Caroline Douglas has a straightforward aim at the Contemporary Art Society (CAS), the organisation she joined as director just over a year ago.
“When I started I said, rather flippantly, what’s the big plan, and the plan is very simple – to buy more art.”
The CAS has been buying art to give to public museums and galleries across the UK since 1910. During this time it has donated more than 8,000 items, including works by key figures in British art such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.
The organisation’s first annual report from 1911 says: “From the conviction that some of the finer artistic talent of our time is imperfectly or not at all represented in the National and Municipal Galleries, the Contemporary Art Society was initiated in the year 1909. Its aim is to encourage by purchase and exhibition the more remarkable examples of painters who in any other country would enjoy a certain official patronage.”
The CAS’s list of purchases from 1910-12 includes oil paintings by Augustus John, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a drawing by Walter Sickert.
“For much of the CAS’s history it was the only game in town – it was the only institution purchasing contemporary art for museums,” says Douglas, who points out that the Arts Council Collection began in 1946.
“It’s not so long ago that Tate Modern opened and the only Damien Hirst in the institution was the one that we had given it.”
More recently, it has gifted works by Marcus Coates, Phyllida Barlow, Laure Prouvost and David Shrigley to museums.
The CAS does a lot more than just raise money to buy works for the museums that subscribe to it as members. It also runs a programme of displays, artist talks and educational events, many of which take place at its home in London, which opened in late 2012.
But it is buying works and improving collections that is at the heart of what the CAS does.
“We work with relatively modest means, to purchase cleverly, to strike while the artist is on an upward trajectory, and we’ve had some amazing successes in doing that,” says Douglas, who points to early acquisitions of works by artists such as Bacon and Anthony Caro.
Supporting curators
Douglas, who replaced Paul Hobson at the CAS after he left to become the director of Modern Art Oxford, says she has spent her first year in the job listening to people’s opinions about the CAS and the way it works.
“I have an absolute conviction that the CAS is as relevant now as it was a hundred years ago, if not more so,” Douglas says. “We work in a unique way in that we support a research process that leads to each acquisition. And supporting the curatorial staff and our museum members is so important.”
Curators, like everyone else working in museums and galleries, are under pressure because of budget cuts and the resulting increase in workloads and responsibilities.
Douglas says that receiving money from the CAS allows them the time to do research to support the acquisitions they are making.
“When there are such trenchant cutbacks in museums, curators are wearing many hats and there are so many pulls on their time that take them away from the research process, which should be at the core of their work,” Douglas says.
“It’s a great boost for them to be able to say to their line manager – ‘I have to have time to do this’.”
Douglas believes curators value the freedom they have when the CAS gives them money through its acquisition scheme. She says other sources of funding for acquisitions often place certain conditions on the museum, which can constrain curators.
“When curators are working with the CAS, our curatorial team works with them to amplify their research, but we don’t constrain them, aside from insisting that they buy contemporary art. We support their research. Different institutions have different levels of experience in purchasing so we are flexible in offering as much support as is appropriate.”
The CAS also supports curators through professional development initiatives such as networking opportunities and bursaries for travel. Helping artists is also important for the CAS.
Curators and artists both benefit from the CAS’s Annual Award, for example, which gives a museum £40,000 to commission an artist to create a new work for its collection. This year’s winner was to be announced after Museums Journal went to press.
Challenges remain
Douglas joined the CAS from the Arts Council Collection, which she headed from 2006 until 2013. It was during this time that she says she got to know the challenges facing curators in regional museums, particularly after budgets started to be cut following the banking crisis in 2008.
It’s been a tough few years since then, but Douglas says she still sees curators doing ambitious work.
“There are people doing some amazing things under the toughest of circumstances,” she says, pointing to Julie Milne, the chief curator at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, who bought a work by Turner Prize-nominated artist Paul Noble in 2013.
The work was acquired with the support of the Art Fund and the V&A Purchase Grant Fund. Noble also gifted a work to the Laing.
“She’d wrapped a wonderful display around the acquisition and had developed a terrific working relationship with the artist,” Douglas says.
“Newcastle has seen severe funding cuts and she’s faced considerable challenges, yet she could pull off something like that, which is fantastic. It shows what can be done by a smart and determined person.”
