Let her go

Picture: The Art Fund

The Art Fund has launched an appeal to buy this picture for £16 million for the National Maritime Museum. It might be the prime version of a famous picture of a famous queen, but there are two others. One is at the National Portrait Gallery, which is just seven miles from the National Maritime Museum. Its importance is 'iconic', as The Art Fund press release says, rather than artistic. And we already have this icon in London. It's too much money for a picture that's essentially a duplicate, and of meager artistic quality.

The sellers have timed the offer well. The old master market is in the doldrums, but early English portraits are selling astonishingly well. Them seem merely clumsy to me, but their mix of 'merrie England' naivety and Tudor bling appeals to some of today's rich. I don't blame the sellers for timing the market. But Britain's public collections tend to mistime acquisitions perfectly, competing with the mega-rich for the most expensive pictures of the day and ignoring unfashionable bargains. The Art Fund has always known that this picture was in a British private collection. But they never seem to think strategically; did they try to buy it previously? And which unfashionable pictures are they trying to buy cheaply today?

And is this really a £16m picture? Portraits of Henry VIII from Holbein's workshop recently sold for £821k and £965k. They're not prime versions, but they're artistically better than the Armada Portrait, and equally iconic. I can accept that the likely prime version of the Armada Portrait is more valuable than studio replicas of Holbein's Henry VIII, but twenty times more seems a stretch. That money could buy a Titian or Rembrandt. For less than half the price (£7.3m) we could have had the fantastic Le Brun portrait bought by the Met, which is a great picture from a school poorly represented in UK collections. With the change we could have bought portraits by Scipione Pulzone, Ludovico Carraci and Girolamo da Carpi. Or for £14m we could have bought a great Poussin, an incomparably better picture. None of these are big names, and they're not especially fashionable. But we should be buying pictures based on quality and importance rather than choosing pictures that lend themselves most easily to publicity campaigns. Art collecting is being driven by public relations, which generally means pictures with some patriotic story behind them, because The Art Fund's PR department only has that one script.

If private donors think the Armada Portrait is good value, and really want to keep this picture in Britain, I won't stand in their way. I'll even agree that it would be a nice acquisition for the National Maritime Museum. But it's not just private donors. The Art Fund is largely subsidised by the taxpayer, in that its members receive free or reduced admission to publicly funded museums and exhibitions. That's a large part of why most people join, and that money funneled to The Art Fund comes straight out of the pockets of public museums. It's effectively a way of moving money from general expenditure to acquisition spending, but at immense bureaucratic cost. And The Art Fund seems especially unskilled at identifying the best things to buy.

There's another big subsidy in that £6m in tax will be remitted. I'm delighted by a £6m subsidy for the arts. But this is an arbitrary £6m subsidy, available only to specific works that are already in the UK. Effectively the government is paying full face value for a gift token that can be used only for one work of art, instead of just giving the money directly so that museums can choose the pictures they want.

The Art Fund has recently called for a review of the system of export licenses. I call for the whole rotten process to be abolished. If a foreign buyer is willing to pay £16m for this, let them have it. And let our museums compete to buy pictures from abroad, rather than having to go after the latest picture that The Art Funds wants to 'save'.

Dear museums: buy this!

Picture: Sotheby's

This Orazio Gentileschi is a supreme masterpiece. It's coming up for auction with an estimate of $25m - $35m. It's beautiful, art historically 'important' and a simply magnificent picture. I've known it from reproductions and I'd longed to see it, so I was delighted to see it on loan at the Met last time I visited. It surpassed most of the masterpieces in the permanent collection, a truly memorable and stupendous picture. So why aren't we buying it for the National Gallery?

Museums always talk about wanting to buy masterpieces rather than 'filling gaps', but they usually do exactly the opposite. The Met, the National Gallery in Washington and the Getty should be going all-out for this, but the Met seems more enthused for contemporary and the National Gallery in Washington has an absurdly myopic focus on buying only Dutch pictures. But what about Europe? 

It would be a great complement to the National Gallery's strong collection of baroque art, but it could equally transform a regional museum's collection - Birmingham would be a fine home, alongside another large Gentileschi and some other fine baroque pictures. It's a measure of the picture's importance and originality that it would complement even the Louvre's magnificent holdings, or the Prado's. German museums bought aggressively and well in the 1970s and 1980s, but little since; it would make up for some of the large baroque pictures that Berlin lost in a fire in 1945. But because it's not already in one of those countries, they're highly unlikely to pursue it. Why not sell the right to export another national treasure and use the funds to buy this instead?

I'll be amazed if any of them are even considering it. Europe's cultural conservatism is so ingrained that even in collecting historic art it seeks to hold onto the stuff that hasn't already been exported rather than seek out the best, wherever it lies. But the UK's cultural class deserves special contempt in this unedifying contest, because they are still obsessing about an over-priced Rembrandt that they should let go, instead of pursuing a great masterpiece that they should buy. The Rembrandt is £35m; the (better) Gentileschi is $35m. But The Art Fund is desperately trying to 'save' the Rembrandt (which seems likely to remain here anyway), and seems not even to have noticed the Gentileschi. 

