The Prince of Wales has personally intervened in a growing row over arts funding by taking the doomed sponsorship agency, Arts & Business (A&B), under his wing.

A&B had been funded by the government through the Arts Council but lost its entire grant earlier this year. It was preparing for closure.

Instead, on Prince Charles’s own initiative, the organisation will merge with the charity Business in the Community of which he is president. “The Prince of Wales personally urged this as an alternaive solution and convinced me that it was the right one”, said A&B’s chief executive Colin Tweedy, whose own resignation after 28 years in the post is part of the arrrangement.

The merger is in effect a takeover by Business in the Community (BITC), created in 1982 in response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots to encourage urban regeneration through corporate social responsibility among businesses.

It will be formally announced at the BITC annual meeting on December 1, but Prince Charles himself revealed it on Thursday at a private ceremony at Clarence House to present his annual medals for arts philanthropy, a scheme he devised four years ago with A&B of which he is also president.

His intervention will fuel a disagreement over arts funding between the government, which has slashed its cultural subsidy by 33% and believes a revival of arts funding lies in philanthropy, and those who are convinced with A&B and the prince that the business community’s contribution can be more effective sooner. He is expected to strike a much higher profile in promoting business sponsorship of the arts.

“People don’t realise Prince Charles’s understanding of the zeitgeist, he has the ability to get people to listen and his brand is a very powerful one,” Tweedy said. “The business community respects it enormously.”

Arts & Business was founded in 1976 under the chairmanship of the late Lord Goodman, a former Arts Council chairman, to introduce the concept of business sponsorship of the arts when it registered an annual corporate contribution of £600,000. A&B established the “mixed arts economy” for the arts whereby funding is roughly a third earned income, a third public subsidy and a third private sector support. By 2007 the private contribution had risen to £700m a year, but since then it has fallen back to around £600m.

In 1984 the organisation developed the idea of matched funding, whereby business contributions would be matched from a government fund run by A&B. Between then and 2008 £90m of public investment was matched by £1 billion from the private sector, but that year the scheme was scrapped and A&B’s government grant cut from £7m to £4m.

A&B had been highly respected in government circles, with George Osborne on its board for four years before last year’s general election, and its research was the basis for much of the current cultural policy. This year, howeve, it learned that all its subsidy was to go and its official responsibilities taken over by the Arts Council.

Tweedy was called to a private meeting with Prince Charles who urged him not to close but to join BITC, now a global operation. A&B’s operations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have become independent, though still funded by their regional governments.

Ironically, it was Arts & Business that revealed the unsuspected significance and potential of private giving to the arts in 2004 when research showed that an astonishing £236m a year was coming from individual giving compared with £111m in business sponsorship, and the figure continued to grow over the next five years. It has since faltered and is dwindling at a rate of 7% year.

The govenment, however, believes private philanthropy is most likely to help arts funding to recover, and last December Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt launched a campaign to encourage more private giving, declaring 2011 to be the Year of Corporate Philanthropy.

“I sense the Year of Corporate Philanthropy has been written off,” Tweedy said. “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsorship, you cannot conflate the two – and nothing can be done in a year. The government was right not to exclude the arts from subsidy cuts, but we believe the government has a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons why people give. Philanthrophy will kick in again but it will take much longer than the government thinks, and most people who give privately in this country earn less than £50,000 a year and go largely unrecognised”. Subsidy will take at least a generation to recover, he said, but the business community’s contribution is already recovering.

Moving A&B into BITC will mean the former’s staff being reduced from 100 to 22 and losing its responsibility for training arts organisations in fundraising and acting as a broker between the arts and business, though retaining its charitable status. “We are going back to our roots, as a campaiging organisation in the business community, and the Prince of Wales will take a high profile in that campaign,” Tweedy said.

Tweedy, 58, who was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, the personal gift of the Queen, in 2003, will to be replaced by a campaign director who will report to the BITC chief executive, Stephen Howard. Tweedy will become a fund-raising vice-president alongside celebrity supporters Stephen Fry, Lord Mandelson, Joanna Lumley, Dame Diana Rigg, former Arts Council chairman Sir Gerry Robinson and Lord Puttnam.

Edward Elgar stretches his legs before him on the garden bench, his favourite pipe in his left hand, as he gazes over the Malvern Hills, “my beloved country”, that were his inspiration.

The garden belongs to the small cottage at Lower Broadheath, three miles from Worcester, where the composer was born in 1857, and though he only spent his first two years here he returned throughout his life. He wrote his first music as a teenager at the neighbouring farm where he and his siblings spent their summers.

But although the bronze by Jemma Pearson was commissioned in 2007 by the Elgar Foundation to mark the 150th anniversary of his birth, this small but respectable rural cottage has become more than a memorial to one of England’s greatest composers. It has developed into the primary source for studying the work as well as the life of the man whose music was seen to mirror the British character in the tumultuous first half of the 20th century.

Now, running a regular annual deficit and receiving no subsidy, the museum needs to avoid closure and on November 23 an appeal for £1m over three years is launched by the conductor Sir Mark Elder who is president of the Elgar Foundation, the charitable trust that owns the museum. “Only at the Elgar Birthplace Museum can you get close to Elgar, feel his presence and understand his work,” Elder said. “The museum’s existence as a centre of excellence for Elgar’s life and work is vital to the international world of music.”

The son of a piano tuner who later had a music shop in Worcester High Street, Elgar was the fourth in a family of seven children. Self-taught, his career began a gradual upward trajectory almost from the day he married his muse, Alice, at the age of 32. Recognition did not come for another ten years with the premiere of The Enigma Variations in 1899, and all his greatest works came in the next 20 years with Alice dying in 1920. By then he had world renown, was the confidant of royalty, and he eventually accrued four knighthoods, including “The 1st Baronetcy of Broadheath” as he styled himself.

