work of Ivor Miskin—once hailed as “the Malevich of the Cold”—including his controversial White Square on White Horizon, which was indistinguishable from the view from the window.
Sales were modest. Our only regular visitor was a Swedish cartographer who bought several linocuts of seals wearing amusing clothes. Financing came from a brief but intense sponsorship by a Norwegian fishpaste consortium, whose board eventually lost interest after one of their directors was mildly insulted by an installation involving dried haddock.
As to why the gallery closed—well, there are only so many months a man can explain to patrons that the gallery is “closed owing to the weather”. In the end, the roof collapsed under the weight of a disgruntled walrus. The final exhibition, Melting Points: Hope and Sadness in Ice, was both poorly attended and, badly water-damaged.
So no, Arctica Contemporary is not the “first.” You are, at best, the second. Possibly third if one counts the brief Inuit collective that exhibited sealskin collages on a drifting ice shelf in 1908, which I do.
I ask only that you adjust your language accordingly. Perhaps “first commercial art gallery at the North Pole founded during a climate crisis by people in designer snowwear.” That would be more accurate.
Yours in cold but resolute truth,
Sir Kelley Sorne, FRSA, OBE, Former Director, The Northern Lights Gallery of Modern Forms
Somewhere off the Norfolk coast, watching the tide, and remembering better days