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In his Chief article in The Artwork Newspaper’s June 2023 version, Nationwide Portrait Gallery ought to change into a dispersed museum, the curator Simon Jenkins states: “The Tate sits atop an iceberg of some 60,000 work, which it stashes in its basement like a curatorial Dr No.” Leaving apart the truth that the Tate assortment is just not stashed in any basement, however in an enormous environmentally managed retailer in Bermondsey, Sir Simon clearly doesn’t perceive its nature.
The newest figures I’ve handy date from 2002, however the Tate assortment grows comparatively slowly, so they may do for the current goal. They break down as follows:
• Complete variety of works within the assortment: 61,208
• Variety of work, sculptures and different three-dimensional works: 5,835
• Variety of works on paper, that’s, watercolours, drawings, prints and images: 54,833
• Of which, variety of works on paper within the Turner Bequest: 37,463 (of which roughly 5,000 are clean pages in sketchbooks that nonetheless have accession numbers and contribute to the full quantity for the gathering).
On the time I obtained these figures Tate couldn’t present a breakdown between work and three-dimensional works, however a protected wager is that the variety of work within the assortment is round 5,000. So a way off Sir Simon’s 60,000.
Works on paper thus make up about 90% of the Tate assortment by quantity, and few, if any, main museums show works on paper aside from in strictly managed situations for restricted quantities of time.
Sir Simon writes that “a decade in the past an try to relocate a number of the Tate’s spectacular retailer of Pre-Raphaelites to related Nationwide Belief properties obtained nowhere”. This grievance, collectively along with his common grievance in regards to the Nationwide Museums in London sitting on their collections, beforehand appeared in an article by Sir Simon within the Guardian on 17 August 2018 the place he wrote that he “pleaded with the Tate to donate some unseen Pre-Raphaelites to Nationwide Belief homes of the identical interval and drew a whole clean”.
After all he would have, since what he was suggesting was deaccessioning—extremely circumscribed for the Nationwide Museums underneath the provisions of the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act, which don’t embrace donation to the Nationwide Belief.
In response to that article the Guardian (23 August 2018) revealed a half web page of letters, led by one from Richard Lambert, then chair of the British Museum, difficult his views and correcting a few of his errors of truth. One letter, from me, particularly handled the Tate challenge.
It’s each distressing and miserable to search out all this recycled in a number one article in The Artwork Newspaper.
• Simon Casimir Wilson OBE, retired Tate curator
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