Art Fund (formerly the National Art Collections Fund) is an independent membership-based British charity, which raises funds to aid the acquisition of artworks for the nation. It gives grants and acts as a channel for many gifts and bequests, as well as lobbying on behalf of museums and galleries and their users. It relies on members' subscriptions and public donations for funds and does not receive funding from the government or the National Lottery.
This section needs expansionwith: history between 1906 and 2005. You can help by adding to it. (September 2023)
The National Art Collections Fund assisted with the purchase of Velázquez's Rokeby Venus in 1906.
The original idea for an arts charity can be traced to a lecture given by John Ruskin in 1857 when he called for the establishment of a "great society" to save works of art for public collections and "watch over" them.
At the start of the 20th century owners of private art collections, under financial pressure, began to auction off many great works of art, often to wealthy citizens of other countries. Artist and critic D. S. MacColl published his concerns and suggested setting up a public organisation to fundraise.[4] The National Art Collections Fund was founded in 1903 in order to help museums and galleries acquire works of art. The founders, who included MacColl, Christiana Herringham, Roger Fry and Robin Benson,[5] were prompted by what they saw as the inadequacy of government funding of museums. Members paid a guinea per year, and donations were welcomed. Herringham wrote to Lord Balcarres, the first chairman, "If we are to influence public opinion we ought only to buy for the nation work that is of its kind first-class… It should be worthy of a prominent place and we should be proud to have presented to the Nation work of intrinsically fine quality." An early campaign by the Fund was to acquire Velázquez's Rokeby Venus.[4]
Art critic Frank Rutter said it made him "boil with rage" that the Fund had spent thousands of pounds on Old Master paintings, some of which he considered of dubious merit or condition, but "would not contribute one half penny" to his appeal in 1905 to buy the first Impressionist painting for the National Gallery, although it welcomed the prestige of presenting the painting, Eugène Boudin's The Entrance to Trouville Harbour, the following year.[6] He said "the Fund's inertia and snobbish ineptitude are entirely characteristic of the art-officialdom in England."[6]
In 2005 the Fund was caught up in the controversy surrounding the purchase by the Tate gallery of The Upper Room by Chris Ofili.[7]
In the summer of 2006 the organisation's name was changed from National Art Collections Fund to The Art Fund.[8] The operational name was subsequently simplified to Art Fund (without a definite article).
Also in 2006, the Fund was caught out when it was discovered that the Amarna Princess, purportedly an ancient Egyptian sculpture, was actually a forgery by Shaun Greenhalgh.
Fundraising campaigns
In addition to using its own funds to help museums and galleries acquire art, Art Fund organises national fundraising campaigns to secure significant works of art that are in danger of being lost from public view.
In 2009 Art Fund led a fundraising campaign to save the Staffordshire Hoard, a collection of over 3,500 gold and silver artefacts discovered in Staffordshire. Over £900,000 was raised through public donations, and the campaign received substantial funds from trusts and foundations. As a result of the campaign, the £3.3 million treasure was acquired for Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum & Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent.
In 2010 The Procession to Calvary by Pieter Brueghel the Younger, which had been hung in Wakefield's Nostell Priory for over 200 years, came under risk of being sold on the open market. Art Fund worked with the National Trust to raise the £2.7 million required to purchase the painting for the National Trust's art collection.
In 2013 King and McGaw partnered with Art Everywhere, a charitable project putting on the world's largest art exhibition. This filled 22,000 billboards across the UK with art prints with all the profits going to Art Fund.[9] The following year the campaign was expanded to 30,000 billboards displaying 25 artworks including the Study of Cirrus Clouds by John Constable, The Circle of Lustful by William Blake and A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling by Hans Holbein the Younger.[10]
Art Fund sponsors the Museum of the Year award (known as the Gulbenkian Prize from 2003 to 2007 and the Art Fund Prize from 2008 to 2012). This is a £100,000 prize awarded annually to the museum or gallery that had the most imaginative, innovative or popular project during the previous year.[11] The winners of the prize since its association with Art Fund have been:
In 2008 Art Fund helped Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland acquire ARTIST ROOMS, a collection of postwar and contemporary art. Since then Art Fund has supported a tour of the collection around the UK, as well as providing additional funds to help museum display the works. By the beginning of 2011 ARTIST ROOMS tours had been seen by approximately 12 million people across Britain.
Tate is an institution that houses, in a network of four art galleries, the United Kingdom's national collection of British art, and international modern and contemporary art. It is not a government institution, but its main sponsor is the UK Department for Culture, Media and Sport.
Christopher Ofili, is a British painter who is best known for his paintings incorporating elephant dung. He was Turner Prize-winner and one of the Young British Artists. Since 2005, Ofili has been living and working in Trinidad and Tobago, where he currently resides in the city of Port of Spain. He also has lived and worked in London and Brooklyn.
Tate St Ives is an art gallery in St Ives, Cornwall, England, exhibiting work by modern British artists with links to the St Ives area. The Tate also took over management of another museum in the town, the Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden, in 1980.
The Saatchi Gallery is a London gallery for contemporary art and an independent charity opened by Charles Saatchi in 1985. Exhibitions which drew upon the collection of Charles Saatchi, starting with US artists and minimalism, moving to the Damien Hirst-led Young British Artists, followed by shows purely of painting, led to Saatchi Gallery becoming a recognised authority in contemporary art globally. It has occupied different premises, first in North London, then the South Bank by the River Thames, and finally in Chelsea, Duke of York's HQ, its current location. In 2019 Saatchi Gallery became a registered charity and began a new chapter in its history. Recent exhibitions include the major solo exhibition of the artist JR, JR: Chronicles, and London Grads Now in September 2019 lending the gallery spaces to graduates from leading fine art schools who experienced the cancellation of physical degree shows due to the pandemic.
