Three-Year Research Grant Programme Continues

Project Manager: Kelmscott and Morris: Past, Present and Future

In an interview for The Times (subscription), Ed Vaizey (left, centre) told Richard Morrison that one of his proudest achievements as a long-serving Arts Minister, was to separate what is now Historic England and English Heritage – the research and statutory side, and the public and commercial operations respectively, of what had been known since 1984 as just English Heritage.
 
‘I realised English Heritage had been badly treated in terms of funding by this government and the last one,’ said Vaizey, who was removed from his post by the new Prime Minister, Theresa May. ‘We treated them the same as we did the Arts Council – forgetting that, while the Arts Council was treated well by the last Labour government, English Heritage’s funding had been cut. I think it will now be a success. Given what seems to be The Times’s current hostility towards the National Trust,’ he added, referring to continuing coverage of a row about a land purchase in the Lake District, ‘I hope you will welcome what is now a viable alternative.'
 
Vaizey addressed the House of Commons on 13 September on the subject of arts funding (having been reminded by the Chair that he had to begin by moving the motion), which he framed as a substitute resignation speech. He congratulated arts and heritage organisations for their success in fundraising, but emphasised that Government money, though ‘only a small proportion of their overall funding’, ‘is vital’, providing core funding and attracting additional money. ‘A grant from the Government, Arts Council England or the Heritage Lottery Fund is a great vote of confidence that ends up acting as a catalyst for attracting private sponsorship and commercial funding.’ A theatre tax break has been successful, an orchestra tax break is just getting going, and an exhibitions tax break is on the way.
 
Vaizey thinks the heritage industry ‘has perhaps been treated rather worse [than the arts], because it suffered cuts under the last Labour Government and we did not protect it additionally when we came into office.’ What is now Historic England suffers from a significantly reduced grant, ‘curtailing its ability to carry out vital heritage regulation’. The new model, however, with English Heritage as a separate charity, ‘along with a very generous capital endowment, will make a big difference.’ He paid tribute to Simon Thurley FSA, former English Heritage Chief Executive, and the current Chairman, Laurie Magnus. ‘Nevertheless,’ he added, ‘heritage funding is not as high as it could be.’
 
‘A new Government,’ he concluded, ‘with fresh Ministers and renewed energy, have a chance to put arts and heritage funding on a secure and core footing… A small and modest increase would not only make a significant difference to the arts and heritage; perhaps more importantly, it would stand.. as an extraordinary vote of confidence in some of the greatest organisations we will find anywhere in the world.’
 
His full speech and the debate which followed, which also covered museums, local authority funding, schools and Scottish arts funding, can be read online on Hansard. Matthew Hancock, Vaizey’s successor, said he believes ‘strongly and passionately in the value of the arts,’ with public funding ‘a cornerstone of a mixed [arts] economy’. 

Photo shows Vaizey with Jonathan Goldstein (Cain Hoy) and Heather Knight (Museum of London Archaeology) at an excavation on the site of the Curtain Theatre, London, in April (MOLA)

The government runs a scheme to encourage significant heritage assets in private hands – buildings, land, works of art and so on – to be preserved and remain where they are. In some cases this undoubtedly pre-empts appeals to the nation to ‘save’ portable works, held under a temporary export ban, from leaving the country. Advocates of the scheme argue that it helps to preserve national heritage managed by private owners in a sort of parallel strand to the National Trust, a public charity. Critics, and they are a growing band, say it gives tax breaks to rich people for questionable public gain.
 
The Conditional Exemption Tax Incentive scheme, as it is known, is run by HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC). To be eligible, assets need to be of outstanding natural beauty, or scientific, historic or artistic interest. New owners can win substantial discounts on inheritance tax if they look after such assets, allow the public to see them, and keep them in the UK.
 
HMRC runs a handy website where we can find out what we can see. Near where I live, for example, I am told that Longleat House in Wiltshire, a grand historic collection in a major stately home, is open to the public for at least 100 days a year, and that ‘tours of the private apartments’ are available on 10 specific days at 2pm. Dorney Court, a Tudor manor house in Berkshire, has agreed to a long list of commitments that range from undertaking a five-yearly condition survey to allowing the public in for 28 days a year. One of many conditions Longleat has to fulfil is making available ‘Chattels … for loan to appropriate public collections for special exhibitions’.
 