One possibility, not to be dismissed lightly, is that the Art Fund is run by idiots. They seem more interested in marketing than in art, demanding that museums include prominent lurid acknowledgement of their support and following fashion in headlong pursuit of trendy contemporary art. Describing the Rembrandt as 'perilously unsafe' is absurd hyperbole that reveals their real focus: keeping stuff in the UK rather than developing our public art collections. 

The other possibility is that they have just given up on the idea of developing collections and buying great works of art in favour of simply keeping in  the UK whatever is already in the UK. The trope of 'saving our art' plays to the bias of loss-aversion, which as specialists in advertising rather than art they will understand well. But it's a sign of the stultifying monoculture of arts discussion here that it goes unchallenged. No one questions the absurdly distorted funding model, or makes the case for going out to buy art that is great rather than art that is here. 

The Treasury is willing to subsidise the purchase of pictures arbitrarily, simply because the owners happen to have some tax to pay. That's an irrational and expensive subsidy that should be abolished. And the fact that it also involves an added subsidy to the owners is despicable. Whatever your views on the UK government's welfare cuts, it's hard to adduce any plausible case for taxpayers making transfers to especially wealthy people just because they own good art. The real cost of the Rembrandt is £35m, not the reduced amount based on tax discount. The tax discount is just a payment from the Treasury. Better to use the money to buy the Danae instead, and have enough change left over to buy some other good pictures. 

'Donations' in lieu of tax: a stupid way to fund the arts

Picture: University of Cambridge

Margaret Thatcher's archives were recently transferred to the nation in lieu of tax, under a scheme that's seen many important artworks and historic documents transferred to public ownership. We even got her handbag (above). The Thatcher archives have been controversial, but for the wrong reasons. There's no question of their importance, whatever you think of Margaret Thatcher. But the scheme itself is absurd. I've done an interview with The One Show on BBC about the acceptance in lieu scheme, which should be broadcast on Friday. Acceptance in lieu almost universally popular because it seems to give free pictures to museums. The official website explains its advangages:  "The primary benefit for a host/acquiring museum, gallery or library is that it receives an important object at no cost".

 

But this is nonsense. These are not free objects. They are objects bought out of foregone taxes. If the tax were paid to the Treasury and then given to the museum, it could spend the money on any picture it liked. What are the chances that of all the pictures available in the world, they'd want the very one handed over in lieu of tax?

 

The beneficiaries are not museums, but the wealthy people with important pictures on their walls and archives in their attics. I don't for a moment blame them for using the scheme - I would in their shoes. They aren't cheating the system; they're using it exactly as it was intended. Our ire should be directed at the Treasury. This is just one of many examples of misleading policies that benefit a tiny number at the expense of the majority. They are pretending that it isn't really arts funding, because the transfer takes place instead of gathering tax and distributing it.

 

The iniquity stings twice. First, it stings that the very wealthy can enjoy such a splendid privilege. Can you imagine the reaction if you offered to pay your council tax by spending a few hours doing some gardening in the local park, and offering your labour at £50 an hour? I'm going to hazard a guess that they won't convene an expert panel to assess the quality of your work and value of your labour. But if you have an important picture you not only get to save on transaction fees from selling it on the open market, you get a tax rebate too - you save a quarter of the tax that would have been due on the object. The other side, of course, is that taxpayers are paying extra for the privilege of acquiring something via the acceptance in lieu scheme. It's actually a more expensive way to buy stuff. And the people transferring objects are often treated as philanthropists, and credited by the museums as donors. They are not donors; they are simply taxpayers. And they're using a loophole that means they are paying relatively less tax than the rest of us. We are paying more than they are.

 

But the scheme also stings because we keep getting more of the kind of pictures that happen to have been popular with British collectors - unsurprisingly, they're the pictures that are usually quite well represented in our national collections, too. We've just got a cache of 44 Frank Auerbachs, which are fine pictures, but do we need so very many of them? We have a total of 54 Auberbach oils alone in British public collections, but not a single picture by the American abstract artist Richard Diebenkorn. And where are the early German pictures, the Scandinavian art, seventeenth and eighteenth century French paintings, nineteenth century German art, and American art, all poorly represented in both public and private collections in the UK? We're missing out on so much because our acquisitions are skewed towards 'saving' more of the same.

 

The cultural sector is extravagantly grateful for acceptance in lieu. But it's a bit like getting a pay rise, but then being told that it will be paid in the form of a monthly delivery of groceries chosen by your employer. Getting a free grocery delivery is better than not getting one. But if the cost is the same to my employer, I'd rather have the cash thanks all the same. And can you image a public company choosing to pay in groceries, but then deciding to pay the supermarket a bit more than their retail prices? That's what the government is doing when it buys pictures under the acceptance in lieu scheme. Shareholders would demand the board be sacked if it were a public company; as taxpayers we should be holding the Treasury to account. To be clear, I'm not making a partisan point here. Acceptance in lieu enjoys cross-party support, and no party has a monopoly on distorting tax schemes. But they should still be held accountable for this stupidity.