When he died at home in Worcester in 1934 Elgar asked his daughter, Carice Elgar Blake, to create a memorial in the Broadheath cottage, then and now owned by the local authority. She endowed with many of Elgar’s own manuscripts, music, letters, recordings and photographs which over the years have been added to by purchases and gifts.

It opened in 1935 and no attempt was made to recreate the house as the toddler might have known it, there was no record. Instead, the house tells Elgar’s story through his own objects – his desk, his pens in the pen holder he made himself, a gramophone (“The gramophone… can bring into being a new public which shall understand music by playing great compositions adequately recorded” he prophesied, slightly pompously, in 1921), his pipes, his books. He was enthusiastic about his hobbies, golf, cycling, travel, scientific experiment – he invented a soap in his laboratory – and crossword puzzles.

In 2000 a new visitor centre was built to the north to ease the pressure on the cottage, controversially because it was seen as architecturally inharmonious. At its centre is a changing display taken from the large archive which tells of Elgar’s early life, the violin he played in local orchestras, the bassoon he played in his own wind quintet. His annotated music manuscripts are here as well as some of the wealth of correspondence, and his honours and decorations. Also in the centre is a shop, a room for meetings and small concerts, office space rented by the local authority which is now going through a cost-cutting exercise.

But with only a steady 10,000 annuals and miserly public transport services which mean a visit requires a car journey, the Elgar Birthplace Museum needs to expand its operation to survive, believes its director Catherine Sloan.

“We need to broaden its appeal by looking more widely at the social history surrounding Elgar,” she said. “We can’t look at this music in the context of the Great War, for instance. He loved the Malverns, but we forget there were quarries with explosions going off all the time and dust pollution which would have affected him. We ought to be able to look at what Worcester was like when he was growing up.”

Already, with funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts, there is to be a recasting of the visitor centre with more interactive displays and a café, and the delicate paper collections – including 10,000 letters and 200 original manuscripts – have been digitised to make access easier, but to expand further the museum needs to establish an endowment.

Secure storage capacity has to be enhanced, and an adjacent building is to become a new exhibition space. The museum wants to strengthen its acquisitions fund, and while it earns only a third of its costs from admissions, ticket costs need to be kept to a minimum if access is to be widened. Outreach and education programmes also need to be developed.

“Elgar wanted his music to be for the people,” Catherine Sloan said, “and we need safeguard our future if we are to make that dream come true.”

Simon Tait visits the 18th century artist’s house in Chiswick that has reopened after a £400,000 restoration

The portrait hanging in the hall of Hogarth’s House in Chiswick, West London, is not the famous self-portrait, that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. In this context, it is more significant.

This one is a copy, painted by a local bookbinder called John Leighton in the 1890s as part of a campaign to save the house from developers. It is a signifier for the local determination over two centuries of Chiswick residents, the latest manifestation of which is responsible for it opening on Tuesday, November 8, a couple of days before the painter’s 314th birthday. The picture was found by present day local volunteers – led by museum consultant Val Bott – in store, torn, its frame broken and badly in need of restoration and conservation.

£400,000 has been spent on restoring the cottage, £287,000 coming from the Heritage Lottery Fund, researching its original appearance and the families that lived here before and after the Hogarths, and refurbishing it so that it can reopen, free of admission charge.

The Queen Anne house was built in 1715 and bought and extended in 1749 by a newly prosperous Hogarth to be his “little country box by the Thames”, the last house in the village of Chiswick before the rolling fields and copses of Middlesex. The lane, now part of one of the busiest thoroughfares in the country where the Great West Road becomes the Hogarth Roundabout, was probably not even named. The house was known simply as North End, and all that is left of an orchard planted then is one crazily gnarled mulberry tree which has survived iron clamps, blight and even the Blitz. Hogarth and his wife Jane were to spend the summer months here for the next 15 years until his death aged 66. He is buried in St Nicholas churchyard nearby, the headstone legend written by his friend David Garrick.

Its acquisition was a mark of Hogarth’s arrival at the pinnacle of his career after an uncertain start. Self-taught, his father was a schoolmaster who opened a coffee shop in Clerkenwell where only Latin was to be spoken. It failed and he found himself bankrupt and in the Fleet while his wife supported a family of seven children by selling patent medicines. William was apprenticed to a silver plate engraver, and began to make a name for himself with book illustrations, most notably for Samual Butler’s Hudibras. He met James Thornhill, creator of the ceiling paintings in Greenwich’s Painted Hall, who introduced Hogarth to painting, and to his daughter with whom he eloped in 1729.

They were childless but Jane continued living here with her cousin, Mary Lewis, until her own death, and the family connection ended when Mary died in 1808. It was bought by Henry Carey, poet, cleric and associate of the Romantics. In the 1860s it was the home of a celebrated melodramatic actor, Newton Treen “Brayvo” Hicks, but it was falling into disrepair. The studio Hogarth built in the garden disappeared, and recent paint scrapings have revealed many layers of Victorian grime as well as paint.

The next door neighbour, a well-to-do printer, bought the house and restored it, but towards the end of the 19th century it was scheduled for redevelopment. A campaign by the artists and writers who had drifted to Chiswick in Hogarth’s wake mounted a campaign to save it, but failed. The house was put up for auction.

Happily, it was bought by a local magnate called Robert Shipway who restored it, collected the engravings to display on the walls, and had furniture made, copied from the engravings by the Chsiwick Artweorkers’ Guild. He even took the photographs for the first guide book, and opened the house to the public in 1904.

