Walk into any major contemporary art museum in London and you will come across works by leading British artists. Not so in the regions. In a bid to redress this imbalance, the Contemporary Art Society has today (11 December) launched a scheme to enable one of the 69 museums in its network to acquire one major work by a British artist every year. Only eight London museums are members of the society.
Often priced out by an inflated contemporary art market, museums will have the opportunity to make a case for a particular acquisition, usually for a work by an artist with a connection to the museum’s collection or region. The London-based charity, Sfumato Foundation, is funding the Great Works scheme, although a spokeswoman declined to comment on the acquisition budget. Works will be bought directly from the artists and their galleries. The deadline for applications is the end of February and successful bids will be announced in March.
Caroline Douglas, the director of the Contemporary Art Society, says museums cannot rely on government subsidies to bolster their collections. “Collecting the art of our time is the lifeblood of a museum and it has now become practically impossible for many museums in the UK to do so without philanthropic support,” she says.
Ahead of the curve, the Contemporary Art Society has been donating works to regional museums for several decades. Notable gifts include Francis Bacon’s Figure Study II (1945-46), which was donated to the Kirklees Museums and Galleries in 1952; Concrete Cabin (1991-92) by Peter Doig, which has hung at the New Walk Museum and Art Gallery in Leicester since 1996; and Lynette Yiadom Boakye’s To Tell Them Where It’s Got To (2013), which was given to Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery in 2013.
The Great Works scheme is the second award launched by the Contemporary Art Society and supported by the Sfumato Foundation. In 2009, the society established a £60,000 annual prize that offered British museums the chance to commission an artist to create a new work for their collection. The final award was given on 23 November to the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. The Great Works scheme replaces this annual award.
