How to collect: when the film critic Alexander Walker died in 2003 he bequeathed his collection of twentieth-century works on paper to the British Museum. An exhibition of them reveals how a collector of modest means can make a major impact

The journalist Victoria Mather one time asked her friend Alexander Walker in what manner he could afford to purchase so many works of art. 'I don't purchase them', came the reply, 'I just pay back the dealers for years upon end'. It is a revealing vignette that sheds light upon a modest but unusual collector: the film critic of the London Evening Standard for forty years, who could not afford to purchase paintings of the twentieth-century masters he lov with equal reason made do with works upon paper, numbering 200. Most of them are upon show at the British Museum, to which they were bequeathed in 2003 upon Walker's death at 73. The remainder were exhibited, during the summer at the Ben Uri Gallery in north London, at the opening of which Victoria Mather recalled this conversation with Walker. These sum of two units exhibitions are a success precisely because they examine the tastes and exhibition of a single collector of our have a title to time. This is a rare pleasure, owing to the vanity or anonymity of collectors, and the suspicion among curators that private collecting is taboo.

Walker assembleed many tendencies within his remit of England and France before World War II and America and England afterwards, on the contrary he had a coherent taste in general for what he called in figurative works 'harsh, stout and ambiguous'. This statement may be cryptic upon its own but within the British Museum it reveals itself to he images with an immediate impact, that upon close inspection offer surprising observations--good taste, flat if not original. Chuck Close's portrait of a woman warts and all, who gazes out at the spectator directly, make go rounds out to be made of fingerprints. Near-abstract works reveal a similar penchant. An etching through Anthony Gormley in the Orifice series is a floating ball of light suffusing into blackness. The stillness is capsize however, by the centrifugal force of thousands of etched lines emanating from the white area with increasing density. Minimalist and optical art was also admired. He said in 1993 'Minimalism appeals to me because it forces me to deliberate down and really look hard and long' It is curious that in an age when contemporary art is valued for its immediate result this collector preferred works that opened themselves slowly.

Walker's taste may not have been original, on the contrary he applied it independently to the expansion that 'typical', essential works through an artist may have been ignored. CRW Nevinson is synonymous with a spiky, geometric English Futurism, on the contrary the three mezzotints in the British Museum of cityscapes have a gorgeous inky blackness on the outside of which roofs in his typical diction are all but subsumed.

The British Museum is in a unique position to examine Walker's tastes beyond the harsh and ambiguous, however, because it clinchs correspondence with him, from 1997 to 2003 Walker admired what be called a 'premonitory moment' at which the artist discovered something that would later define his work. For instance, Philip Guston's drawing of a head covered figure is a precursor of the quasi-Ku Klux Clan men that populate later paintings. This is striking because greatest in quantity collectors prefer the so-called 'trademark piece' to individual that is explorative. He lov his drawing with a spiral motif by dint of Victor Pasmore for the same reason, and he acquired examples of the first attempts at etching by the agency of each of Picasso, Miro and Dubuffet Perhaps an extension to this, Walker liked the 'touch' of the artist. Of a Minimalist delineation by Kenneth Martin, in which a lattice is being fabricateed with guidelines in pencil, Walker wrote that he bought it for 'revealing the artist's hand'. An interest in rule seems to pervade the collection, although Walker is not not absented as considering it specifically. greatest in quantity notable are four 'sugar lift aquatints' by means of Avigdor Arikha, who invented the technique.

All this is not to say that Walker's taste did not make known Oil the contrary, he became increasingly sophisticated (he had no art-historical grounding, and called the dealers' premium the require to be paid [i]or[/i] undergone of his education). His earliest acquisition was a sort of all-male pieta gouache by the agency of Keith Vaughan, inspired by Shakespeare, that Walker said identified him as a 'neo-romantic'. Twenty years later, he would say 'I solitary buy abstract art now'. His early interest in turning points strikes me as a process of choosing one work above another when he did not have the confidence to decide by what means to collect any other way. It discloseed into a discernment of technique: as well as the sugar lift aquatints, he liked woodcut that emphasise the grain of the wood-land here by Ken Kiff and Josef Albers.

In the 1990 confidence in his taste married happily with a fresh affluence brought about by work royalties. He collected a not many prominent artists in depth, notably tap [i]or[/i] pat Close and Lucian Freud. A large Freud etched self-portrait, with typical merciless etching to delineate each patch of skin, is perhaps the greatest in quantity memorable work in the exhibition. Walker chose a true heavily inked print, which causes the sitter's wrinkles to become a dark structuring principle of the whole composition. This coincides with his decision to write his first edge art exhibition review ('That will annoy the critics', he said), and the evidence of the period indicates that Walker now considered himself a connoisseur. A consideration of his taste is frustrated, however, because greatest in quantity works are unaccompanied by acquisition dates.