Shipway gave the house to the local authority in 1909, and it was kept by custodians who lived there rent-free provided they admitted the public when required. In 1940 it was badly damaged by a parachute mine, but was repaired and reopened in 1951.

In 1984 Hounslow Council, which still owns it, decided to sell the house and another local campaign was launched, this time by the local history society and Val Bott, who has guided the latest restoration. They won the day, and the house returned to being, effectively, a gallery for the display of Hogarth engravings. In 1997 Bott was called in again to fund-raise for a refurbishment to mark Hogarth’s tercentenary, but before long it needed more fundamental repair and recasting.

“Local people who came to events here told us they wanted more than serried ranks of framed prints on the wall, fascinating as they are,” Bott says. “They yearned to understand the place as a home, so we’ve presented the house so as to make sense of its building phases, and we’ve added some domestic details.”

She assembled a committee of local scholars, academics and specialists into a charitable trust to oversee the restoration, and they remain as an advisory council.

Much of Col. Shipway’s furniture has been reassembled, and crockery from the period has been acquired, mostly at the personal expense of the volunteers. Hogarth-related objects have been loaned by other museums around the country. A suit of clothes based on Hogarth’s own has been made to hang in his bedroom closet, and copies of some of his own books, such as his lavishly illustrated The Analysis of Beauty, published in 1753. There is an engraving plate from Hudibras, and, discovered discarded in a cupboard, the Latin primer Hogarth’s father had written and published in 1712. Bott found original shutters painted in at one of the first floor parlour windows.

The HLF funding has allowed the employment of an outreach officer, John Collins, who had been in post two weeks in 2009 when the half-complete refurbishment was set back by a freak electrical fire. “It’s been frustrating,” he says, “but it’s meant that we could do some important extra research for the new displays, and to connect the house with the community that has done so much to ensure its survival.”

By Simon Tait

An astrophysics program that uses the public to identify elements of the galaxy is to help thousands of amateur art lovers in compiling the largest online paintings catalogue in the world.

The works of art are the 200,000 oil paintings from public collections rarely if ever on show that the Public Catalogue Foundation (PCF), in partnership with the BBC, is putting on its new website, Your Paintings. The site was launched in June, but a unique “tagging” programme has been added that is being launched this month (September) to universities and schools as well as the general public.

“By looking at the paintings in detail,” said Andrew Ellis, director of the PCF, “taggers can help generate useful subject classifications for each work that wouldn’t occur to art historians, and give us important keyword information about people, places and events shown in paintings.

“Our challenge is that basic material – title, artist etc is just not sufficient to find one’s way around 200,000 paintings. What the public might search for may not be as simple ‘fashion between 1800 and 1825’, but it might be someone teaching a class of primary school children who wants red vibrant paintings that are abstract. Or something specific – Alsation dogs, top hats. If we can categorise the pictures in this way we can make them more easily searchable.”

The on-line technique of “crowd-sourcing” was perfected by the Oxford astrophysicists Arfon Smith and Chris Lintott who, in trying to map the galaxies, had millions of pieces of unconnected data. In 2007 they created the Citizens Science Alliance, a collaboration of scientists, software developers and educators, to put together an internet sweep that would glean the ordinary public’s assessment of some of the material, and encourage wider interest.

They launched Galaxy Zoo online and within 24 hours were receiving 70,000 new classifications an hour, and in a year had 50 million from 150,000 respondents. “Then we asked, could you go beyond astrophysics?” Dr Smith said, and adapted the programme, Ancient Lives (http://ancientlives.org/), to help archaeologists sifting the myriad papyri found at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Oxhyrynchus in the early 20th century, and including everything from private letters to lost gospels.

It was launched in July and to date 20,000 people have examined 130,00 unpublished papyri fragments providing over four million individual character transcriptions. They include a small piece from Thucydides, the 5th century BC historian, in which he explains how some Greeks turned to piracy as their main source of income, a poem lamenting a warm drink on a hot day, part of Plutarch’s dialogue on the Cleverness of Animals, and a Simonides fragment in which the 6th century BC poet explains the use of ice to cool wine.

The Public Catalogue Foundation is hoping for similar success in sourcing insights into the enormous but little seen national oil painting holdings. Since its beginning in 2003 the PCF, a charity, has published 33 volumes of pictures in UK public collections, county by county, many of them in store or in unconventional exhibition venues such as fire stations and town halls.

The PCF has joined forces with the Citizens Science Alliance, the art history department at Glasgow University and museums, galleries and art scholars around the country to devise the tagger and bring, it is hoped, thousands of non-experts to the project, giving extra information about each picture as it is tagged.

The programme takes visitors through easy preliminary steps, with the process becoming progressively more sophisticated as the taggers become more adept. They are asked to add their own remarks and impressions.

“I never know what is coming next, and it’s amazing to see how many pieces of art are held by corporations, councils, libraries, etc, across the UK,” said Vivienne Bradshaw, an early tagger. “At first I wondered if you needed to have specialist knowledge, but the information given made me realise that it was open to all. Time really flies and in no time I had tagged a dozen or so paintings. I tag at odd times really, whenever I think of it and have some spare time. I find that I am drawn to anything with really finely detailed costumes, especially ‘power’ portraits with their fine satin and silk gowns, jewellery, feathers, gloves, etc.
“William Etty is a painter whose work I have been introduced to by tagging. I look out for his paintings and spend a bit longer studying them before moving on.”

