Draining our museums’ lifeblood

The government favours access over acquisition with dire consequences. Mark Fisher investigates

For the past 13 years, visitors to the National Gallery have been able to see Titian’s beautiful ‘Portrait of a Young Man’, described by Gustav Waagen in his definitive 1854 survey as the single most beautiful portrait in Britain. Now its owner, Lord Halifax, wishes to sell, but the National Gallery cannot afford to buy, even jointly with the National Gallery of Scotland.

People will ask, ‘Surely we have enough Titians?’ The National Gallery’s exhibition in 2003 demonstrated that there are indeed several excellent Titian portraits in public collections: Kingston Lacy’s superb ‘Nicolò Zen’, the Ashmolean’s ‘Giacomo Doria’ and the National Gallery’s own, enigmatic ‘A Man with a Quilted Sleeve’. Nevertheless, if our great museums and galleries are to maintain their world-class reputations, the acquisition of important objects or works of art will always be important. In the words of Sir Nicholas Serota, objects are the lifeblood of museums.

In a recent speech at the British Museum, Liz Forgan, the chair of the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), made it clear that the NHMF and Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) have a duty to save the treasures that comprise our national heritage. With their help in recent years some magnificent works have been acquired: the Macclesfield Psalter by the Fitzwilliam Museum; the Becket Chasse by the V&A; the Viotti Stradivari violin by the Royal Academy of Music; and, last year, Raphael’s ‘Madonna of the Pinks’.

But similarly important works have slipped through the fingers of public collections: the Badminton Cabinet, Rubens’s ‘The Massacre of the Innocents’, Francis Bacon’s ‘Study after Velasquez’ and now the Halifax Titian.

Our museums and galleries no longer have adequate acquisition funds. In 1992 the National Gallery and the Tate received from the government ring-fenced acquisition budgets of £2.75 million and £1.8 million respectively. Today neither receives a penny. The British Museum’s acquisition grant-in-aid has fallen from £1.5 million to £100,000. Few local authority museums have ever had significant purchasing grants, but in recent years even those who have, such as Sheffield and York, have had their grants cut to zero. In the same period art-market prices have risen by as much as 600 per cent.

Without the HLF, the NHMF and the National Art Collections Fund (NACF) acquisitions would have almost ceased. Even these sources have shrunk: the HLF down to £1.6 million last year from about £10 million in previous years, the NHMF to £5 million from £12 million in 1993/4. Only the NACF has managed to maintain its help for acquisitions, at about £5 million a year. Founded in 1904, the NACF has saved over half a million objects for our public collections, from ‘The Rokeby Venus’ and Botticelli’s ‘Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child’ to smaller exquisites such as the Bomford Collection of Antique Glass (for Bristol) or the Helmingham Breviary (for Norwich).

All the major regional museums have benefited from the NACF’s help, as they have from the other main sources of funding, the V&A Purchasing Fund, which distributes about £1 million each year, the Contemporary Art Society (about a further £1 million for the purchase or commissioning of contemporary artists) and the government’s Acceptance in Lieu scheme (AIL) through which works of preeminent quality can be offered in lieu of death duties and are then allocated to public collections. Over the past ten years works with a total value of £225 million have entered more than 70 public muse ums by this route, including a Cimabue to the National Gallery, one of the Dundas Chairs, designed by Thomas Chippendale and Robert Adam, to the National Gallery of Scotland, a William Scott to the Cecil Higgins Art Gallery in Bedford and a Giovanni Bellini (temporarily) to the Bristol Museum and Art Gallery.

Now the HLF, which has provided £150 million for acquisitions over the past 12 years, has been asked by the government to review its priorities. Many museum directors fear that its focus will be shifted to the 2012 Olympics and the demands of a wider social agenda, and that it may withdraw from acquisitions altogether.

