Serota's Visit and Tate Donation
Sir Nicholas Serota was dubbed the "least likely visitor" to the show, which included a wall of work satirising the Tate and Serota himself, such as Thomson's Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision. In fact, he did visit and met the artists, describing the work as "lively".
In 2005, the Stuckists offered a donation of 160 paintings from the show with a value of £500,000 to the Tate. This offer was rejected by Serota, who wrote, "the works in question have been reviewed by our curators and presented to the Board of Trustees ... We do not feel that the work is of sufficient quality in terms of accomplishment, innovation or originality of thought to warrant preservation in perpetuity in the national collection." The Times reported:
| “ | The Tate was accused yesterday of snubbing one of Britain’s foremost collections after it rejected a gift of 160 paintings that had been given pride of place at the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. Its director, Sir Nicholas Serota, said that the works did not deserve to be in a national collection, even though their five-month exhibition last autumn drew thousands of people to the Walker, one of the outstanding collections of fine art in Europe and part of National Museums Liverpool." | ” |
Thomson said, "The Tate ... rejected Modernism and artists such as Matisse and Picasso ... Now it has lost the nation the prime works of an international movement founded in Britain. A direct consequence of this was a media campaign Thomson led over the Tate's purchase of its trustee Chris Ofili's work, The Upper Room. In 2006 the Charity Commission censured the Tate and ruled that it had broken the law in making the purchase and similar trustee purchases during the previous 50 years. The Daily Telegraph called the verdict "one of the most serious indictments of the running of one of the nation's major cultural institutions in living memory."
Read more about this topic: The Stuckists Punk Victorian
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