The Tate Gallery and the Yale Center for British art are forging a “special relationship”, with a major loan arrangement. The Tate is hoping to borrow up to twenty pictures for display at the Gallery of British art when its new Millbank exhibition space is inaugurated in March 2001. Director Stephen Deuchar is planning what he calls “The Great British art exhibition”, and he admits that the Yale Center is “our natural sister across the Atlantic and an obvious port of call”. Yale’s British holdings are superior to those of any UK public collection, other than that of the Tate. Funded by Paul Mellon (who died last February), its gallery in New Haven, Connecticut was opened in 1977.
Among loans requested by the Tate and under discussion are a Rubens painted in England (“Peace embracing Plenty”), Canaletto’s “Warwick Castle”, works by Stubbs (such as the set of four “Shooting” scenes, “Zebra” and “Horse frightened by a lion”) and Constable’s “Hadleigh Castle” (to display beside the Tate’s oil sketch). Loans are also being sought for a Blake exhibition which opens at the Tate in November next year.
In return, the Tate would offer important pictures on short-term loan to the Yale Center, which admits that it is relatively weak in twentieth-century works. Among artists who are completely unrepresented by paintings are Sutherland, Freud, Hockney and Riley. The Yale Center also has very little of the St Ives school. “The Tate could ‘arm’ us and help us to demonstrate to an American audience that British art is just as interesting as Italian or French. We have a shared mission with the new Tate Gallery of British Art,” explained director Patrick McCaughey.
The other form of cooperation is likely to be over complete exhibitions. “The art of Bloomsbury” (which opens at the Tate on 4 November) is going to the Huntington Art Gallery (4 March-30 April) and then on to Yale (20 May-3 September 2000). The Yale Center is also talking to the Tate about a major Turner exhibition in the United States, to take place within the next five years.
UK local authority museums:
Tyne & Wear £43 million
Glasgow £31 million
Leeds £29 million
Birmin gham £24 million
Bristol £19 million
Manchester £14 million
Brighton & Hove £11 million
Leicester £9 million
Stoke-on-Trent £6 million
Nottingham £5 million
Southampton £5 million
Hull £4 million
Bradford £2 million
Wolverhampton £1 million
Others (4) £1 million
Total £204 million