The Whitworth is an art gallery in Manchester, England, containing over 60,000 items in its collection. The gallery is located in Whitworth Park and is part of the University of Manchester.
Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota,, is an English art historian and curator, who served as the Director of the Tate from 1988 to 2017. He is currently Chair of Arts Council England, a role which he has held since February 2017.
Charles Thomson is an English artist, poet and photographer. In the early 1980s he was a member of The Medway Poets. In 1999 he named and co-founded the Stuckists art movement with Billy Childish. He has curated Stuckist shows, organised demonstrations against the Turner Prize, run an art gallery, stood for parliament and reported Charles Saatchi to the OFT. He is frequently quoted in the media as an opponent of conceptual art. He was briefly married to artist Stella Vine.
The Stuckists Punk Victorian was the first national gallery exhibition of Stuckist art. It was held at the Walker Art Gallery and Lady Lever Art Gallery in Liverpool from 18 September 2004 to 20 February 2005 and was part of the 2004 Liverpool Biennial.
John Bourne is a British artist and painter, living and working in Wales, and a member of the Stuckists art movement. He founded the Wrexham Stuckists group in 2001 and has been exhibited in the group's shows since then, including The Stuckists Punk Victorian. He has also taken part in Stuckist demonstrations against the Turner Prize. The subject matter for his paintings, which are done in a simplified style, comes from his memories.
The Upper Room is an installation of 13 paintings of rhesus macaque monkeys by English artist Chris Ofili in a specially-designed room. It was bought by the Tate gallery in 2005 from the Victoria Miro Gallery and was the cause of a media furore after a campaign initiated by the Stuckist art group as Ofili was on the board of Tate trustees at the time of the purchase. In 2006 the Charity Commission censured the Tate for the purchase, but did not revoke it.
The Museum of the Year Award, formerly known as the Gulbenkian Prize and the Art Fund Prize, is an annual prize awarded to a museum or gallery in the United Kingdom for a "track record of imagination, innovation and excellence". The award of £100,000 is Britain's biggest single art prize, and the largest single museum arts prize in the world. The prize and is presented to a museum or gallery, large or small, anywhere in the UK, whose entry, in the opinion of the judges, best demonstrates a track record of imagination, innovation and excellence through work mainly undertaken during the previous calendar year.
Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision is one of the paintings that was made as a part of the Stuckism art movement, and is recognized as a "signature piece" for the movement, It was painted by the Stuckism co-founder Charles Thomson in 2000, and has been exhibited in a number of shows since, as well as being featured on placards during Stuckist demonstrations against the Turner Prize.
The Holy Virgin Mary is a mixed media painting created by Chris Ofili in 1996 that utilizes elephant dung and pornographic images. It was one of the works included in the Sensation exhibition in London, Berlin and New York in 1997–2000. The subject of the work, and its execution, caused considerable controversy in New York, with Rudolph Giuliani – then Mayor of New York City – describing Ofili's work as "sick". In 1998, Ofili was the first black artist to be awarded the Turner Prize. The painting was sold for £2.9 million in June 2015, and was gifted to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 2018.
The Government Art Collection (GAC) is the collection of artworks owned by the UK government and administered by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). The GAC's artworks are used to decorate major government buildings in the UK and around the world, and to promote British art, culture and history. The GAC now holds over 14,000 works of art in a variety of media, including around 2,500 oil paintings, but also sculpture, prints, drawings, photographs, textiles and video works, mainly created by British artists or artist with a strong connection to the UK, from the sixteenth century to the present day. Works are displayed in several hundred locations, including Downing Street, ministerial offices and reception areas in Whitehall, regional government offices in the UK, and diplomatic posts outside the UK.
Christiana Jane Herringham, Lady Herringham was a British artist, copyist, and art patron. She is noted for her part in establishing the National Art Collections Fund in 1903 to help preserve Britain's artistic heritage. In 1910 Walter Sickert wrote of her as "the most useful and authoritative critic living".
The Hepworth Wakefield is an art museum in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, England, which opened on 21 May 2011. The gallery is situated on the south side of the River Calder and takes its name from artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth who was born and educated in the city. It is the successor of the municipal art collection, founded in 1923 as Wakefield Art Gallery, which spans the Old Masters to the twentieth century.
No Woman No Cry is a 1998 painting created by Chris Ofili in 1998. It was one of the works included in the exhibition which won him the Turner Prize that year. The Financial Times has described it as "his masterpiece".
The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) is an independent charity that champions the collecting of outstanding contemporary art and craft for UK museum collections. Since its founding in 1910 the organisation has donated over 10,000 works to museums across the UK. From the 1930s the Society also donated works to Commonwealth museums, but since 1989 the focus has remained exclusively on UK institutions.
Paintings in Hospitals is an arts in health charity in the United Kingdom. Founded in 1959, the charity's services include the provision of artwork loans, art projects and art workshops to health and social care organisations. The charity's activities are based on clinical evidence demonstrating health and wellbeing benefits of the arts to patients and care staff.
Piano Nobile is a commercial art gallery in London, England, specialising in twentieth-century British art. It was established by Dr Robert Travers at premises in Richmond in 1985. In 2000, the gallery moved to its current address at 129 Portland Road, London. In 2019, an additional gallery space was acquired at 96 Portland Road. Between 2008 and 2019, the gallery also had an exhibition space at Kings Place in King’s Cross.
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