[CPProt.net] UK: How an £8m gamble on stolen Turners netted Tate £17m - to spruce up its Turners

[Ellie Bruggeman]

How an £8m gamble on stolen Turners netted Tate £17m - to spruce up its 
Turners

The Tate is to invest £10m in new art and finish cataloguing its entire 
works of J M W Turner thanks to a calculated insurance gamble which 
netted it £17m.

The money is one of the biggest financial windfalls in years for the 
gallery and will also enable it to research specialist areas such as 
British Romantic paintings and to open its store in Southwark, London, 
to the public.

The funds are the remains of an insurance claim which followed the theft 
of two of its paintings by Turner from an exhibition in Germany in 1994. 
Insurers paid out £24m for /Shade and Darkness - the Evening of the 
Deluge / and /Light and Colour - the Morning after the Deluge/ but would 
have owned them if they were ever recovered.

The Tate gambled that the paintings would turn up eventually, paid the 
insurers an £8m fee to buy back the title to the works and was rewarded 
when one was retrieved in 2001 and the other the following year. Having 
spent £3.5m on the hunt and having collected considerable interest on 
the original sum, it was left with £17m.

It took legal advice on whether it could spend the cash on the gallery 
as a whole or whether, as the Turners were part of the artist's bequest 
to the nation when he died in 1851, the cash had to go towards the 
bequest. After consultations which went to the Attorney General, the 
trustees have been told they are free to use the funds for the benefit 
of the entire collection.

About £1m will be spent on cataloguing the Turner Bequest, which 
consists of nearly 300 oil paintings and around 30,000 sketches and 
watercolours. This enormously important act of scholarship began nearly 
100 years ago, but with new researchers could be completed within five 
years.

A further £10m will go into the endowment fund which the Tate 
established last year. The aim is to raise £100m to enable the gallery 
to buy new works as its own funds are severely restricted and it has no 
dedicated cash for purchases.

Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of Tate, said: "It's a wonderful 
opportunity to do something really good. It's a tremendous sum of money 
and the largest sum we've had come in for some time.

"It was a great loss when the Turners were stolen in 1994 and it is a 
great relief for us to now have both the paintings returned and a sum of 
money which will enhance our understanding of Turner, create 
opportunities to acquire works for the Collection and help us fulfil our 
responsibility for caring for it."

Asked whether the insurance deal had been a gamble, Sir Nicholas called 
it "judgement". "I believed the paintings were still undamaged or at 
least in existence and that eventually works like this do emerge. I 
didn't know whether it would be five, 10 or 15 years, but I thought it 
was worth buying the title."

David Blayney Brown, one of Tate's Turner experts, said: "This funding 
will allow us to fulfil the ambition of every Turner scholar which is to 
see the works on paper of Britain's greatest landscape painter properly 
catalogued and contextualised with the aid of modern scholarship and the 
knowledge gained from nearly 100 years since A J Finberg first set out 
on this task."

To put the windfall in context, the Tate has spent £28m on buying works 
of art in the past two years of which £17m was given by individuals and 
the remainder raised by Tate itself with the help of lottery bodies and 
the National Art Collections Fund charity.

Announcing the establishment of an endowment fund for future purchases 
last year, Paul Myners, the chairman of the Tate trustees, said it had 
spent £2m of its own money on new works at a peak in 1984, down to 
around £750,000 two decades later, while inflation in the art market had 
soared.

He said the Tate galleries would slowly lose their status among the 
world's leading galleries if they failed to fill gaps in their 
collections and did not continue buying contemporary art.

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/story.jsp?story=623099