It's even more stupid in the context of funding cuts that mean we can't get to see the stuff we're acquiring because museums can't afford to keep the doors open. Money is available for acquisitions, but not for running costs. The British Museum has acquired some wonderful drawings under the acceptance in lieu scheme. But it's just slashed the opening hours at the print room, so it's now harder to see them. And we're acquiring archives, but shutting libraries. It's perverse to keep buying things when we can't afford to display them. 

 

Of course the risk for the cultural sector is that the acceptance in lieu scheme gets scrapped without any compensating payment. But we are citizen as well as art enthusiasts, and we have a duty to play fair. We should seek to win the argument for funding on its own terms, not on the basis of secret subventions. And those secret subventions impose a real cost. It is more expensive to acquire via acceptance in lieu, because of the extra tax rebate. And too often it means we acquire the wrong things; museums need to get more creative with their acquisitions, and the Treasury should be a little less creative in its accounting. 

Bad Acquisition in Chicago

The Art Institute of Chicago has acquired a collection of contemporary art that they describe as the 'largest' in their history (it's been misreported as 'greatest'). It includes artists I like (Jasper Johns and Gerhard Richter) and artists I don't (Warhol, Koons, Hirst). But some people like that sort of thing, and there's no question that the art is a worthy addition to the Institute's collection. It's a bad acquisition not because of the pictures, but because they paid too high a price, agreeing to display the collection together for fifty years. That is not really a gift. It's an expensive acquisition that hands over a public space and subverts it to the whim of vain plutocrats.

Donors Stefan T. Edlis and Gael Neeson are buying themselves a memorial, over-riding judgments of more expert curators and over-riding the changing views of posterity to insist that their taste is imposed for half a century, that their pictures are shown whilst other, perhaps better pictures are consigned to storage. If the importance of the collection were beyond doubt then the condition would be unnecessary. The collection's focus on the most currently fashionable artists makes it especially vulnerable to changing taste, and I suspect that future curators and visitors will bitterly regret this acquisition.

The press release disingenuously claims that the museum itself proposed the condition. That trivial piece of spin disgusts me far more than the condition itself. The museum has not only given them gallery space, it implies that the plutocrats' generosity is untainted by conditionality. They get to eat their cake and have it; they take over part of the museum for half a century, and pretend that it was some one else's idea. They get a grand boastful memorial that imposes a cost on the public, and they get to be presented as modest and public-spirited. The museum prostitutes itself twice over, first in handing over the galleries, and second in surrendering its dignity. 

Museums should have the courage to turn down costly bequests like this, which do themselves and their patrons no favours. The Institute is already stuffed to the rafters with treasures. Unless they're adding another wing (or maybe subdivide the big atrium they built for parties), showing these pictures means not showing better pictures. Just say no, kids.

Whither Fragonard?

Picture: Getty

It's reported that the remainder of the Rau collection, which he left to Unicef, is going to be sold by Sotheby's, Bonhams and Lempertz.  It's a mixed bag, but the highlight is the stunning Fragonard, above, from the series of Portraits de Fantaisie, which Rau bought at auction in the 1970s for a very high price.  The Louvre has several, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. bought The Reader from the auction of the Erickson Collection (from which the Met bought Rembrandt's Aristotle Contemplating the Bust of Homer for a record price).  Others are in the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown Massachusetts and the Art Institute of Chicago.

 

The Unicef site indicates that it will be sold by Bonhams - in which case it will surely establish a new record for that auction house.  It was previously on loan to the Getty, and it would be a great acquisition for them, complementing the impressive newly discovered Watteau that they bought recently.  Cleveland is another plausible institutional buyer.  I suspect the Kimbell, another museum with deep pockets, will struggle to compete after recently buying expensive paintings by Poussin and attributed to Michelangelo (and they're completing a building project, too).  I'd love to see it in National Gallery.  It's obviously an impossible acquisition for them, but their collection of French eighteenth century art is weak (the good stuff is in the Wallace Collection), and there's nothing quite like this in any British collection. 

Acquisitions and Exhibitions

Picture: BBC

This collection of renaissance silver looks like a great acquisition at the Ashmolean, although weirdly there doesn't seem to be anything on their website yet.  See the BBC for some initial details, disappointingly focusing on speculation about improper provenance.  It will complement the Ashmolean's strong collection of renaissance bronzes, which they present particularly well. 

 

The Ashmolean is exhibiting a selection of highlights from its first rate collection of drawings from May 25 to August 18.  It will be well worth a trip - wherever you live!  The Palais des Beaux Arts in Lille has a comparable collection of drawings, also strong in Raphael.  They are exhibiting a selection of highlights from the Wicar collection 12 April to 22 July, including 15 Raphaels.

Prado Acquisitions

The Prado website announces the donation of a rare group of Spanish gothic paintings.  Looks like a spectacular acquisition, and there are impressively comprehensive details in English, but it doesn't seem to say when they will be on display.  I hope I can see them when I go to Late Van Dyck next month.