Douglas also gives the example of the Walker Art Gallery and its strand of collecting related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) art. The CAS recently supported the acquisition of The Gang by Catherine Opie, which was part of an exhibition focusing on the American photographer’s images of her friends from the LGBT community.
Douglas says the purchase provided the impetus for the exhibition, which formed part of Homotopia, an annual festival of LGBT art and culture that takes place in Liverpool.
But it is not all good news, and one of the areas that Douglas is concerned about, like many in the sector, is museums selling items from their collections.
“The most recent sale by Northampton of an Egyptian sculpture is potentially a catastrophic precedent,” Douglas says. “Once you start to sell things from the collection, you destroy the positive, virtuous circle that permanent public collections of art benefit from, which is people gifting things.”
Douglas says people gift items or offer them at a significant discount to public museums because it is a “forever proposition”. If local authorities start to sell items, the proposition starts to unravel.
“All our great city museums were founded in a 50-year period in the 1800s on a robust combination of public funding and private philanthropy,” Douglas says.
“It is the founding principle for Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and so many others. The coming together of the two is a powerful model, and you have to have both. So if the local authority starts backing out of that pact then, potentially, we lose the extraordinary wealth in those museums.”
Preventing items being sold from public collections is tricky and Douglas feels it might be more productive to target the local authority rather than the museum.
“I salute the Museums Association for picking up the debate on this and raising the question as to whether tougher sanctions should be given to museums for this kind of action. Tougher sanctions need to be applied somewhere, but I question whether it’s the museums that should be suffering.”
Douglas points to the time when Southampton City Council was planning to sell works by Alfred Munnings and Auguste Rodin in 2009, saying that it was nothing to do with the museum.
Beyond the capital
“The museum staff were horrified – it was actually the local authority that was in the driving seat – and I believe the local authority was also driving the sale in Northampton,” Douglas says.
“So yes, there should be stronger sanctions against the selling of works from public collections, but it’s at government and local authority level where that conversation should take place. To remove museums’ Accreditation is a big stick to beat them with, but the likelihood is that Northampton’s local councillors don’t care.”
Of course, another debate related to funding cuts and the pressure they are putting on museums is the question of whether the distribution of public money to museums and galleries is fair.
Recent reports have highlighted some of the imbalances between funding for London and the rest of the country. Douglas says about 90% of the CAS’s work is done outside the capital.
“It’s important that we have the big mus-eums based here in London to hold up the beacon for excellence and best practice to everybody,” Douglas says.
“But even though they’re free, they are not as accessible to people who don’t live in London. It’s important that the kid growing up in Huddersfield, for example, can walk into a free museum and look at great works of art.
“Our museums are important, non--commercial, social spaces where people have freedom to think and respond to ideas, and develop their own thinking,” Douglas continues.
“I can’t state strongly enough how much I believe that. And it’s not about -necessarily producing artists, it’s about producing young people who have intellectual self-confidence and can apply that in any sphere.”
Douglas hopes that the CAS will continue to play a role in this by supporting the collecting, display and appreciation of contemporary art in UK museums.
“It’s not a huge amount of money that we offer, but it’s about putting it in the right places and making that money work as hard as possible – that’s what we try and do at every level,” she says. “I like to think that we are the smart money.”
Caroline Douglas became the director of the Contemporary Art Society in October 2013. Before that she was the head of the Arts Council Collection, which she joined in 2006. Douglas worked as a curator in the visual arts department of the British Council from 1994 until 2006.
She has an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
The Contemporary Art Society is a national charity that raises funds to purchase works by new artists, which it gives to museums and galleries. Since 1910, it has donated more than 8,000 works.
There are currently 65 museums and galleries that are members of the CAS, which is looking to add 10 more museum members in the current financial year.
As well as helping museums acquire new works, the CAS also has a number of other initiatives that place work in collections. These include the Annual Award, which each year gives £40,000 to a museum to commission an artist to create a new work for its permanent collection.
There is also the Cathy Wills Sculpture Fund, which is enabling five museums in the north-west to work together over a five-year period to co-acquire artworks.
The CAS has an office in central London and employs about 20 staff.
