Busted: Blair gives public treasure to White House
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/...html?gusrc=rss
Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent
Sunday August 28, 2005
A bronze bust of Winston Churchill, owned by the British Government Art Collection and paid for by the taxpayer, is at the centre of a row after it was loaned by Tony Blair to George W Bush.
The renowned Jacob Epstein sculpture that sits in President Bush's Oval Office was loaned to the White House four years ago, on orders from Blair's office, in an unprecedented act outside the strict remit of the collection.
The claim, to be made in a BBC radio documentary on Thursday and supported this weekend by art specialists, forms part of new scrutiny of the GAC and its backroom handling of tens of millions of pounds worth of British art each year.
'This is a little-known government arm that still works in surprising secrecy,' said Mark Whitaker, the reporter and presenter of the Radio 4 investigation. 'But it was clear the GAC are rather embarrassed by the loan to Bush. They could only tell me they didn't think it had happened before.'
The government's huge hidden collection is held inside an anonymous underground storehouse in Soho and contains around 12,000 works of art (five times more than the National Gallery owns).
The curators are given £200,000 a year to buy new pieces and the art is available for government ministers to request for display in their private offices. It is also sent out all over the globe to foreign embassies and consulates.
Intended as a showcase for British cultural life, the work has always stayed inside property owned by Britain. Until, that is, March 2001, when Blair's officials requested the President of the US should be loaned a bust of the British war-time premier.
George Bush, a fan of Churchill, who once described him as 'the best example of how individuals can shape history', now has sole use of the Epstein bust, despite the fact this sort of political or diplomatic presentation of GAC art is not sanctioned by founding principles drawn up in 1898.
'This is usually a well-run collection, but they should stick to their rules,' said Gill Hedley of the Contemporary Art Society this weekend.
The contentious bust was made by Epstein in 1946 following six short sittings with Churchill. Epstein, a Jewish American who moved to London and later took up British citizenship, is best known for Llandaff Cathedral's aluminium 'Christ In Majesty', as well as his nudes at the British Medical Association's London headquarters.
The GAC bought the Churchill sculpture for a reported fraction of its worth under its former director, Wendy Baron.
Ministers and embassies who request works of art must follow a stringently enforced and confidential pecking order, although in the past some ministers have tried to subvert the system.
Baron, who left the GAC in 1997, has admitted that the disgraced former Conservative MP, Neil Hamilton, once went over her head to David Mellor, at the Department of National Heritage, to secure a painting he had been told was for the British embassy in Beijing. He was unsuccessful.
The GAC has recently commissioned 26-year-old artist Emma Kay to create a work for the new Home Office building. Each year she will ask 46 members of the public to engrave their idea of what it means to be a British citizen on the walls.
The collection includes 2,300 paintings and watercolours and 8,000 historical and modern prints, with sculptures by artists such as Barbara Hepworth, and 18 oil paintings by Walter Sickert. Along with a Hogarth and a Gainsborough, the GAC also owns an early Lucian Freud and an obscure work by Constable.
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