Exhibitions 2
The NatWest Group Art Collection (Lothbury Gallery, 41 Lothbury EC2, till 2 May)
A bank's flutter
John Spurling
During the Sixties and Seventies, when abstraction ruled and most people were Still baffled by it, British artists were mainly patronised by the state. The success of their latest shows in London galleries depended heavily on selling to the Tate, the Arts Council, the British Council or the Leicestershire Education Authority, with the charitable Contemporary Arts Society chipping in to buy works for presentation to public galleries. Private buyers in this country were few and far between, and if, as I did, they bought on tick without inter- est, their support must have been more valuable psychologically than financially. Given such measly patronage, it is extraor- dinary how much ambitious, innovative, buoyant and even flamboyant work was produced.
With the revival of figuration in the Sev- enties and determined efforts in the early Eighties by the Contemporary Arts Society and others to persuade people that they could both like and afford contemporary Work, the private market increased for small-scale, cheaper work, but at the same time government cutbacks meant that the state's patronage shrank. Nevertheless, the Whole 33-year period from the mid-Fifties to the mid-Eighties can now be seen as the golden age of British art, more energetic, Confident and diverse than any other since the Romantic period at the end of the 18th century.
The people who really missed out on this bonanza were the big private institutions, the banks and businesses who might have Cheered up their foyers, corridors and offices and amused or stirred up their employees by spending a few thousand a Year in galleries and studios all round the country. One bank, however, did every so Often have a flutter on the contemporary E?ritish art market. These 'acquisition ini- tiatives', as NatWest's press handout calls !Item, 'were often linked to building pro- jects', so after the NatWest Tower was built in the City in the late Seventies, its enviable and civilised owners, who had already bought contemporary art in the Sixties to hang in their regional head office in Manchester, went out and acquired 100 More works for the Tower. The whole collection is now to be shown to the public in a series of changing exhibi- tions in the newly opened Lothbury Gallery, beside the Bank of England, and the process has begun with a selection of 46 works representing four standard 'sub- jects of art': landscape, still-life, the figure and abstraction. Many of them are lovely: two elegant still-lifes by Patrick Caulfield, Arthur Boyd's scratchy-looking brown and blue 'Australian Landscape with Cocka- too', Elisabeth Vellacott's glowing and satirical 'Christ Driving the Photographers from King's College Chapel', Bridget Riley's 'Study Towards Print', a delicately dynamic blue-and-grey-striped St Andrew's cross, 'Orange Flowers in a White Bowl' by Ivon Hitchens, and Anne Redpath's 'White Azaleas', to name but seven, Merlyn Evans's 'The Meeting', a huge canvas painted for the Festival of Britain in 1951 and based on an open-air meeting of Elec- trical Trades Union workers, is not so much lovely as powerfully unsettling; like most of his work, and one wonders where the bank usually hangs it. The Pasmore, the Sutherland and the Lowry are all excellent examples of their brands.
Some items, of course, are merely fash- ion-conscious or dull or, in the case of Gilbert and George's two postcard col lages, both. But everyone makes mistakes, not least real insiders like the Tate, which in its anxiety to keep abreast of interna- tional trends seems often to forget to look before it buys. Nat West's buyers have avoided the dubiously exhibitionist kind of art made specially for museums — gargan- tuan sculpture, installations, conceptual layouts — by limiting themselves to paint- ings, prints and photographs and they have chosen mostly what any sensitive private buyer might choose, things to like and live with.
The irony is that the mighty marble-pil- lared banking hall which has been translat- ed into a gallery for showing these works Australian Landscape with Cockatoo', 1974, by Arthur Boyd would be much better suited to exhibiting large sculptures or installations. There is, in fact, on one side of the hall, a kind of installation, in the shape of a wooden model of central London — thought to be the largest architectural model in the world — which serves the practical purpose of drawing attention to buildings ripe for investment and is likely to be more of an attraction to most casual visitors than the art collection. Hung on neat white move- able screens in the middle of this cavernous 19th-century Temple of Mammon, the pic- tures look cheerful and ingratiating, but also — even the largest — transitory and frivolous, like a butterfly-collection in a cathedral. That may, of course, be a fair reflection of the way bankers see art, but it undervalues both what they have acquired and their own imaginative contribution, by acquiring it, to the encouragement of con- temporary artists.
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