This can be presented as a form of state aid for the preservation of, and granting of public access to, important national heritage that has burdensome costs and responsibilities. Few Fellows, I surmise, would be particularly uncomfortable about that (Historic England has a helpful web page introducing all the heritage assets tax wheezes). And, one assumes, it is in that guise that Parliament approved it. However it can also be painted as state subsidy for the wealthy, who get to live in their expensive houses and enjoy their art and views, under beneficial financial arrangements that would never be offered to the great majority of taxpayers.
 
On 4 September The Sunday Times (subscription) featured Lord Howe, Defence Minister and Deputy Leader of the House of Lords. In ‘a confidential deal with the taxman’, reported the paper, Howe avoided paying some inheritance tax otherwise then due (the amount is not specified) on a £30 million estate at Penn in Buckinghamshire. ‘The only information publicly available’, says the paper, ‘is a 50-word summary on the HMRC website that states “reasonable steps” will be taken for the maintenance of the property” and to secure “reasonable access” to the estate’ – which The Sunday Times establishes currently to mean on two days a year. Under a separate agreement, Howe apparently also received tax relief on works of art and artefacts at the house. Chris Bryant MP said he thinks ‘everything should be out in the open’.
 
The Guardian ran a related story in 2013, addressing specifically works of art. ‘More than 115,000 works’, it reported, are listed on ‘a rarely publicised [HMRC] database’ in return for allowing owners exemption from inheritance tax or capital gains tax in return for public access. But the paper found gaining access was not always easy. Thirty properties were contacted, leading to five appointments to view. One owner asked for a certified copy of a passport, and several were unable to confirm the whereabouts of listed works. Helen Goodman, then Labour Shadow Culture Minister, called the scheme, which The Guardian said cost ‘more than £1bn in lost revenue in the last few decades’, ‘a bit of a racket’. 
 
In this light, the deals at Longleat and Dorney Court might seem less favourable to the taxpayer. In both cases, public access appears to come through buying tickets to what look like business operations. The ten given dates on which we can see private apartments at Longleat are (in September 2016) for 2014.
 
Richard Compton, President of the Historic Houses Association, wrote a letter to The Times in response to the Lord Howe story, asking for more tax breaks, not fewer. The Conditional Exemption Tax scheme, he said, ‘is vital to ensure that the most important heritage assets have a viable long-term future.’ ‘There should be a real commitment to public availability’, wrote Bernadette Bowles, High Wycombe, in another letter, ‘if we are paying for it with a lower tax bill… If a family home is involved, access by appointment and at restricted times is reasonable but twice a year is not.’ Perhaps a useful start would be a handbook, to sit on the shelf with English Heritage’s and the National Trust’s.
 
The photo shows Penn House, built in 1760 and ‘passed down in a direct family line since the Middle Ages’ (Penn House website, omitting to mention that the current Earl Howe’s inheritance was achieved by by-passing four daughters of the previous Earl, who was Howe’s uncle). This year’s Heritage Open Days were on 9 and 10 September, though additional ‘Guided tours of the house by historical and arts-based societies may be booked by prior arrangement.’ A programme of ‘extension and improvement of public rights of way’ began in 1994. 
 

 
On 3 August Matt Hancock, Minister of State for Digital and Culture, placed a temporary export bar on two 17th-century ivory statuettes. To keep them in the UK, the asking price of £1.8 million had to be matched within a month. No further announcement has been made, but this deadline can be extended until 2 December 2016 if a serious intention has been expressed to raise the necessary funds. Alternatively, the statuettes will to the private buyer, the Herzog Anton-Ulrich Museum in Braunschweig.
 
The statuettes were made in 1695 by Balthasar Permoser (1651–1732), says the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA), considered one of the greatest sculptors of the German Baroque era and the Holy Roman Empire. Named Autumn and Winter, they depict the classical gods Bacchus and (a shivering) Vulcan. There is only one other work attributed to Permoser in the UK, the ivory Entombment at the Victoria and Albert Museum. The statuettes were first recorded as belonging to the Duke of Braunschweig, parts of a set of four. It is believed they were confiscated on the order of Napoleon in 1806, and they were later acquired by Edward Viscount Lascelles in Paris and brought to Harewood House in Leeds.
 
Lowell Libson FSA, a member of the RCEWA, said the pieces ‘rank not only as the best and rarest examples of such objects in the UK, but as prime examples of the work of the most important northern sculptor of the period.’
 