“When I started I said, rather flippantly, what’s the big plan, and the plan is very simple – to buy more art.”
The CAS has been buying art to give to public museums and galleries across the UK since 1910. During this time it has donated more than 8,000 items, including works by key figures in British art such as Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore.
The organisation’s first annual report from 1911 says: “From the conviction that some of the finer artistic talent of our time is imperfectly or not at all represented in the National and Municipal Galleries, the Contemporary Art Society was initiated in the year 1909. Its aim is to encourage by purchase and exhibition the more remarkable examples of painters who in any other country would enjoy a certain official patronage.”
The CAS’s list of purchases from 1910-12 includes oil paintings by Augustus John, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, and a drawing by Walter Sickert.
“For much of the CAS’s history it was the only game in town – it was the only institution purchasing contemporary art for museums,” says Douglas, who points out that the Arts Council Collection began in 1946.
“It’s not so long ago that Tate Modern opened and the only Damien Hirst in the institution was the one that we had given it.”
More recently, it has gifted works by Marcus Coates, Phyllida Barlow, Laure Prouvost and David Shrigley to museums.
The CAS does a lot more than just raise money to buy works for the museums that subscribe to it as members. It also runs a programme of displays, artist talks and educational events, many of which take place at its home in London, which opened in late 2012.
But it is buying works and improving collections that is at the heart of what the CAS does.
“We work with relatively modest means, to purchase cleverly, to strike while the artist is on an upward trajectory, and we’ve had some amazing successes in doing that,” says Douglas, who points to early acquisitions of works by artists such as Bacon and Anthony Caro.
Supporting curators
Douglas, who replaced Paul Hobson at the CAS after he left to become the director of Modern Art Oxford, says she has spent her first year in the job listening to people’s opinions about the CAS and the way it works.
“I have an absolute conviction that the CAS is as relevant now as it was a hundred years ago, if not more so,” Douglas says. “We work in a unique way in that we support a research process that leads to each acquisition. And supporting the curatorial staff and our museum members is so important.”
Curators, like everyone else working in museums and galleries, are under pressure because of budget cuts and the resulting increase in workloads and responsibilities.
Douglas says that receiving money from the CAS allows them the time to do research to support the acquisitions they are making.
“When there are such trenchant cutbacks in museums, curators are wearing many hats and there are so many pulls on their time that take them away from the research process, which should be at the core of their work,” Douglas says.
“It’s a great boost for them to be able to say to their line manager – ‘I have to have time to do this’.”
Douglas believes curators value the freedom they have when the CAS gives them money through its acquisition scheme. She says other sources of funding for acquisitions often place certain conditions on the museum, which can constrain curators.
“When curators are working with the CAS, our curatorial team works with them to amplify their research, but we don’t constrain them, aside from insisting that they buy contemporary art. We support their research. Different institutions have different levels of experience in purchasing so we are flexible in offering as much support as is appropriate.”
The CAS also supports curators through professional development initiatives such as networking opportunities and bursaries for travel. Helping artists is also important for the CAS.
Curators and artists both benefit from the CAS’s Annual Award, for example, which gives a museum £40,000 to commission an artist to create a new work for its collection. This year’s winner was to be announced after Museums Journal went to press.
Challenges remain
Douglas joined the CAS from the Arts Council Collection, which she headed from 2006 until 2013. It was during this time that she says she got to know the challenges facing curators in regional museums, particularly after budgets started to be cut following the banking crisis in 2008.
It’s been a tough few years since then, but Douglas says she still sees curators doing ambitious work.
“There are people doing some amazing things under the toughest of circumstances,” she says, pointing to Julie Milne, the chief curator at the Laing Gallery in Newcastle, who bought a work by Turner Prize-nominated artist Paul Noble in 2013.
The work was acquired with the support of the Art Fund and the V&A Purchase Grant Fund. Noble also gifted a work to the Laing.
“She’d wrapped a wonderful display around the acquisition and had developed a terrific working relationship with the artist,” Douglas says.
“Newcastle has seen severe funding cuts and she’s faced considerable challenges, yet she could pull off something like that, which is fantastic. It shows what can be done by a smart and determined person.”