The project has a dual purpose, Ellis said, encourage viewers to spend more time absorbing pictures, and to fill in missing information. “What’s so striking,” he said, “is that it does encourage you to look at paintings for longer, and that’s a wonderful pleasure and greatly satisfying.
“While the range of knowledge in range of knowledge of the paintings is wide, there are gaps in the smaller collections and our guess is that 10% don’t have firm artists’ attributions, that’s 20,000 paintings,” he said. “Tagging will also allow people to make suggestions like the missing names of sitters, and I think we’ll get a lot of response over time.”

But time is limited, and the compiling of you’re your Paintings website, including tagging, is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2012.
http://www.thepcf.org.uk

The Times, 10/9/11

The once drab Norwegian town of Drammen has announced its rebirth by unveiling a spectacular centerpiece in the form of a £1.1m, 4m high walk-in water sculpture by the British artist William Pye.

It is the latest in a growing line of contemporary British art that is adorning foreign cities, begun by Barbara Hepworth with her Single Form outside the United Nations building in New York (1964), and Henry Moore’s massive Large Spindle Piece bronze in Jedda (1968).

Pye’s Water Pavilion in Norway follows Antony Gormley’s Habitiat in Anchorage, Alaska (2010); Richard Wilson’s Final Corner, commissioned by Fukuroi City, Japan, to mark the 2002 World Cup; Rachel Whiteread’s controversial Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna, also known as the Nameless Library (2000), and the extraordinary Cloud Gate in Millennium Park, Chicago, made by Anish Kapoor whose Leviathan is currently stunning Parisians as it occupies the whole of the Grand Palais exhibition hall. In Moscow’s Copernicus Centre, a kinetic artwork by the British collective known as Greyworld was installed last year. On Tuesday (June 1), high in the Austrian Alps, Gormley is to unveil his landscape piece, the 100 lifesize figures of Horizon Field, on Tuesday (June 21).

”Public sculpture is always a sensitive subject and a lot of it, like Bill Pye’s, is the result of public competition,” said Andrea Rose, the British Council’s head of visual art who has been responsible for placing many British artists’ work overseas. ”The fact that there is so much British sculpture abroad is down to the fact that we have so many world-class sculptors in Britain, and it’s the world-class bit that people are really after.”

Pye’s “Vannpaviljong”, to give it its Norwegian title, was unveiled by Dramman’s mayor, Tore Opdal Hansen, recently to mark the town’s 200th anniversary, but also the end of its renaissance. “This is the final piece after a 40 year building process” said Knut Smeby, chairman of the committee of Drammen businessmen that commissioned the piece, adding with a valiant attempt at British jargon, “It is the creaming of the cake top”.

About 40 miles from Oslo and Norway’s eighth largest conurbation, Drammen stands at the mouth of the Drammenselv river which flows into the Drammensfjord, and its timber and paper industries made it a prosperous and important centre. But by 1970, Smeby said, it was dying, “a place on the crossroads where no-one stopped”, with its new electronic and service economy still in its infancy, when it was decided to rebuild. It is now Norway’s eighth largest city and growing, with the unveiling of Vannpaviljong in the centre of the new Strømsø Square signalling the end of the multi-billion pound regeneration. “Bill Pye’s sculpture marks our moving on to the world map”, Smeby said.

Pye, 72, was one of 170 artists who answered an open international competition four years ago to create Drammen’s centrepiece, and emerged from a shortlist of five – against an American, a German and two Norwegians. It was to be the gift of Drammen’s business community to the city, and the theme was to be water.

“It was an anonymous selection process, but the Pye proposition simply stepped out at us as the one,” said Smeby. “It was dramatic, inventive and extremely appealing.”

Pye’s water sculptures have made him the most ubiquitous artist in London’s public spaces, but this was his biggest challenge. “I’ve never been asked to make a whole pavilion that you could walk into before, and the more I worked on it the more discoveries I made about the possibilities,” he said.

Admirers step into the pavilion though walls of water cascading over mirror-polished stainless steel walls while LED light add to the constant movement over the structure. At its centre above their heads is a double skin acrylic dome across which water pulses, the dome’s colour changing with the natural light. At their feet, “starbursts” of water like tidal geysers explode against glass tiles.

The huge piece was too large for Pye’s south London studio and had to be constructed in an industrial fabrication workshop in Dagenham. Transportation costs to Norway alone were more than £40,000.

“It has been one of the most complex projects I’ve done, and Drammen was wonderful to work with,” Pye said. “But like all public sculpture, the proof of how good it is will be in hindsight – how much the people like it.”

“British sculpture is in a period of real excellence which is shown by the way its admired and used all over the world,” said Anne Rawcliffe-King, director of the Royal Society of British Sculptors. “The reputation has grown by degrees, and it is characterised by the inventiveness and attention to detail as well as expertise our artists have show, and Bill Pye is at the forefront of them.”

High-flying civil servant who switched careers to make an enduring contribution to he arts in London

Richard Pulford, who has died after a long battle with pulmonary disease, twice made telling career leaps, first from a turbo-charged civil service career to arts management, and then from the subsidised to the private sectors, in all of which he showed a formidable capacity for assessing complex situations and seeing solutions. He brought this talent to bear most tellingly at the South Bank Centre and the confusion after the Great London Council (GLC), which ran it, was abolished. Most recently, as the chief executive of the Society of London Theatre, he was tackling the problems of post-9/11 tourism blight, ticketing anomalies and the decrepit state of some of our most beautiful theatres.