 
The Fitzwilliam Museum announced in August that it had raised the funds needed to keep two pietre dure Roman cabinets in the UK, making them the only such pair in a public collection in Britain. The National Heritage Memorial Fund and the Art Fund respectively contributed £700,000 and £200,000 towards the price of £1.2 million. The cabinets had originally been bought by Henry Howard, the 4th Earl of Carlisle, for his collection at Castle Howard, Yorkshire, during his second Grand Tour of Italy (1738–39). An overseas buyer bid £1.2 million for them last year at Sotheby’s London, when they were offered for sale by Castle Howard Trustees, and Ed Vaizey, then Culture Minister, imposed a temporary export bar.
 
The cabinets were made in Rome in the early 17th century, almost certainly for a member of the papal Borghese dynasty, said a press release, and represent the highest quality of furniture-making of the time. Veneered with ebony and rosewood, they are ‘embellished with inlays of expensive, exotic and vividly coloured semi-precious hardstones (such as lapis lazuli and jasper) and with gilt-bronze statuettes and escutcheons.’ Each sits on a Neo-classical mahogany stand.
 
Christopher Rowell FSA, a member of the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, said the cabinets represent ‘the high watermark of the British taste for Italian princely furniture’. Tim Knox FSA, Director of the Fitzwilliam, said, ‘Nowhere in the UK is it possible to see a pair of Roman cabinets of quite this swagger and splendour. They are a fitting acquisition to celebrate the 200th birthday of our founder, Lord Fitzwilliam.’ Sir Mark Jones FSA, Chair, The Pilgrim Trust, which had contributed funds, also welcomed the purchase.

‘The real triumph,’ said The Times in a leader, ‘is the vindication of how Britain protects its treasures… there is no blanket ban on the export of every artefact deemed to be part of the national patrimony. But nor can any oligarch put in a top bid at Sotheby’s and walk off with a priceless painting pawned by an impoverished aristocrat… This not only generates a huge interest in the artefact … but also stops us wasting our money on tat.’
 

In August the Museums Association (MA) reported on the relationship between major UK cultural institutions and the oil and gas company BP. The MA’s Ethics Committee rejected claims by The Art Not Oil Coalition that sponsorship by BP breached the MA’s Code of Ethics for Museums. At the time the British Museum, the Royal Opera House, the National Portrait Gallery and the Royal Shakespeare Company had just announced five-year sponsorship deals; a long arrangement with Tate had not been renewed.
 
Ian Blatchford FSA, Director of the Science Museum, and Ian MacGregor FSA, then Director of the British Museum, were among those singled out by the Art Not Oil Coalition in May. In BP’s Cultural Sponsorship: A Corrupting Influence, a 40-page brochure, the campaign group set out its case that major London galleries and museums had been duped by the company, and had been complicit in deceiving the public, in arrangements that brought BP cheap positive PR in return for small handouts.
 
Art Not Oil (ANO) made much of ‘a member of British Museum staff’, who it claimed told it exclusively that BP had been ‘extremely demanding of the Museum – bullying, I would say.’ ANO used Freedom of information requests to access correspondence with the British Museum, Tate, the National Portrait Gallery and the Science Museum; it published extracts of concern to no one but the prying. ANO cannot be similarly queried, so we may know no more about this anonymous British Museum comment, repeated five times in ANO’s report. It was perhaps the one claim that appeared worth investigating.
 
The campaign had considerable support from prominent public figures. On 2 August more than 200 ‘artists, scientists and campaigners’ wrote to The Times to object to ‘BP-branded culture’, saying that public institutions ‘must play a positive role in taking urgent climate action and defending human rights’. Among the signatories were Richard Sandell, Professor of Museum Studies, University of Leicester; Anthony Roberts, Director, Colchester Arts Centre; and Alison Klevnäs, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University.
 
The next day The Guardian published a letter from ‘almost 100 prominent figures from the arts, science and politics’, congratulating Hartwig Fischer on his appointment as Director of the British Museum. The writers’ subject, however, was BP. ‘Retaining such an unethical sponsor’, they said, ‘would seriously damage the British Museum’s reputation, and place it firmly on the wrong side of history.’ Signatories included the same Sandell and Roberts (the latter apparently managing to sign this one twice), as well as Jane Goodall, Founder the Jane Goodall Institute and UN Messenger of Peace; and Gavin Grindon, Director of the Centre for Curatorial Studies, University of Essex.
 