Douglas also gives the example of the Walker Art Gallery and its strand of collecting related to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) art. The CAS recently supported the acquisition of The Gang by Catherine Opie, which was part of an exhibition focusing on the American photographer’s images of her friends from the LGBT community.
Douglas says the purchase provided the impetus for the exhibition, which formed part of Homotopia, an annual festival of LGBT art and culture that takes place in Liverpool.
But it is not all good news, and one of the areas that Douglas is concerned about, like many in the sector, is museums selling items from their collections.
“The most recent sale by Northampton of an Egyptian sculpture is potentially a catastrophic precedent,” Douglas says. “Once you start to sell things from the collection, you destroy the positive, virtuous circle that permanent public collections of art benefit from, which is people gifting things.”
Douglas says people gift items or offer them at a significant discount to public museums because it is a “forever proposition”. If local authorities start to sell items, the proposition starts to unravel.
“All our great city museums were founded in a 50-year period in the 1800s on a robust combination of public funding and private philanthropy,” Douglas says.
“It is the founding principle for Leeds, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham and so many others. The coming together of the two is a powerful model, and you have to have both. So if the local authority starts backing out of that pact then, potentially, we lose the extraordinary wealth in those museums.”
Preventing items being sold from public collections is tricky and Douglas feels it might be more productive to target the local authority rather than the museum.
“I salute the Museums Association for picking up the debate on this and raising the question as to whether tougher sanctions should be given to museums for this kind of action. Tougher sanctions need to be applied somewhere, but I question whether it’s the museums that should be suffering.”
Douglas points to the time when Southampton City Council was planning to sell works by Alfred Munnings and Auguste Rodin in 2009, saying that it was nothing to do with the museum.
Beyond the capital
“The museum staff were horrified – it was actually the local authority that was in the driving seat – and I believe the local authority was also driving the sale in Northampton,” Douglas says.
“So yes, there should be stronger sanctions against the selling of works from public collections, but it’s at government and local authority level where that conversation should take place. To remove museums’ Accreditation is a big stick to beat them with, but the likelihood is that Northampton’s local councillors don’t care.”
Of course, another debate related to funding cuts and the pressure they are putting on museums is the question of whether the distribution of public money to museums and galleries is fair.
Recent reports have highlighted some of the imbalances between funding for London and the rest of the country. Douglas says about 90% of the CAS’s work is done outside the capital.
“It’s important that we have the big mus-eums based here in London to hold up the beacon for excellence and best practice to everybody,” Douglas says.
“But even though they’re free, they are not as accessible to people who don’t live in London. It’s important that the kid growing up in Huddersfield, for example, can walk into a free museum and look at great works of art.
“Our museums are important, non--commercial, social spaces where people have freedom to think and respond to ideas, and develop their own thinking,” Douglas continues.
“I can’t state strongly enough how much I believe that. And it’s not about -necessarily producing artists, it’s about producing young people who have intellectual self-confidence and can apply that in any sphere.”
Douglas hopes that the CAS will continue to play a role in this by supporting the collecting, display and appreciation of contemporary art in UK museums.
“It’s not a huge amount of money that we offer, but it’s about putting it in the right places and making that money work as hard as possible – that’s what we try and do at every level,” she says. “I like to think that we are the smart money.”
Caroline Douglas at a glance
Caroline Douglas became the director of the Contemporary Art Society in October 2013. Before that she was the head of the Arts Council Collection, which she joined in 2006. Douglas worked as a curator in the visual arts department of the British Council from 1994 until 2006.
She has an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art.
Contemporary Art Society at a glance
The Contemporary Art Society is a national charity that raises funds to purchase works by new artists, which it gives to museums and galleries. Since 1910, it has donated more than 8,000 works.
There are currently 65 museums and galleries that are members of the CAS, which is looking to add 10 more museum members in the current financial year.
As well as helping museums acquire new works, the CAS also has a number of other initiatives that place work in collections. These include the Annual Award, which each year gives £40,000 to a museum to commission an artist to create a new work for its permanent collection.
There is also the Cathy Wills Sculpture Fund, which is enabling five museums in the north-west to work together over a five-year period to co-acquire artworks.
The CAS has an office in central London and employs about 20 staff.
