That's Full of Holes

Talking of money, it’s easy enough to be outraged by a report that ‘Rishi Sunak bought a £1.5M sculpture for his garden with public money’ which is what friends of mine were sharing the other day. As this relates to the museum/art world I was especially interested, and thought it would be very unlikely that any such purchase for the PM’s own garden would get through. What seems to have happened is that someone from The Sun saw Henry Moore’s Model for Seated Woman being carried into the front door of 10 Downing Street a few days ago. It’s quite impressive that a tabloid journalist might recognise a sculpture by Henry Moore, but if it’s for the Downing Street garden rather than Mr Sunak’s own personal home it will be the responsibility of the Government Art Collection, an organisation most people know nothing about: I knew it existed but had given it no special thought. The Moore was, as reported, definitely sold at Christie’s in October and the quoted price is roughly what it was expected to sell for. But did the GAC buy it?

The GAC is run by an advisory board consisting of leading art gallery directors who sit on it ex officio, curators and academics, and is chaired at the moment by Sir David Verey, a banker by trade with a long record of involvement in the arts world. It’s the curatorial staff of the GAC who draw up lists of items for acquisition, which the board then approve. The board members aren’t paid and no politicians sit on it, so there’s no obvious political influence on what the GAC does.

It's slightly unsatisfactory that up-to-date information on the GAC’s budget isn’t easily available, as the latest report on its website is only from 2018-19. But then, and in the year before (I have looked back no further than that) it spent some hundreds of thousands of pounds on a wide variety of artworks, the great majority by contemporary, living artists; the cheapest cost a couple of hundred pounds, the most expensive about £70K, and the average in the few thousands. Model for Seated Woman would have cost about four times the GAC’s usual annual spend on acquisitions, and it would be exceedingly unusual for it to buy a piece by one of the world’s most acclaimed and expensive (and dead) artists, rather than the relatively humble purchases it seems usually to make. It already owns a Henry Moore, albeit not a very spectacular one, which sits in the garden of the British Ambassador in Seoul and which it bought in 1965; and it therefore seems very unlikely that it’s added another, far pricier example, of its own choice or at the insistence of someone in Downing Street, even maybe the Prime Minister.

The official line is that the sculpture was not bought by the GAC, but has appeared in the no.10 garden as a result of ‘a longstanding charitable arrangement’. If accurate, that would suggest that the actual purchaser was a private individual who has then loaned the figure to the GAC for display as part of some tax scheme or something like that, meaning that neither public money nor political influence was involved. But of course Christie’s doesn’t reveal who the buyer was, and if the loan was made to set against tax, no official body can comment on it either: it could be Mr Sunak himself, though it's unlikely. That outrage-provoking headline clearly isn't true, but it hides a far more complex process which mingles public and private interest that few people pay any attention to.