It is a tale of two civic art collections, one in the north, one in the south, both containing well over a thousand paintings and sculptures. But while Hertfordshire county council has decided to auction or give away most of its hoard later this month, Rochdale in Greater Manchester is attempting to put every single work it owns on display.
On 21 March, an auction house in Cambridge will sell some of the gems from the Hertfordshire collection, which includes a pastel work by the Scottish artist Joan Eardley that has an estimated value of £12,000–£18,000.
The council insists it is less about saving money than space. “It is the sensible thing to do,” said Terry Douris, a Conservative cabinet member for education, libraries and localism. “With 60% of the art collection languishing in storage and not available to the public, the county council believes that the approach it is taking to the art collection balances its fiduciary duty to its council taxpayers to use the full resources available to it to best advantage, while aiming to achieve much improved access and display of the retained collection for the public.”
Meanwhile in Rochdale, a show opens on Saturday that attempts to cram the council’s 1,600-strong fine art collection into the Touchstones gallery. The brainchild of the artist Harry Meadley – But What If We Tried? – was prompted by questions from members of the public disappointed that most of Rochdale’s art collection – as with civic collections around the UK – was never on show.
It has proved a logistical conundrum for the gallery as it attempts to use every inch of wall space. The result is a riot of styles and genres, displayed side-by-side in order of acquisition date. It is a discombobulating experience for the art lover used to exhibitions organised by theme or genre. Within a few metres viewers are expected to process A Special Pleader, a sentimental Victorian oil painting of a sulky girl and a dog by Charles Barber, which was reproduced for many Rochdale living rooms in the 1980s, and then a black and white homoerotic portrait of two wrestlers, a bit of pop art or a surrealist landscape.
One minute viewers are enjoying a caricature of a Winston Churchill lookalike by the “Lancashire Hogarth” John Collier (who went by the pseudonym Tim Bobbin), before being presented with a steel chastity belt hanging from the ceiling by Anthea Hamilton, who was shortlisted for the 2016 Turner prize. The most valuable piece in the collection is Woman’s Head with Yellow Background (circa 1963) by Lucian Freud, acquired with the help of various local bequests in 1983.
Mark Doyle, Touchstones’s creator, happily admits many of the works on display are not his cup of tea. “But it isn’t about what I like, or what Harry likes. It’s just about what fits on the walls,” he said. Hanging the show required a change in mentality: “It was hard to get our heads around. Usually the artist decides where each work needs to go. We are fighting our normal instincts.”
Doyle hopes the show will spark a debate about the worth of civic art at a time when council budgets are under increasing pressure. It takes a certain amount of courage for a council to resist the temptation to flog its collections as austerity bites, he thinks: “When you are getting lots of complaints from residents about bins not being collected it might feel like having a collection and spending money on it isn’t necessarily a priority. Times are tough. Rochdale has a lot of economic deprivation.”
Over the past nine years, Rochdale’s Labour-controlled council has cut £178.1m from its planned budget. But it has resisted the temptation to sell its art and continues to build its collection with the help of external funding, such as the Art Fund New Collecting Award, which helped buy Hamilton’s 4th Guimard Chastity Belt earlier this year.
Neighbouring Bury council received a barrage of criticism in 2006 when it sold a Lowry for £1.4m to plug a £10m budget shortfall. It was accused of cultural vandalism by the Museum Association. Eight years later, it came up for sale again at Sotheby’s and had risen in value to almost £2m.
Under the Museums Association’s ethics code, public institutions are warned not to consider their art collections as “financially negotiable assets”. They are not allowed to dispose of works for financial reasons, “except where it will significantly improve the long-term public benefit derived from the remaining collection”.
Tory-run Hertfordshire has got away with its great sell-off by saying its collection, which began as a postwar initiative to obtain artworks for schools to borrow from the council, had fallen out of favour. It had no gallery to display the work and so most of the 1,496 works gathered dust in storage. It will sell 150 at the auction, followed by a further 279 later in the year. The rest are being offered for free to schools, museums and interested organisations, with 27 pieces being kept by the council.
The Art Fund, a national charity, said it broadly supported Hertfordshire but wanted clarity on how the council was going to spend the £200,000-£300,000 it hoped to raise at auction: “In this case we are concerned with the council’s suggestion that only a proportion of the monies raised will be invested into the remaining collection,” said a spokeswoman.
She applauded the Rochdale initiative: “We welcome any news of a project or exhibition with the ambition to open up a public collection and to provide access to as wide of an audience as possible.”
The new show will certainly do that, even if a lack of wall space thwarted Rochdale’s ambitions. Of the 1,600 works in the collection, there was room for about 360. But at least it tried.