For the third in our series of Frieze week blog posts, Diana Eccles, our Head of Collection, headed to Frieze Masters and we hear about a few of the works she spotted by British Council Collection artists:
"Visiting Frieze Masters revealed how perspicacious previous members of Visual Arts were in acquiring works for the British Council Collection. It would be impossible to list all of their contributions to the Collection but a few instances caught my eye. Richard Green had a sublime display of works by Ben Nicholson and Henry Moore. Alongside these, there was a small Freud painting (our fabulous Girl with Roses by Freud purchased in 1948 is currently on long loan to the Courtauld Gallery in London), plus works by L S Lowry, Peter Lanyon and William Scott, all of whom were acquired for the Collection in the late 1940s and 1950s.
An archive display of photographs and catalogues placed alongside the works by Lynn Chadwick at Blain Southern included catalogues for various British Council exhibitions of his work, together with a happy of photograph of Lynn plus fellow artists, partners larking around a Venetian sculpture with the formidable Lilian Somerville, Director of Visual Arts from 1949-1970, in their midst.
Marlborough had zingingly coloured paintings by Dame Paula Rego on show. Her works were shown at Sao Paulo Biennial in 1975 as part of the Portuguese representation, and ten years later the British Council presented her paintings at the same event as part of the UK representation. This highlights rather tidily how the British Council Collection is not a collection of works by British passport holders, but by artists who have contributed to the richness of the visual arts in Britain."
