FINDING A MARKET

Southland Times, Issue 21093, 27 May 1930, Page 2

FINDING A MARKET

WORK OF BRITISH ARTISTS. HELPFUL MOVEMENT. London, March 20. Sir Martin Conway and Sir Robert Witt have issued an interesting report on the first three years’ achievement of the movement which Sir Joseph Duveen founded to .help British artists to find a market for their work. They say with confidence that the experimental stage has been passed, and that the organization “has acquired momentum and tradition.”

The exhibitions have developed along lines even more progressive than their founder anticipated. Sir Joseph’s first idea was to introduce British artists to the British public. His plan was to arrange exhibitions of the work of men and women whose reputations were not sufficiently widely established and who were comparatively unknown outside artistic circles. The foreign exhibitions at Paris, Brussels, Buenos Aires, Venice and Stockholm were a happy, and fruitful afterthought. All the same, it is in Britain that the scheme is mainly intended to work, and it was at provincial exhibitions at Home that 6J6 works were sold out of a total of 744. The direct sales do not exhaust the harvest of the effort.

“Every ' exhibition,” the report says, "brings new clients, who eome, somewhat incredulously, to find pictures which the} admire at prices they can afford to pay.” A nucleus of new or potential buyers is thus created. A man who bought an original painting for the first time in his life at the Leeds exhibition has since bought a dozen more by paying visits to artists at their > studios, and probably this is but one instance out of many. An exhibition at Toiko is under contemplation. This year there is to be an exhibition at Hull, and later, for the first time, one in London. The pictures for these exhibitions will be selected by a committee, of which Sir William Orpen is chairman.