Release the art! (ctd.)
April 4 2016
Picture: Tate
Regular readers will know that one of AHN's hobby horses is the question of art locked away in storage (see earlier AHN here and here, and also my piece in the FT here). In the UK, about 80% of our public collection of oil paintings is in storage at any one time. For some of our major museums, such as Tate in London, an extraordinary amount of great masterpieces lie languishing in storage, unseen for years. We're not just talking about lesser works, but pictures by major names such as Van Dyck, Constable and Gainsborough.
So hurrah then for the Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, who is determined to do something about it. Here's a snippet in the Mail on Sunday:
An unseen treasure trove of the nation’s most valuable paintings could soon be on display in local art galleries and community centres across the country if radical new plans proposed by Culture Minister Ed Vaizey get the green light from Downing Street and the Treasury.
Vaizey is said to have been stunned by the size of the collections languishing in the storage vaults of London’s major galleries – ‘like something from Raiders Of The Lost Ark’ he reportedly told friends – and is lobbying for funding to put them on display in the regions.
The problem of art in storage is a feature of the government's new 'White Paper' on culture, the first for 50 years, and which you can download here. It features many sensible things.
