On 1 March 2007, after a successful fundraising campaign initiated by Tate and The Art Fund, we announced we were able to secure JMW Turner's late watercolour The Blue Rigi, Sunrise 1842. Among those attending the press conference was Matthew Hughes, a schoolboy who had raided his piggy bank to contribute to the campaign. In doing so, Matthew added to a figure of £582,218 raised by the public.
The Art Fund, which was instrumental in leading the campaign, donated £500,000, and the National Heritage Memorial Fund gave £1,867,782. Tate Members gave £250,000 and Tate gave £250,000 from general funds as well as drawing on the Collection Endowment Fund, started in 2005, to make an exceptional contribution of £1.5 million. The work was purchased for £4.9 million and joins the Turner Bequest, which lacks an example of the artist's late finished watercolours.
As well as responding to such opportunities to enhance our historic holdings, our approach to building the Collection currently has three main focuses: acquiring works from new priority areas such as Latin America and the Asia-Pacific region; growing our representation of Conceptual art, photography and time-based media; and acquiring works by emerging artists.
We are now showing more new acquisitions in the galleries than ever before. Over 20% of the new Collection displays unveiled at Tate Modern in May 2006 were recent acquisitions, and we have already shown a number of other works acquired in 2006–7, including Carsten Höller's Sliding Doors 2003 and two paintings by Marlene Dumas at Tate Modern, and a group of works by Jeremy Moon at Tate Britain.
We continue to acquire a number of significant works from exhibitions held at Tate, such as Come into the Garden, Maud 2000–3 by Howard Hodgkin, following his retrospective at Tate Britain, and Jeff Wall's A View from an Apartment 2004–5, from the exhibition at Tate Modern in 2005. We were grateful to the Trustees of the Josef and Anni Albers foundation for their gift of a group of works by Josef Albers following the Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World exhibition at Tate Modern.
Latin America continues to be a focus and we acquired a number of significant works. These included Untitled 1963 by Mira Schendel, Gabriel Orozco's Carambole with Pendulum 1996, and Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project 1970 as a gift from the artist, Cildo Meireles. In March 2007 we formed a similar group devoted to the acquisition of art from the Asia-Pacific region, with an initial emphasis on China, Japan and Korea.
In the area of Conceptual art and photography highlights of our acquisitions included Tavern 2006, a group of five photographs by Thomas Demand, Untitled Painting 1965 by Art & Language, and One of the Possibilities 1973, an important early work by Daniel Buren. Time-based media pieces accessioned into the Collection included Tacita Dean's Palast 2004, Stan Douglas's Inconsolable Memories 2005, and Mark Wallinger's Sleeper 2004.
Through the Frieze Acquisition Fund we acquired works by 12 artists from the Frieze Art Fair in 2006, including many emerging artists such as David Shrigley, Anna Barriball and Trisha Donnelly. We also bought a number of works by young artists following the Tate Triennial at Tate Britain including Come, Helga 2006 by Rebecca Warren and Knock Knock 2005 by Eva Rothschild.
As we strive to develop the Collection in a buoyant art market, our networks of supporters and external organisations play an increasingly important role. Tate Members helped us acquire 17 works with a total donation of £1.4 million. They also contributed, along with The Art Fund and the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to a fine conversation piece by the eighteenth-century artist Francis Hayman, which depicts the author Samuel Richardson and his family.
Among the works supported by Tate Patrons was a portfolio of photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans. The American Fund contributed the works we acquired this year by Gabriel Orozco and Jeff Wall and provided many significant works on long-term loan such as Robert Mangold's Red Wall 1965 and Mark Bradford's Los Moscos 2004. In addition, a number of significant works were allocated to the Tate Collection by HM Government in lieu of Inheritance Tax, including works by Kenneth Martin and Kurt Schwitters.
In-lieu provisions also brought two large and important collections into our Archive: the papers of the art critic JP Hodin, and the archive of Helen Anrep and Roger Fry, which includes material relating to other members of the Bloomsbury Group. The Archive was especially fortunate to receive the generous bequest of the personal papers of the art dealer and writer Lillian Browse. As well as numerous smaller collections, gifts to the Archive included the extant records of the New English Art Club, dating back to the 1880s, and an outstanding collection of 1960s photographs by Tom Picton, including portraits of artists and documentation of the Destruction in Art Symposium of 1966.
