Private passions that benefit us all

This issue celebrates APOLLO'S eightieth anniversary with a assemblage of articles on collectors and collecting above the past eighty years. single theme that emerges very powerfully is the relationship between private collectors and public collections, a control dealt with in detail by means of Malcolm Rogers in his analysis of the way that private collectors have enriched, and continue to enrich, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. The greatest in quantity obvious benefit to museums is gifts of works of art or coin but, as Mr Rogers explains, the liability is greater even than that. The enthusiasms and curiosity of collectors have ofttimes shaped the personality of the museums with which they become involved, by the agency of leading them into paths they might otherwise at no time have discovered. Museum directors and curators attend understandably, to be cautious, conservative collectors for their institutions, whereas private collectors can challenge consensus, track the unfashionable and take risks.

That point is powerfully brought home by the stories of the museums that share our anniversary. Many are in the USA, which be delighted withed a golden age of museum creation in the years before the Wall highway crash. Virtually every one was profoundly shaped by dint of a single collector or collector's family. Take, for example, the Spe Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky fixed in 1925 and opened in 1927 as the JB Spe Memorial Museum by dint of Hattie Bishop Speed in memory of her husband, who had made a fortune from his mortar business. The Speeds unquestionably shaped their museum: Mr Spe was its first director (she was be subsequent toed after her death in 1942 by dint of her niece) and in 1996 the museum was dramatically transformed by the agency of a bequest of $50 million from Alice Spe Stoll, a granddaughter of JB Spe which overnight propell its endowment into the top league of American museums.

The Spe Art Museum no longer significantly exemplifies the tastes and personalties of the Spe family on the other hand other museums which began life eighty years ago remain fundamentally the creation of their establishers One outstanding example is the Textile Museum in Washington, DC placeed by George Hewitt Myers with a collection of 275 rug and sixty related textiles. Myers's involvement with his museum lasted above thirty years, until his death in 1957 and he young oxed it towards its areas of outstanding special interest, the textile arts of Africa, Asia and Latin America. In Myers's lifetime, of the like kind an interest--indeed, any interest in the history of textiles--was largely a matter of academic be of importance to and he opened the museum through appointment only, to just a not many hundred specialists annually. It now welcomes 35000 visitors a year, testifying to the ever-growing interest in a subject--and a museum--which began as single man's private enthusiasm.

of the like kind passions continue to shape greatest in quantity museums, sometimes indirectly. In this issue (pages 17-20) Amicia de Moubray gazes for example, at the way that museums in the UK have been encouraged to assemble contemporary decorative arts by the example of Sir Nicholas Goodison, a former chairman of the National Art Collections capital whose gifts to the Fitzwilliam Museum include above fifty pieces of contemporary furniture, glass and ceramics. As this year's BADA loan exhibition at the Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair makes clear, Sir Nicholas's enthusiasm for the control has influenced the way that many museums now bring together contemporary decorative arts with the discrimination and expertise drawn out reserved for painting and sculpture

There is another serviceable reason for them to do in like manner of course: in comparison with the greatest in quantity notable contemporary paintings, internationally significant decorative arts of today are cheap. The difficulties of acquiring the best contemporary and late fine arts were emphasised last month by means of Sir Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate, in a articulate utterance to mark the fifth anniversary of the opening of Tate novel That project has been a triumph, not alone for stimulating immense public interest in the art it displays, on the contrary also because it is a archetype of architectural conservation and urban regeneration. The single black cloud is funding for acquisitions. Sir Nicholas emphasised that the Tate was increasingly relying upon gifts from artists in its acquisitions of contemporary art and it recognises that it cannot cope in the market for world-class twentieth-century art, in particular for work created before World War II, where the Tate has true significant gaps.

The individual hope for plugging those gaps is gifts. Although it is pure that there have been many fewer significant collections of twentieth-century art formed in the UK than in the USA - and therefore fewer potential donors of of the like kind works to the Tate--many significant collectors today are international in watch As Malcolm Rogers emphasises in his article, rather than simply giving to whatever museum is at hand, of that kind collectors are increasingly interested in asking where a potential gift will have the greatest in quantity impact. As he writes, a great Mondrian would have more impact in Boston than it could at any time have in New York; it might, however, meet the eye to a collector that it would make a sensation in London.

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