Born in the North East of England the son of a polytechnic principal, Pulford won a sholarship from the Royal Grammar School, Newcastle, to read law at Oxford, and after a year’s voluntary service in Africa (he was an enthusiastic traveller all his life) he joined the “fast track” of the civil service. In his 12-year Whitehall career he went from assistant principal to assistant secretary in the Education Department – at 33 the youngest to achieve the grade – with an intervening couple of years at the Treasury, and had in prospect the highest echelons when, at the age of 35, he left to become deputy to the secretary general of the Arts Council of Great Britain, Roy Shaw. His brief was to use his knowledge of the Education Department – then the funding ministry for the arts – to negotiate a better grant, but together they watched horrified as arts funding was shrunk by the Thatcher government. Shaw was a proponent of the partnership between education and the arts – “so long as educational inequalities exist, there is a case for especially encouraging those parts of our artistic and educational efforts which speak to the actual conditions of the potential audience,” he said – and was impressed by the like-minded young education bureaucrat with a passion for music (he was a keen pianist) and particularly for opera.

In 1984 the GLC was abolished, orphaning the Royal Festival Hall, the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Hayward Gallery and the Purcell Rooms. Combined as the South Bank Centre, they were transferred to a new board of governors under an executive chairman, Ronald Grierson, with Arts Council funding. It was decided to appoint two executive chiefs, Pulford as general director (administration) and Nicholas Snowman as general director (arts).

“It was complete chaos,” Snowman recalls. “All the different elements of the South Bank Centre had been run by different boards and Richard had to try to bring all the strands together in as contented a manner as possible, and he did it brilliantly”. True to beliefs nurtured in Whitehall and at the Arts Council, Pulford established an in-house education department at the South Bank, one of the first arts centres to do so.

In 1992 it was decided to change the governance of the South Bank with a single chief executive, Snowman, which gave Pulford the opportunity to pursue interests abroad. He became a cultural consultant to the governments of Bulgaria and Hungary of the post-communist era, as well as to the British Council, the Royal Opera House, the Wales Millennium Centre and the Arts Council itself.

The leap between the subsidised to the commercial arts sectors came in 2001 when he succeeded Rupert Rhymes as chief executive of the Society of London Theatre, and with it the Theatre Management Association which represents regional theatres, both membership organisations. High on his agenda for London were the state of the buildings and their surroundings, and of ticketing anomalies.

“The key issues are certainly how we can do something about the building stock, and how we can help to restore the image of the West End, both the theatrical image and the perceived nature of the West End as a place to be for agreeable social purposes,” he said in 2008. “Some people find it a bit intimidating, a bit scruffy”. He had to use his negotiating skills with both local and central government as well as theatre owners in London.

In 2004 a report from the Theatres Trust (of which Rhymes was by then chairman) had shown that the West End theatres needed at least £250m spent on them, well beyond the means of the owners, and together Pilfoird and Rhymes were proceeding towards bringing the Department for Culture Media and Sport to a pragmatic funding partnership. This was scuppered when the DCMS’s lottery income was diverted to the 2012 Olympic Games, “a baleful impact” Pulford said.

He confronted the complex problems of ticketing presented by computerised systems and touting partly by enhancing the activity of the Leicester Square cut-price ticket booth, renaming it TKTS, and opening a second in the suburbs at the Brent Cross Shipping Centre, turning them into legitimate agencies to complete with less accountable ones. Pulford mobilised an effective publicity campaign to beat an illicit ticket market.

Westminster Council was often an adversary on particular issues, such as the proposal to scrap free evening parking which he argued would be a “huge blow to the night-time economy”, and persuading the council to relax its ban on smoking on stage, which he argued was inappropriate artistic interference. He retired in 2010, but still chaired the opera panel of judges for SOLT’s Olivier Awards this year.

For four years until 2009 he was also president of the Performing Arts Employers League Europe, a forum representing 3,500 theatrical and production employers, and travelled regularly to campaign on such issues as visas and temporary work permits for theatre workers.

“He had silky skills of negotiation which meant it was impossible not to get on with him,” said the West End producer Nica Burns, president of SOLT for Pulford’s last three years there. “There were a lot of younger producers coming into the West End who didn’t know the rules, and Richard always knew the right moment for a judicious lunch. There were many industrial negotiations to be done between managements and unions such as Equity, the Musicians Union and BECTU, and Richard was brilliant at bringing sides together without taking any side himself.”

He is survived by his brother, Frank, and sister, Jane Allison.

Richard Pulford, civil servant and arts administrator, was born on July 14, 1944. He died of pulmonary disease on August 7, 2011, aged 67.

The recent fallout at the Poetry Society has brought the whole issue of governance, crucial to any arts organisation’s future, back to the forefront, says Simon Tait