These problems are not new. In 1863 the National Gallery’s director, Sir Charles Eastlake, was unable to buy Giotto’s ‘Dormition of the Virgin’ when it was sold at the auction of the Bromley Davenport collection. In 1912 three major works by Rembrandt were lost because the National Gallery had no funds to buy them. As Denys Sutton noted in 1953, ‘The nation does not take sufficient action to safeguard its treasure.’ In these circumstances it is remarkable that museums and galleries have managed to continue to collect. The current exhibition at the National Gallery of Scotland, to mark the retirement of its director-general, Sir Tim Clifford, parades the treasures that he has acquired in the past 21 years. They include Botticelli’s ‘Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child’, the Sutherland Titian, ‘Venus Anadyomene’, Canova’s ‘Three Graces’ and paintings by Auerbach, Bacon and Freud, all with the help of the HLF or the NACF, and AIL. Tim Clifford is exceptional in being not only a fine scholar but also a charismatic showman who can lead public campaigns to secure great paintings.

If smaller museums find it difficult to imitate these high-profile tactics, some have proved to be remarkably resourceful in other ways. At the Barber Institute in Birmingham, Richard Verdi has not had the acquisition budgets with which his predecessors, Dr Thomas Bodkin and Ellis Waterhouse, created this outstanding collection in the 1940s and 50s, so he has pursued less expensive works on paper and artists who are less celebrated, at least in England, such as the 17th-century Italian painter of still lifes, Evaristo Baschenis, Pieter Anthoniesz Barbiers, a Dutch 18thcentury artist whose talents link Ruisdael to Gainsborough, and the Norwegians Johan Christian Dahl and Thomas Fearnley.

The collection of contemporary work would not have been sustained without the support of the Contemporary Art Society (CAS). Its resources are relatively modest, but since 1910, when it was founded by Lady Ottoline Morrell, Roger Fry and Sir Edward Marsh, it has helped galleries acquire the works of Jacob Epstein, Henri GaudierBrzeska, Wyndham Lewis and William Roberts before they were established, and in recent years its Special Collections Scheme has helped 15 regional galleries collect, among others, Olafur Eliasson, Catherine Yass and Gillian Wearing.

This CAS scheme, funded by the Lottery, has now ceased, and museum directors share the anxiety expressed by the president of the Museums Association, Charles Saumarez Smith, that the trustees of the HLF and the NHMF may in future treat acquisitions generally, and works of art in particular, as ‘relatively low priorities’ in line with the government’s agenda that favours access and social inclusiveness over the collection of objects and the scholarship to interpret them.

What can be done to ensure that collecting is maintained? The government is committed to restoring the NHMF budget to £10 million by 2007, but this will only bring it back to its 1980 level. More important would be a clear lead in the form of guidance to the Lottery Trusts that redefined ‘Heritage’ and gave works of art status equal to more politically correct objectives.

Having rightly gained the gratitude of museums for providing the money to remove museum charges in 1999, Gordon Brown could secure his reputation by responding positively to the 2004 Goodison report and giving tax relief to the gift of works of art made in a person’s lifetime and extending the AIL scheme to offers of pre-eminent objects against all forms of tax liability. In doing so he would be reinforcing what has always been the single most important source of museum funding — the individual benefactor.

With the exception of the British Museum, which was established by Act of Parliament in 1753, almost all our museums and their collections owe their existence to the generosity, in the form of endowments or bequests, of such individuals as Ashmole, Fitzwilliam, Soane, Walker, Courtauld, Burrell and Sainsbury. That generosity is sustained today by Janet de Botton, Charles Saatchi, Sir Denis Mahon and Colin St John Wilson, the architect of the British Library, which will open next year a gallery of his own design to house the collection of contemporary art that he has given to the Pallant House Gallery in Chichester.

The Labour party 2005 Manifesto promised to ‘encourage philanthropy to boost the quality of our public art collec tions’. Goodison offers the means to redeem that pledge. It will be too late to help the National Gallery buy the Halifax Titian, but it could lead to a new era of sustained acquisitions for all our museums and galleries.

Mark Fisher’s Britain’s Best Museums and Galleries is published in paperback by Penguin at £20.