SESSION: Private Collecting into Public Collection
Kettle’s Yard was the home of Jim and Helen Ede between 1957 and 1973, containing their collection of art, furniture, ceramics and other objects. The house and its contents were given to the University of Cambridge in 1966, after protracted negotiations, along with an endowment for their upkeep. This session interrogates the intent, practicalities, appeal, ethics, politics, meanings and legacies of collections of twentieth-century art (and any associated buildings) that passed from private hands into the public domain between 1900 and 1999 in Britain and internationally. What are the challenges and opportunities created by their succession? What related ideas, institutions and structures follow from these twentieth-century inheritances, and how do they impact upon our work and thinking today?
Session Convenor:
Inga Fraser, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
Naomi Polonsky, Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge
Session Speakers:
Sixtine Haye, École Pratique des Hautes Études – PSL / Laboratoire Saprat
From Gallery to Museum: Jacques-Michel Zoubaloff and the Institutionalisation of Modern Art in France (1912-1941)
Jacques-Michel Zoubaloff (1876-1941) was among the most remarkable benefactors of French museums during the Third Republic. Born in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia), Zoubaloff donated more than six hundred artworks to French public institutions between 1912 and 1933. Unlike many collectors of his time, Zoubaloff’s collecting practice was driven not by private enjoyment but by a social and didactic mission. His intention to donate preceded most of his acquisitions: many of the works he selected moved directly from artists’ studios or galleries into public collections, without ever entering his private sphere. His collection, although eclectic, was focused on progress and modernity. He paid particular attention to graphic works and sculpted sketches, as well as to Cubism and modern decorative arts. Through his donations, he plays a decisive role in promoting and recognising these new movements, in a historical and cultural context marked by profound transformations in artistic practices and ways of curating heritage. This paper will highlight how Zoubaloff’s activity, situated at the crossroads of philanthropy, cultural policy, and the quest for modernity, contributed to the institutionalisation of contemporary art in early twentieth-century France. By analysing his extensive correspondence and unpublished archival material, the study will examine how he negotiated with museum directors, curators, and artists to ensure the visibility, conservation, and pedagogical role of his donations. Moreover, his correspondence reveals a meticulous concern for display and preservation, reflecting his belief in an educational mission of art and illustrating how philanthropy shaped the modern identity of public collections.
Anastasiia Presniakova, Independent Researcher
Implementing State Cultural Policy: Reframing the Shchukin and Morozov Collections (1918–1948)
In 1918, the Shchukin and Morozov collections were nationalised by the Soviet state and became the core of the State Museum of New Western Art in Moscow, along with their embedded political associations. The museum endured decades of pressure and was finally closed in 1948. Scholarship often treats the change in the collections’ political meaning as a direct result of prohibitive state measures. While the transformation was indeed state-driven, its implementation inside the museum was neither straightforward nor uniform.
Drawing on archival reconstruction, I examine both concrete directives aimed at these collections and how they were perceived, implemented, and reframed by museum staff responsible for display and compliance. The study identifies the limits and instruments of political reinterpretation within the institution, showing how the staff sought to protect the collections and keep them publicly visible by reworking interpretation (labels, guides, catalogues), reshaping display (sequencing, hangs, gallery routes), and managing circulation, loans, and access to meet evolving ideological demands for late 19th- and early 20th-century Western art.
Beyond directives and timelines, the paper reconstructs how museum workers negotiated meaning in practice – testing language, regrouping objects, and revising exhibition logics to keep the art visible within permissible bounds – and treats these adjustments as forms of micro-resistance. The Shchukin-Morozov case thus shows both how such measures functioned within daily museum practice and where they failed, when new frames could no longer reconcile the collections with the demands of the regime.
Rebecca Fortnum, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
Margaret Gardiner: A Genius for Friendship
holdings in Stromness, Orkney, an unlikely setting for an international gallery. This paper explores how the collection amassed through her support of British modernist artists as a result of what Adrian Stokes called her ‘genius for friendship’.
Educated at Cambridge in the 1920s, her biographers mention the presence of influential, famous men in her social circles, such as W H Auden, TS Eliot and Herbert Read. However, taking its cue from Virginia Woolf’s statement on the radically new nature of women’s friendships of the time (‘Chloe Liked Olivia…..’, A Room of One’s Own, 1929), this paper will look at her collection through the lens of her friendship with Barbara Hepworth. The Cambridge context for this alliance will be developed through other female friendships between artists and writers, such as Gwen Raverat and Elizabeth Vellacott, Winnifred Nicholson and Kathleen Raine, and Rosamond Lehmann and Frances Partridge.
Although Gardiner saw herself as a ‘rebel’ rather than a ‘revolutionary’, activism was her calling. Her roles in campaigns for peace, socialism and anti-fascism underpinned her cultural activity. The paper will suggest that Gardiner’s contribution is best described as a ‘disoeuvre’ (Allen 2016), which recognises her organising and activism, her love of Orkney and even her own painting practice, as integral to her collecting. It claims her diverse practice as feminist, where the PAC ‘does not act as a monument to her importance but instead [is] a foundation for new modes of art continually to be created and experienced.’ (Gardner-Huggett, 2005)
John Chu and Sophie Clarke, National Trust
The National Trust takes on The Homewood: modernist heritage and other paradoxes
In the closing years of the twentieth century, the National Trust emerged as an unexpected custodian of modernist heritage. The acquisition of Ernő Goldfinger’s 2 Willow Road in 1994 was soon followed by Patrick Gwynne’s The Homewood in 1999 — two 1930s houses in the International Style that survived, uniquely, with their architects’ original furnishings and art collections.
Three decades later, this paper revisits the paradoxes embedded in the decisions, language, and actions that led to the transfer of these functional, forward-looking private homes into a public organisation for the preservation of historic sites. Drawing deeply on National Trust archives and the wider cultural discourse surrounding the acquisition of The Homewood, it examines how contemporary tensions around heritage and modernism were negotiated within both institutional process and personal experience. Gwynne, unlike Goldfinger, lived through and was intricately involved in this moment of extraordinary change for his house and collection.
The paper further considers how these conceptual tensions have played out in the twenty-first century, tracing the Trust’s evolving approaches to access, interpretation, and conservation, and assessing how such interventions have helped shape broader attitudes toward modernist art and heritage in Britain and beyond. Particular attention will be paid to activities tied to the art collections. In doing so, it asks what it means for modernism — a movement rooted in progress — to be ‘taken on’ by a heritage, and how this transformation redefines both terms.
Eleanor Clayton, The Hepworth Wakefield
A Collector’s Eye: The Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection
The Jeffrey Sherwin & Family Collection, a significant private collection of British Surrealism, has now found a permanent home at The Hepworth Wakefield, offering a complex case study in the transition from private ownership to public stewardship. This paper interrogates the motivations and cultural positioning of Sherwin as a collector, situating his activity within broader narratives of British Surrealism, its post-war continuation and reception. Drawing on biographical and sociological perspectives, it explores how personal taste and networks shaped the collection’s character and its eventual donation. The second strand of analysis considers the ethical and practical challenges arising from this succession: how does the transfer of privately curated works into institutional frameworks recalibrate their meanings? Issues of provenance, interpretive responsibility, and the politics of display are examined in relation to contemporary debates on heritage and privilege. By tracing the interplay between individual agency and institutional structures, the paper reflects on the enduring impact of twentieth-century collecting practices on current curatorial strategies and public engagement.