The sudden implosion of the venerable Poetry Society, one of the Arts Council’s favourite clients, has brought back into focus an issue which had shifted from the arts sector’s gaze: governance, and the relationships of board and executive in arts organisations.
And last week Arts Council England’s appointed its first director of organisational leadership and development with a team whose job it will be to give clients like the Poetry Society guidance on how to steer their businesses with excellence and stability. Governance will be a large part of her remit.
Last month a spat escalated and brought the resignation of the Poetry Society’s director. This led to the entire board standing down because they hadn’t seen it coming, they had lost touch with the executive. ACE, which had offered an extra £100,000 funding for next year against the trend of cuts, has temporarily suspended its grant because of what it sees as a spectacular collapse of the organisation’s governance. “We have made it very clear to the society what it needs to do, as a matter of urgency, in order to re-establish compliance with the terms of its current funding agreement – particularly in the areas of governance, management and leadership, reputational risk and reasonable care,” the ACE spokeswoman said.
Governance had been seen as vital to any arts organisation’s future, but as an issue it had been overshadowed by the suddenly more urgent funding crisis. In the 80s, at a time of great change in cultural subsidy when funding was shrinking, arts and heritage organisations were encouraged to find alternative income sources and looked to corporate sponsorship. It was an ethical shock for many of them, but several were successful quite quickly, and to help them many recruited business leaders to their boards, encouraged by Arts & Business.
In the 90s these business appointees began to find themselves at the head of many boards, most of them either charities or companies limited by guarantee – and while some guided their organisations skillfully and harmoniously, others tried to impose their business style on boards unprepared for the City approach. There were some serious fallings out, with the directors of both the National Maritime Museum and the National Gallery moving on after clashes between chairman and CEO. In 2005, the chairman of English National Opera – a financial services millionaire who had personally brought considerable cash to the company – fired the artistic director, the second he had personally sacked, and appointed successors without an interview process, strictly against the rules for a subsidised company. It brought calls for his own resignation from luminaries as varied as the novellist Jeanette Winterson and the singer Philip Langridge, and he duly stood down.
Boards, how they work with the executive and how confrontations between the two can be obviated, became a major issue. It featured in the Arts Council’s own debacle over its 2007-8 investment programme in which it had found governance failings among some regularly funded organisations. Tellingly, ACE’s then new chief executive, Alan Davey, said in an interview: “There are lots of good boards about, but some boards see their job as managing financial risk only and not enabling artistic risk”.
A year later the ACE’s Cultural Leadership Programme took it up and organised a conference on the issue which identified key questions – like should a chairman be a visionary, a facilitator or a leader? how do you overcome board conflict? who owns the company vision, the chief executive or the board?
It became part of the CLP’s Meeting the Challenge programme, which is now to be taken on by the new ACE leadership director, Ginny Spittle, brought in from the private sector to inject an element of business reality into arts board thinking and to “maintain the interactive continuum” within the arts.
Meanwhile, for the last four years the Clore Leadership Programme has been running its own board development advisory service, with training days not just for potential board members but for CEOs and sitting chairs, to help them challenge perceptions and “harness creativity and clarity of thought; and to realise the aspirations for their organisation”. Theirs is a popular programme which is sold out as soon as each new prospectus is announced, and the Clore will be working closely with Ginny Spittle, says its director, Sue Hoyle.
But, she says, it’s going to be harder for boards now to get the balance Davey wants between financial stability and bringing on “the surprising and the new”. The Arts Council’s £40m Catalyst fund has been devised to encourage boards to find other sources of income using the tried, tested and discarded (by politicians) Arts & Business ploy of matching funding.
There may, however, be an object lesson in an organisation that started life as the gleam in the eye of the millionaire toymaker, Sir Torquil Norman, and no subsidy at all, which this summer is celebrating five years since it opened. The Roundhouse’s board is an extraordinary mix of professionals who have in common their devotion to the mission of giving young people from difficult histories the better future they go there to find. Norman was the first chairman, succeeded by Travelex’s Lloyd Dorfman and this year by Chris Satterthwaite, chief executive of Chime Communications.
He was interviewed for the job, as were four others, after having been headhunted by a committee chaired by Nick Allott, the West End producer and long-standing board member, which vets all prospective board members. Others include the ex-UBS chief Alan Hodson; Wayne McGregor, the choreographer; Baroness Ginny McIntosh, ex-RSC/National Theatre; TV Dragon Deborah Meaden; EMI’s UK president Andria Vidler; the former cabinet member and arts minister Estelle Morris.
Unusually and controversially for some who think this practice is a blurring of distinction between policy-making and strategy (and has to have the Charity Commission’s approval), the Roundhouse’s chief executive and artistic director, Marcus Davey, is a full member of the board, not merely there to report and be given the board’s decisions.
“We’re made to feel a genuine part of the place and its spirit,” Estelle Morris says. “There are big bands in the main space, but in the little theatre there are teenage bands just starting off, the same age as the audience. I went to listen, and there was Torquil – I was 30 years older than rest of them, he was 50 years older, and nobody thought it was strange.”

[Box 1]
“To be successful, organisations need a combination of effective executive leadership and good governance: that’s why I view board development as a vital part of our work in strengthening leadership in the cultural sector.”
Sir John Tusa, Chair, Clore Leadership Programme.

[Box 2]

The 2009 Cultural Leadership Programme’s key questions about governance:
Who owns the vision, the board or CEO?
How can the board remain informed and keep an independence of mind?
Should the chair be a visionary, a facilitator or a leader?
How do you overcome conflict at board level?

By Simon Tait

The fall in the number of courses for the young has caused dismay

Some astute property management by the wife of a medieval goldsmith is helping to ensure the future of his craft, more than six centuries after his death.

Robert Harding, or Hardyng, had a long and prosperous life, living to be almost 80 mixing his craft as a goldsmith with property dealing, and holding property in Surrey and Essex, and possibly Kent, Norfolk and Buckinghamshire, as well as in the City. In 1489 he was Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths’ Company, and in 1498 he was elected a Sheriff of the City. He died in 1503.

Agas, or Agnes, Harding was his widow and in her will of 1514 she left a small bequest to the Company in her husband’s memory, a plot of land between Shoe Lane and Fetter Lane, just north of Fleet Street. Leaseholders developed the land, putting tenements and gardens on it in the mid-17th century when New Street was created.

After the Great Fire of 1666 the neighbourhood became a lively trading area and in the 19th century printers, publishers and newspapers settled around the Harding bequest. Now it is called New Street Square, 700,000 square feet of office and retail space in five buildings, worth £17.5m.

This is the source of the funding that is creating the Goldsmiths’ Centre and Institute, that will open not far away in Clerkenwell in October. A charitable enterprise, it is the company’s biggest single investment in its 700 year history and its most important educational initiative since it founded Goldsmiths’ College in New Cross in 1891. “The company has watched with dismay the rapid reduction in the number of courses available to young people wanting to make a career in the sector,” said Martin Drury, chairman of the new centre’s trustees, a former director general of the National Trust and a recent Prime Warden of the Goldsmiths. ”The vocational courses the polytechnics offered have closed and no pre-apprenticeship courses in silversmithing and jewellery are now offered in the London metropolitan area.”

