Minimalist collecting: why have British museums in the past 50 years collected so little contemporary art?

Apollo, June, 2006 by Martin Gayford

Last month the Art Fund highlighted the parlous state of British museums and galleries, about 60% of which are unable to allocate a single penny for new acquisitions, with 96% finding lack of funds a serious obstacle to collecting. This is a national scandal, but my purpose here is not to lambast the government further, richly though it deserves it. Nor is it to single out the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, for special obloquy; although his unilateral vetoing of an extremely sensible plan to give tax breaks to donors to museums is a grim warning of what the arts can expect under his premiership. My mission is to point out a catastrophe within the wider crisis.

There is now little or no money at present for buying any sort of art--so the Badminton Cabinet has been lost to the V&A and Jan Steen's Burgher of Amsterdam to the National Museum of Wales--but it is many years since there has been much cash for contemporary art. In 2003, when the Art Fund organised its celebratory centenary exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, 'Saved!', made up of works bought for British collections with its help, an odd discrepancy was noticed. There was a rich sufficiency of items to choose from--up to the 20th century. After that the pickings were slim.

That was the reason why the Fund resolved to pay for a significant contemporary art commission for a British institution--the final result was James Turrell's Deer Shelter, a sky space at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (reviewed on p. 92). That was an admirable initiative, and the Art Fund intends to do much more. And much more is needed. For consider: how many other pieces by post-war artists of international renown are there in British galleries outside London and Edinburgh?

The truth was revealed by an exhibition organised some years ago at the Royal Academy of art from provincial galleries. Museums outside the capitals and the university cities, this made clear, are first and foremost repositories of Victorian art. After that, they contain, in order of priority, pre-Victorian painting from Britain, and Old Masters. There are honourable exceptions, such as Southampton, with its works by Chris Ofili and Gilbert & George, and the Fitzwilliam, which recently received the collection of the late Bryan Robertson, rich in 1960s abstraction. But in most museums the art of the past 50 years is more or less missing.

Why this should be is not immediately clear. It is not solely due to Britannic philistinism--though that is no doubt a factor (and evident in the current administration and Chancellor of the Exchequer). In the 19th century, collectors spent fortunes on buying the art of their day, and then--very often--presented it to civic institutions. But for some reason this public-spirited tradition withered and died in the 20th century. The standard British view was that a taste for modernist art was a distinctly suspect trait. In John Buchan's novel The Island of Sheep, Richard Hannay gave the following verdict on a villain: 'A first-class, six-cylinder highbrow. A gentlemanly communist. An intellectual who doesn't forget how to shave. The patron of every new fad in painting and sculpting and writing. Mighty condescending about all that ordinary chaps like you and me like, but liable to enthuse about monstrosities, provided they are brand-new and for preference foreign. I should think it was a genuine taste for he has that kind of rootless, marshal mind.'

Nonetheless, throughout the mid-century; a brave band of contemporary art collectors existed in Britain--such as Michael Sadler, Roland Penrose, Edward James--although sadly their possessions did not always end up in the public domain. The sale and dispersal in 1988 of the Edward James collection - a superb and quirkily individual hoard of surrealist art and artifacts, including the sofa designed by Salvador Dali in the form of Mae West's lips--was a disaster. Penrose's collection fared better--26 objects formerly owned by him were bought by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. But the acquisition of modernism for the nation was painfully slow, and beset with misfortune.

In the 1930s, Penrose, Herbert Read, and Peggy Guggenheim, among others, planned a museum of modern art for London (an institution that did not come into being until 2000). Their plan foundered largely because of Guggenheim's cantankerousness. Her later intention to leave her marvellous, personal collection to the Tare came to nothing as--apparently--she became irritated about not being able bring her dogs into the country without quarantine. Think how her Pollocks and Picassos would have transformed the galleries on Bankside.

The lack of a dedicated museum of modern art cost London dearly. The will--and money--to collect major modernist works of art was absent for many years at the Tate. In the mid 1940s Matisse's Red Studio was on sale at the Redfern Gallery for over a year at 600 [pounds sterling]. No one from the Tare even went to look at it. It was only due to Penrose's determination and contact with the artist that the Tate has The Three Dancers. Without that, and the Weeping Woman from Penrose's collection, the national collection of one of the two great artists of the 20th century would be pitiful, rather than just thin. As it is, the number of Matisses on UK soil actually is negligible.