Guardian of the nation's treasures
Susan Moore celebrates 100 years of the National Art Collections Fund
Exhibitions celebrating the nation's art treasures have a habit of backfiring. Within 50 years of the great Art Treasures of the United Kingdom show held in Manchester in 1857, for instance,
around half the works of art exhibited in this inadvertent shop window had been sold by their owners and had left the coun try. What strapped-for-cash country landowner, hit by the agricultural depres sion of the 1880s, could resist the newly bulging chequebooks of the German museums and the equally bulging American plu tocrats? Not least when a loan to an exhi bition had proved to the family that it could, after all, live without its greatest heirloom. As the heritage Jeremiahs warned at the time of the comparably spectacular Treasure Houses of Britain show in Washington in 1985, human nature and financial expediency have not changed a bit.
What has changed over the intervening years is Britain's ability to respond quickly and effectively to the threat of any masterpiece — major or minor — leaving these shores. For this, thanks are due in no small measure to the heroic campaigning of the National Art Collections Fund. The Fund was founded in 1903 by four individuals intent on stemming the flow of works of art out of Britain and saving them for the nation's museums and galleries — the artist and art historian Christiana Herringham, the art critics D.S.
MacColl and Saved for the nation: st Sir Claude Phillips, Keeper of the Wallace Collection. It has remained as much our national conscience as it is public benefactor.
By 1907, George Bernard Shaw was describing American millionaires as 'stripping Britain more ruthlessly than Napoleon stripped Italy and Spain'. Certainly, even 30 years earlier, the financier J.S. Morgan, father of John Pierpont, could spend 10,000 guineas — more than the National Gallery's annual purchase grant — to win the likes of Gainsborough's ravishing `Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire'. Shaw saw the Fund as 'making good the neglect of the Treasury when it came to Britain's art defence'. Crucially, it ensured that even those of limited means could have the satisfaction of playing their part.
From the first, the Fund has adroitly boxed above its weight, not least by masterminding ambitious public appeals to save such outstanding trophies as Velazquez's `Rokeby Venus' (its first and arguably greatest coup) or the Leonardo Cartoon — the latter campaign drawing over a quarter of a million visitors to see it at the National Gallery in 1962. The Fund has successfully lobbied for increased museum grants, championed free public access to museums, and broadened the debate as to what does, or should, constitute the national heritage.
In an age when prices for major works of art increasingly necessitate funding from a wide range of grant-awarding bodies, a contribution from the Art Fund (as it now calls itself) has kick-started many a major fund-raising appeal. To date, the Fund has supported the acquisition of half a million works of art by some 600 British museums, galleries and historic buildings, 56,000 of them presented as gifts or bequests. Little wonder that those institu tions should have responded so generously to the Fund's request to borrow many of their greatest and best-loved treasures for its centenary retrospective.
Saved! 100 years of the National Art Collections Fund, at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 18 January 2004, is far more than a well-deserved, self-congratulatory slap on the back. From the very first — walking into Gallery One to be confronted by Jacob Epstein's towering, monumental figures of Jacob and the Angel, hewn out of glowing coloured alabaster and locked in desperate embrace — this is a show that stuns, delights and provokes in equal measure. Its only potential flaw might be visitors' reluctance to move on from an opening knockout display of causes celebres and triumphs embracing not only the likes of the `Rokeby Venus', Canova's 'Three Graces' and Picasso's 'Weeping Woman' but also a massive Liao Dynasty earthenware Luohan, a spectacular Melanesian dance crest and a compelling Roman bronze head of the Emperor Augustus, acquired in 1911 from Liverpool University in exchange for £1,000 towards further archaeological excavations and now in the British Museum.
Richard Verdi, the show's curator, working with Michael Craig-Martin and designer Piers Gough, has delivered a bold and refreshingly unorthodox display. Many exhibits look better here than they do in their home galleries; others are revelations — like the three Moche-culture figure and animal vessels from 2nd to 8th centuries Peru, normally in store at the BM's depot in Hackney — and give pause for thought by taking a long overdue public bow. Most intriguingly, the chosen items are shown alongside works of art acquired in the same decade or two to give a sense of the evolution of taste. It is no accident, for instance, that the Fund's first major acquisition, a year before the `Rokeby Venus', should have been Whistler's 'Nocturne: Blue and Gold — Old Battersea Bridge', and that it should be shown alongside Sargent's swagger 'Study of Madame Gautreau' and a chaste Hammershoi interior with a woman. All three are pure Velazquez in their fluid and painterly handling of pigment and monochromatic palette. Here is a lesson on every wall, if one cares to see it. It is no coincidence either that the Fund should have begun to support the acquisition of gutsy, Italian and Northern Baroque painting after Anthony Blunt joined its Pictures Committee in 1944.
The Fund is not above making mistakes (or admitting them) — the first painting it supported, for instance, turned out not to be by Watteau but by Pierre-Antoine Quillard. Some may also believe that it has no business involving itself in contemporary art. But what makes this show so unexpectedly affecting is the fact that it represents a tribute to those countless selfless souls and generous benefactors who gave their time, their money or their often spectacular art collections to the Fund in order that Britain's public museums and galleries, and their visitors, should be enriched.
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