MARCH/APRIL, 2025
The British Council is in such serious financial jeopardy it’s been forced to consider selling some of the 8,800-piece art collection it began accumulating in 1938. They borrowed £250 million from the Government during the pandemic and, like thousands of other organisations who accepted the Government’s offer of instant loans, can’t now pay it back – and the debt is accumulating interest at £14 million a year. The Council offered unsuccessfully the whole collection, which they valued at £200 million (the actual figure in their latest published accounts is £188 million), to the Government in exchange for cancelling the debt.
A fifth of the collection, they say, is on loan at any one time to their foreign offices in over a hundred countries. It is also calculated that well over half the works (those valued at £117 million) are not allowed to be sold anyway because of conditions placed on certain acquisitions especially gifts. Since 2020 they have not added to their collection.
There is a great deal of minor work by minor artists in the BC collection which will never be shown anywhere and probably can’t be sold, and possibly not even given away (these contingencies also apply to the Arts Council’s flabby holdings). A few of the 1,500 artists featured are represented by over a dozen works each so there is definitely scope for weeding. Unfortunately, if the BC must sell pieces, it will have to be the finest work because the bulk will raise almost nothing – and even if the cream is sold it won’t come close to realising £250 million.
If they have to resort to flogging stuff it would be sensible to start with items duplicated between collections such as the BC, the Arts Council (8,000 works) and the Government Art Collection (14,000 pieces), pointless overlaps cited many times previously in these pages. It is worth reminding ourselves that these huge hoards are all national assets which most of the public who paid for them never see and to which they have little or no access.
The amalgamation of the Arts Council, British Council and Government Art collections has always seemed like sound financial sense, not least for the savings in storage alone: The Jackdaw first made this point over 20 years ago. Indeed, later this year the Arts Council and British Council collections will both be housed together for the first time in a former Ikea store in Coventry. What better time than the present, therefore, to combine these troves with their many overlaps as well as quantities of trivia and dead wood – those works, fashionable for 15 seconds, which arguably should never have been acquired in the first place.
As one example of these duplications, the Tate, the Government Art Collection and the British Council all have the same well-known screenprint called Release: Swingeing London by Richard Hamilton, originally issued in 1972 in an edition of 150 and 15 artist’s proofs. The Tate even has the 19 individual proof stages of this print. Surely one of the finished item is sufficient for the national collection. And if, say, the Government Art Collection needed to borrow it to educate the North Koreans – having first sold their own – the Tate could lend it to them because it isn’t on display anyway. An impression was sold last September by Sotheby’s for £22,500. Pallant House also has this work while the Arts Council also has a sketch of it, which would likely fetch more than the print.
As is well known, Release is based on a 1967 press photograph (author never cited) taken of Mick Jagger and art dealer Robert Fraser handcuffed in a police van as they arrived at court in Chichester following arrest for possession at Keith Richards’ Sussex pad. Jagger got three months and Richards a year, both sentences quashed on appeal. Poor old Fraser, an old Etonian (albeit expelled), was forced to serve his six months for possessing heroin. In this instance, perhaps it was a first, the Beaks made an example of a toff whilst freeing the oiks; usually it’s the other way round. What can a poor boy do ’cept join a rock ’n roll band?
Other Richard Hamilton duplicates between collections include In Horne’s House, a 1981 etching (ed. 120), which is in the Government Art Collection and the Tate as well as three impressions and a preparatory drawing in the British Museum; and also the speckled relief print, Guggenheim, of which the British Council have three versions, the Tate two and the Arts Council one.
Apart from a Simon Brett illustration in a poetry book in the Arts Council‘s collection, there is nothing in the Tate, British Council, Arts Council or Government Art collections by either Brett, Eric Rimmington or Dick French, all highly skilled and original artists remembered in this issue. If you consult online recent acquisitions of the Tate, the Arts Council and the Government Art Collection you’ll quickly realise the reason for their being ignored.