VISUAL ARTS: Shopping for Posterity; CULTURE in Association with the Art Lounge the Contemporary Art Society's Special Collections Fund Helped Public Collections in the West Midlands to Buy Work by Living Artists. Terry Grimley Looks at Its Impact

Byline: Terry Grimley

There is nothing new about local authority museums buying contemporary art: in a way, that's how they all started.

To take just one example, Stanhope Forbes's painting The Village Philharmonic, a major example of the then innovative Newlyn School of the late 1880s, was bought by Birmingham Museum & Art Gallery within a year of it being painted.

But things changed in the 20th century, when the gap between developments in modern art and the public began to widen and museums were vulnerable to accusations of wasting public money.

In 1964 John Hewitt, first director of the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, was pilloried in the local press for attempting to buy a painting by Ben Nicholson. This seems to have triggered a failure of political nerve which may help to explain why today Coventry has one of the poorest public art collections, for a city of its size, in the country.

A decade later Wolverhampton Art Gallery found itself under similar attack for buying - for what now seems a derisory sum - a …

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Publication information: Article title: VISUAL ARTS: Shopping for Posterity; CULTURE in Association with the Art Lounge the Contemporary Art Society's Special Collections Fund Helped Public Collections in the West Midlands to Buy Work by Living Artists. Terry Grimley Looks at Its Impact. Contributors: Not available. Newspaper title: The Birmingham Post (England). Publication date: December 19, 2006. Page number: 11. © 2009 Birmingham Post & Mail Ltd. COPYRIGHT 2006 Gale Group.

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