The Arts Council Collection: 80 years of the ‘museum without walls’

When the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner first arrived in the UK from Nazi Germany in 1933, he noted with surprise the inferiority complex the English had about their aesthetic capabilities. Once the bastion of such revolutionary painters as J.M.W. Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites, England had become something of a backwater. Most of the innovations in modern art were happening in Paris and Berlin.

This changed in the post-war period. After the election of a Labour government in 1945, Prime Minister Clement Attlee introduced a radical social policy to construct a welfare system that would be the envy of the world. As well as building libraries and sports centres, and founding the National Health Service, the government proposed an organisation that would support the arts and encourage cultural unity. Its founding chair, the economist John Maynard Keynes, was determined that the newly named Arts Council of Great Britain — later divided into separate bodies for England, Scotland and Wales — would be independent, in order to prevent what had happened in Nazi Germany, where the arts were scrutinised and censored in the name of the regime’s ruthless ideology.

In a speech in 1946, Keynes encapsulated the organisation’s radical philosophy: the task of the Arts Council, he said, was not ‘to teach or to censor, but to give courage, confidence and opportunity’. He considered art to be something incalculable: it could not be confined or measured, and should be available to all who wanted it. Most importantly, he stressed art’s autonomy from the state: ‘The arts,’ he said, ‘owe no vow of obedience.’

The British government’s investment in the arts achieved results far more quickly than anticipated. The Institute of Contemporary Arts was established in 1946 to provide a centre for cutting-edge art, with its first exhibitions championing the European avant-garde, including Picasso, Matisse and Giacometti. It also brought attention to work from Africa and Polynesia. The Arts Council supported the 1951 Festival of Britain, a source of great national pride, and commissioned sculptures and paintings. It even awarded a cash prize to a young painter named Lucian Freud.

British artists began to be recognised abroad for their unique styles — most notably the jagged, brutish constructions of the ‘geometry of fear’ sculptors led by Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler, and the raw, ‘kitchen sink’ style promoted by the painters John Bratby and Jack Smith. By 1952, British artists were winning prizes at the Venice Biennale. Keynes’s wish that artists would ‘walk their several ways as they once did and learn to develop something different from their neighbours and characteristic of themselves’ seemed to have come true.

Meanwhile, the Arts Council Collection, known as the ‘museum without walls’, was created to support living artists and to champion experimental art. ‘For 80 years, the Arts Council has been collecting the work of emerging artists, often long before they were recognised,’ says Sir Nicholas Serota, chair of Arts Council England. ‘This far-sighted support for artists has created a great national collection that is shown in galleries and museums, large and small, across the country, reaching audiences that would otherwise rarely see the art of our time.’

The collection celebrates its 80th anniversary this summer, and to mark the occasion, Christie’s in London is presenting an exhibition of some of its highlights. In Close Encounters: Figuration, Painting and Landscape in the Arts Council Collection, paintings by David Hockney and Peter Doig will appear alongside new acquisitions by Christina Kimeze and Vanessa Raw. ‘We are excited to showcase one of the most significant and forward-thinking public collections of modern and contemporary British art,’ says Tessa Lord, head of Post-War and Contemporary Art at Christie’s in London.

‘This non-profit institution, owned by the nation, has such a wide social impact,’ says Marie-Louise Chaldecott, Christie’s Client Advisory director. ‘It’s an honour for Christie’s to be associated with it and to help contribute to its goals.’

For Alona Pardo, director of the Arts Council Collection, the exhibition is a chance to reaffirm its founding mission: ‘to support living artists and ensure world-class British art is accessible to everyone’. Close Encounters, she says, is ‘a thoughtfully curated display that traces the history of the collection, drawing connections between historic works and contemporary practice’.

The collection holds more than 8,500 works, by artists such as Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth and Hew Locke. In its entirety, it reveals the changing artistic, social and political landscape of Britain over the past 80 years. Close Encounters will feature several groundbreaking works, including Sonia Boyce’s four-panel painting Lay back, keep quiet and think of what made Britain so great (1986), which depicts some of the ex-colonies of the British Empire against a backdrop of William Morris wallpaper, highlighting the contradictions of a country that championed socialist thinking but continued its oppressive imperialist regime. She is joined by Turner Prize nominees Claudette Johnson and Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who have reshaped the language of representation and resistance in contemporary art. There are also works by Michael Armitage and Suleman Aqeel Khilji, which consider the role of landscape painting in the psyche of memory and displacement.

Close Encounters: Figuration, Painting and Landscape in the Arts Council Collection opens on 3 June 2026 to coincide with London Gallery Weekend (5-7 June), and runs until 23 June alongside the Post-War to Present sales view. It reveals just how far Keynes’s vision ‘to breed a spirit, to cultivate an opinion, to offer a stimulus’ has taken the country.

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