Word: tates
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...your Feb. 15 discussion of the Tate Gallery's affairs, when you refer to the charge that "the Tate trustees had sold good paintings, bought inferior works at inflated prices," you do not specify what they sold, what bought. Actually what was lately sold was a nude bather by Renoir, whose popularity in contemporary America you document in your color spread in the same issue. They sold it for $16,800 . . . and their principal purchase from this money was Picasso's cubist Seated Nude Woman...
...infuriated the Royal Academy's President Sir Alfred Munnings, a horse painter with mid-Victorian tastes, by deciding that hanging was too good for 400-odd pictures and sculptures which the Royal Academy had bought for the Tate. Last year indignant M.P.s wanted to know why publicity-conscious Sir John had allowed pictures to be taken in the Tate of Cinemactress Zsa Zsa Gabor simpering at a Toulouse-Lautrec. Last week Director Rothenstein faced far more serious trouble...
...House of Lords, questions had been asked about how the Tate spends some of its bequest moneys. It turned out that in one case, part of the proceeds from ?40,000 ($112,000) left by a wealthy spinster for the purchase of works by contemporary Asians had been spent for Portrait of a Lady by John Constable, who was no Asian and died in 1837. From another bequest for the purchase of paintings, the Tate had bought some sculpture. In a third case, some funds left for the purchase of works by British artists had been spent on works...
...Tate's board of trustees admitted that some bequest money (?2,750) had not been used as directed, but insisted that the sum had been refunded from other income. Nevertheless, Painter Graham Sutherland (twelve of whose starkly modern paintings hang in the Tate) resigned his post as a trustee, last week charged that "several breaches of trust" had been committed and that the board had been duped on the current market value of modern works of art, resulting in "considerable wastage of public money...
Director Rothenstein's old enemies were using the affair for all it was worth. Trumpeted 75-year-old Sir Alfred Munnings: "An investigation of the running of the Tate is long overdue...