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The spaces of British art: patronage, institutions, audiences

This is one of five keynote essays commissioned from leading scholars for the modern period volume in Tate Britain's and Yale's three volume History of British Art. Each essay was designed both to address general readers and to generate new lines of research. My chapter analyses how a nexus of institutions and structures (dealers and galleries, collectors and patrons, art museums and national cultural agencies) underpins the formation of modern art in Britain. The modern period is usually divided into three distinct phases. The period to c.1939 is characterised as an era of private and independent initiative; the period after 1945 sees the emergence of the nation state as the primary patron and guarantor of the visual arts. In turn, state subsidy is said to have been displaced by the privatisation of national culture in the 1980s. While these three phases are useful for organising the material, this chapter argues for new insights into the ways the relationship between independent organisations and national initiatives is dynamic, and that there are continuities, as well as discontinuities, throughout the period.