Where is the $20 million from the Turner thefts, Squandered on Demonic Serota's Modern Art Choices !!

Tate unites Turners to save masterpiece

Dayla Alberge, Arts Correspondent

Gallery to raise £4.95m for purchase
Temporary bar placed on export



Arts

The Times December 07, 2006



The Blue Rigi, for which the Tate must raise £4.95 million



The Tate is to bring together for the first time three of Turner’s greatest watercolour paintings as part of a campaign to raise nearly £5 million to prevent one of them, The Blue Rigi, from going abroad.

The Blue Rigi, The Dark Rigi and The Red Rigi — shimmering depictions of Mount Rigi, as seen from Lake Lucerne — are widely regarded as Turner’s finest works, if not the finest watercolours of all.

Each of the three paintings depicts the mountain at a different time of day and is characterised by a defining colour or tone.

The Red Rigi has been in the National Gallery of Melbourne since 1947, but the other two have, until this year, been in private hands.

David Lammy, the Culture Minister, has placed a temporary export bar on The Blue Rigi. The Tate must raise £4.95 million by March 20 to save it for the nation. If successful, it would be the most expensive single work of art it has bought.

Mr Lammy’s ruling followed a recommendation by the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, which described the painting as “of outstanding aesthetic importance”. The committee gave it a starred rating, meaning that “every possible effort should be made to raise enough money to keep it in the country”.

Stephen Deuchar, director of Tate Britain, said: “The acquisition of The Blue Rigi would have a significant impact on our ability to reveal the full brilliance of his mature work. This is a chance we dare not miss.”

The exhibition, at Tate Britain in London, will run from January 22 to March 25. It will unite the extraordinary, finished watercolours — late works dating from 1842 — with the gallery’s own collection of Turner’s preparatory material for the Rigi series.

The Dark Rigi was sold this year by Simon Dickinson, the London dealer, to the National Gallery of Art in Washington for £2.7 million, subject to an export licence being granted. Then the dealer “sold it to the first UK buyer to match the price . . . who always planned to lend it to a UK institution”.

The Blue Rigi was sold this year, at Christie’s, where it made £5.83 million, having had a £2 million estimate. The buyer is thought to be American.

Art Hostage comments:

The Blue Rigi was purchased by Steve "Mr Magoo" Wynn at auction this year.

My question is, where is the $20 million from the Turner thefts that the Tate extorted from AXA and Hiscox?

This money, as with the terms of the Turner bequest should be used to purchase the said Turner watercolor.

As with all elitist institutions like the Tate, they have spent the Turner theft money on modern art, and now have the balls to ask the public for the money to keep the Blue Rigi in Britain.

Dalya, bless her, seems to omitt the money left over from the Turner theft, although I think it is her editor that has sanitised her reporting.

The honourable thing for the Tate to do is to sell the modern artworks purchased by Demonic Serota, then use that money to buy the Blue Rigi.

Is this too much to ask from the Criminal gangsters at the Tate, who hide their blatent criminality behind the cloak of respectability?