The centre’s director, Peter Taylor – an enamellist by training who set up the Jewellery Industry Innovation Centre in his home city of Birmingham ten years ago – is determined to reverse the trend, with layers of operations on the five floors.

The centre, partly in a listed Victorian board school, Eagle Court, and partly on the site a 1960s cookery school, is in a district that had become a Dickensian slum at the time newspapers were beginning to populate Robert Harding’s bequest. The land, behind Farringdon Station, is owned by the London Development Agency which is anxious to revive the area. The Goldsmiths have a 125 year lease with an option on the freehold, and the new centre will open in October.

Standing on the edge of the Hatton Garden jewellery quarter and in the traditional watchmaking neighbourhood of London, the institute within the centre will provide pre-apprenticeship training in silversmithing, jewellery-making and design in fully-equipped workshops. Eight to ten young people aged between 16 and 19 will be employed for a year, and the course will act as a feeder for the Goldsmiths’ own apprenticeship scheme.

It will also offer an intense one or two year course in professional design for post-graduates, as well as short courses for established goldsmiths. Other workshops will be available for hire at affordable rents by craftspeople just setting up business. Too many fail in their early years because of the cost of rents in suitable centres the idea is that that the proximity of commercial and educative operations would be mutually beneficial. “We will get them involved in the educational aspects by offering them rebates on their rents if they help with the teaching,” Taylor said, “so that we will create a community, not just a facility”.

The centre will also have exhibition space and conference facilities available for hire, and a publicly accessible café, raising revenue which will be ploughed back into the fully independent centre.

The initiative is a radical departure for the Goldsmiths who have preserved a non-interventionist policy, said Peter Taylor, until the growing paucity of properly trained jewellery and precious metal craftspeople demanded a more direct response.

“The unique nature of our membership combined with our history and financial resources means that we are the only organisation that is in the position to make this bold step,” he said. “We believe that the Goldsmiths’ Institute will be uniquely equipped to take on this challenge and to respond to the serious issues faced within craft and design education for our sector.”

As new ways of funding the arts are explored, Simon Tait explains the concept and impact of venture philanthropy and the financial advantages of such an approach

Fiery Dragons, the new West End producer, is being seen as the embodiment of a mysterious new funding model, venture philanthropy. Led by a high octane triumvirate of producers and entrepreneurs, Luke Johnson, Raymond Gubbay and Edward Snape, it corrals theatre angels who, historically, almost never see a return on their investments but happily lay out for the joy of making theatre happen, and most of their ventures fail. These dragons will add their investment expertise and producing nous to the mix, and the proof might be in its first production, The Ladykillers, in November.

But is it venture philanthropy?

The ungainly phrase – it could be worse, it is also known as “philanthrocapitalism” – was born in the United States in the mid-90s and is becoming more familiar here, through the charity sector. It is has begun to emerge in cultural circles thanks to Arts & Business and its chief executive Colin Tweedy who have been quietly promoting it.

Its meaning in the arts is obscure, though, and is not measurable yet. At first, it seems to be no more than a new portmanteau for a number of familiar sponsorship nuances. It might mean giving to a cause to enable it to become more self-supporting; or investing in a charitable concern that has resonances in one’s own business; it might be personal, collective or even corporate giving as long as there is no immediate benefit to the philanthropist; perhaps it is giving no money at all, just one’s skills that have a particular relevance to the beneficiary.

Confusing, but it becomes a more definable when you go back to its non-cultural origins.

The Nationalist Venture Capital Association, based in Arlington, Virginia, says venture philanthropy “focuses on leadership, bold ideas, developing strong teams, active board involvement, and long-term investment”, but on behalf of not-for-profit organisations. In this country, the banner has been flourished by the Impetus Trust, founded eight years ago and entirely self-financing.

Amy Stillman, Impetus’s director of communications and development, said the trust has a three-component model: core funding s; hands-on management support; and pro-bono expertise below board level. “What we haven’t done,” Stillman told The Stage, “is to address the arts and culture – yet”.

Theatre’s angels and dragons stand on a different plinth, as Paul Taiano, chairman of the Central School of Speech and Drama and an accountant who specialises in the theatre, explains. Attempts have been made for years to concentrate individual investment in productions, and Sally Greene’s Old Vic Productions has over 100 productions under its belt in its 18 years, including Billy Elliot the Musical.

But, says Taiano, it hasn’t had the success it might have had, and might yet have. Because Fiery Dragons has been born to take advantage of the new Enterprise Investment Scheme rules that came into force in April: investors paying tax at 50% can claim 30% a year, up from 20%, back on investments of up to £500,000.

“The concept of the angels still exists, but you get minimal relief for any losses,” Taiano says. EIS is safer, and even with a flop you need lose only 35p in the pound. It takes three years for a company – or production – to qualify for EIS status so considerable advance judgement comes into play, yet more producers are looking at the possibility and Taiano himself is working with ACT Productions on a portfolio of four EIS shows. It maybe venture, he says, but the endgame is profit, so it is not philanthropy.

For Colin Tweedy, the advance of venture philanthropy has been a creeping progression which began with A&B posting volunteer business people on arts boards, and it has progressed so that, for instance, Paul Ruddock has taken his acumen as a hedge fund financier to the chairmanship of the V&A, and several million pounds. Or Michael Hintze, another hedge fund magnate, who among things rescued Wandsworth Museum and recast its business plan as well as giving £2m.