MacGregor, said The Guardian in a linked article, had commented on BP’s sponsorship, ‘What would you want companies to do with their profits? Do you want them to spend them in a way that benefits the public or not?’
 
‘None of the emails quoted in [ANO’s] report’, concluded the MA’s Ethics Committee, ‘suggest anything other than polite correspondence and friendly working relationships’ between BP and the cultural institutions; ‘The inclusion of such correspondence in the Art Not Oil report’, added the Committee, ‘was considered poorly judged’. There was no evidence that the museums had prevented peaceful protest from taking place – ‘Indeed, the Committee believes that these museums have gone to substantial effort to accommodate these protests.’ It found no signs of sponsor influence over museum programming, nor of special lobbying and policy access.

When Martin Roth announced his resignation as Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, people wondered if he’d been prompted to return to his native Germany by the UK’s vote to leave the EU. On BBC Radio 4’s Front Row on 16 September, Roth made it clear that this was so. ‘I’m an European’, he said, ‘it’s my identity.’ He loved Britain, but rejected the ‘new nationalism’ – a world phenomenon. Leaving England, however, seemed to have more to do with Roth’s desire to become politically active in support of his beliefs, than an issue with a particular country.
 
The Front Row interview focussed on museums and Britain, but on 17 September The Economist aired the wider issue of public institutions and politics. ‘On the question of the EU, museum curators are to a man (and woman) Remainers’, said the newspaper. ‘Many of them come from Europe; even more have studied there.’ Roth may soon be outspoken on controversial matters, as, in December 2014, Hartwig Fischer, now Director of the British Museum (BM) but then Director of the Dresden State Art Museums, confronted far-right protestors with street banners announcing ‘Works from Five Continents. A House Full of Foreigners.’ Who will replace Roth and Nicholas Serota (departing Tate Director), asks The Economist: ‘Civil servants who keep their lips zipped, or cultural warriors prepared to speak their mind?’
 
In Anthony Gormley: Missing Continents at the British Museum (Radio 4, 8 September), the British artist opened a public debate on some of the things Fischer might need to address at the BM. The Museum, said Gormley, has outstanding collections representing cultures of Africa, Oceania and the Americas: but the displays focus overmuch on classical Old World cultures. Gormley, a former Museum Trustee, said he had failed to give adequate space to those ‘missing continents’.
 
He talked to Fischer, and to curators and specialists including Lissant Bolton and Polly Bence at the BM’s Department of Africa, Oceania and the Americas. We must listen, says Fischer, and think about what European domination meant to the rest of the world. How do we make a new context, asks Gormley, in which whatever-it-is imported ethnographic artefacts bring, can be made meaningful? How do we break the grand narrative the BM imposes?
 
‘We need to redefine “civilisation”,’ says Bolton (‘Ah, good,’ Gormley interjects), ‘a colonial assumption that it means buildings, gold, armies.’ Civilisation, she says, can exist in how people organise themselves, in philosophy and stories.
 
Where are the missing continents, Gormley asks Fischer? ‘This has to change’, replies Fischer (‘Ah, good’), ‘it’s obvious.’
 
The Museum needs to evolve, concludes Gormley, to expand and reflect the diversity of the world. ‘What constitutes society? How does it cohere? We have to understand the world on which all life depends, and that knowledge is not in the hands of the colonisers, but in the hands of the colonised.’

Across the Atlantic, on 24 September there will be ‘an unprecedented local, national and international event unlike any other opening of a cultural institution in America or globally in recent memory’ – the launch of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC. Like all Smithsonian museums, it will be free to enter. President Obama is to make a speech.
 
The displays offer a mix of struggle and oppression, and creativity and achievement. Exhibits will include the original coffin of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old murdered in Mississippi in 1955, Ku Klux Klan hoods and a piece of rope used in a lynching; the walls of one gallery bear the names of more than 2,200 people known to have been lynched between 1882 and 1930. Elsewhere are Carl Lewis’s Olympic medals, Jimi Hendrix’s waistcoat and Lead Belly’s guitar.
 
The building was created by a US/UK consortium, Freelon Adjaye Bond/SmithGroup, with Philip Freelon as design guarantor and David Adjaye as lead designer. Adjaye is a Tanzanian-born and London-educated British architect (photo NMAAHC).

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