There paradigms emerging of venture philanthropy in the arts that fit the Impetus criteria, though they probably would not recognize the label.

Sky Arts launched its Ignition programme in April, worth more than £1m over three years in which the channel will collaborate with six organisations to create new works of visual art, with how best to broadcast the arts a major part of the programme. With it, the Sky Arts Ignition Future Fund will offer five individuals bursaries of £30,000 each to help them move from art college to becoming full-time artists.

John Cassy, who was the Sky Arts director until recently moving on to head up Sky’s 3D operation, launched Ignition. “The arts are thriving creatively in the UK but money is tight, so if we can do our bit to help create new works and give them a platform, we’ll be happy,” he said.

For Tweedy, however, the thinking is being put into practice by arts foundations and charities like Hamlyn, Jerwood, Sainsbury, and particularly the Gulbenkian Foundation which last month launched its performance participation scheme. This offers £175,000, the biggest single arts award in the world, to “help artists develop the gleams in their eyes and bring them to reality”, in the words of the director, Andrew Barnett.

Awarded to National Theatre Wales just this month – Gulbenkian won’t tolerate words like “win” because, they say, there is no competition – after a painstaking process of recommendation by experts around the country, sifting, whittling and reassessing, NTW will get £75,000 to research and develop a street theatre project with Cardiff Bay Somali poets and musicians, and another £100,000 to put it on in 2013. They plan another four such grants in the succeeding years, and at least one of those considered this time will be nurtured by the foundation for a possible future grant.

“We were keen to do something that covers the social and cultural breadth of the foundation and at the same time supports and works with arts organisations to stretch their practice in new ways that could inform the way in which the arts are practiced in the UK,” Barnett said. “We wanted to take an approach that was innovative, moving beyond the mere transaction of writing a cheque but working with them from the beginning to explore different practices. But key is the insistence on uncompromisingly high artistic standards.”

That, says Colin Tweedy, is venture philanthropy, and if its real nature is obscured by other initiatives, it can only grow. “It is,” Tweedy says, “simply unstoppable”.

[box]

THE IMPETUS MODEL

1. Strategic funding
 Long-term core funding to allow beneficiaries build their capacity, which can be used as leverage or additional funding from co-investors.

2. Hands-on management support
An investment team with consulting, financial and voluntary-sector experience goes hands-on to support the beneficiary’s CEO.

3. Specialist expertise
Experts volunteer their skills to specific, agreed, requirements in the beneficiary organization – senior management team coaching, for instance, or financial planning.

The biggest art prize in the world is launched tomorrow, with a shortlist of potential winners that is almost certain to cause controversy. Called simply the Gulbenkian, the £175,000 award is worth more than four times the Turner Prize and outstrips the US-based ArtPrize, previously the world’s largest, at $250,000 (£153,000).

Announcing the award exclusively in this newspaper, Andrew Barnett, the UK director of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, said: “We want to help artists develop the gleams in their eyes.” But the award is likely to excite much comment. Entrants shortlisted for the first award include a bonfire night spectacle involving street drinkers; a surreal world in which humans and animals change place; young Somalis in a poetry drama on Cardiff’s dockside; an interactive virtual version of a Brecht/Weill opera; Shetlanders tinkering with cars; and a London indoor and outdoor mass cycle ride.
The winner will have two years to develop their idea before it is presented in 2013. And while the chosen works are unusual, the aim of the prize is to produce high-quality arts projects that involve the public, its organisers say. They cite La Machine, the giant robotic spider that crawled all over the hearts and imaginations of Liverpool in its year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, or One and Other, Antony Gormley’s cross between sculpture and theatre on Trafalgar Square’s empty Fourth Plinth in the summer of 2009.
Set up in 1956 by the energy baron Calouste Gulbenkian, the foundation promotes culture and education throughout Europe, so the six shortlisted works also need to have a social purpose and pioneer new ways of reaching the disadvantaged. “It sounds very worthy,” said Simon Mellor, general director of the Manchester International Festival and one of the award’s advisers, “but what we’re looking for is something spectacular that will have real resonance”.
Perhaps the most controversial is Duckie, an anarchic theatre group based in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, just over the Thames from Tate Britain, which wants to work with Graham House, a “wet hostel” for street drinkers, to create a choreographed performance around a Guy Fawkes bonfire. The work would address addiction, homelessness and desperation in front of an audience of around 4,000.
The Truro company Wildworks – in the news at Easter when it worked with National Theatre Wales to present The Passion in Port Talbot, South Wales, with the actor Michael Sheen – is proposing what its artistic director Bill Mitchell calls “a surreal mythic world” bringing together rural and urban communities in Cornwall and London.
NTW is also shortlisted, with a proposal aimed at giving the young poets and playmakers of the long-established Somalis of Butetown, once Cardiff’s Tiger Bay, their moment.
National Theatre Scotland’s entry reflects on the irony of Shetland once being rich in air-poisoning oil. Graham Vick and his Birmingham Opera want to turn Brecht and Weill’s political satire Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny into a multi-participant online production examining the survival of the soul in a virtual world. The Young Vic will fill its neighbourhood, near Waterloo station in London, with enthusiastic cyclists recreating the Chinese film Beijing Bicycle.
The prize’s first recipient will be announced early in June. “We want to take an approach that’s innovative,” Mr Barnett said, “moving beyond the mere transaction of writing a cheque and working with them from the beginning to explore different practices.”
He added that he hoped the Gulbenkian will inform the Arts Council, as it rethinks how it will spend the extra £50m a year expected via the Government’s rejigging of the National Lottery in favour of good causes.