In october 1970 The Burlington Magazine published an Editorial announcing the formal establishment of the Tate Archive.(1) Although warmly welcoming the initiative, it lamented that Tate ‘has woken up to its obligations almost too late. Nowadays American universities are prepared to pay large sums for the archives of modern British art and the Tate has no funds for purchase’. Fifty years on, such misgivings will seem a distant memory to anyone who visits the display that opened in the Marie-Louise von Motesiczky Archive Gallery at Tate Britain last month to celebrate the archive’s fiftieth anniversary.(2) The representative selection put together by the Archivist, Adrian Glew, and his team provides an absorbing taste of what has become, in the words of the archive’s mission statement, ‘a public research collection, focusing on 20th-century British art’, which ‘acts as the national repository documenting fine art practice in the UK’.

The collection now reaches back chronologically far beyond ‘modern British art’ – among the older items on show are important John Constable documents – and extends well beyond material made, written or owned by British artists, or by artists who lived and worked in the country. As well as documenting the activities of collectors and writers on art, it contains the records of dealers, commercial galleries and a great number of the societies and institutions that have contributed to the culture of British art, from frame makers to funding bodies. Within that breadth there are several areas, described by the archive as ‘centres of excellence’, where it collects in great depth, notably Bloomsbury, Surrealism, St Ives and emigré artists. All these subjects are strongly represented in the exhibition’s decade-by-decade survey of the British art world since 1900. There is material relating to the Omega Workshops, including a dinner menu designed by Vanessa Bell or Duncan Grant (does anyone still possess the recipe for Potage Alpha?), a photograph of Salvador Dalí in his diving suit at the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition at New Burlington Galleries, London, Naum Gabo’s experimental photographs of light reflections made at St Ives in 1941 and the typescript for a broadcast by the Jamaican-born artist Ronald Moody recalling his first impressions of Britain in the 1920s.

There is much material relating to people who merit further research. The sculptor Eva Dorothy Allan, who in 1929 adopted the name Julian Phelps Allan to counter misogynistic prejudice, is represented not only by photographs of her work but also by the medals for her service in both world wars, which she donated to the Tate. A war record of a different type is the subject of a display relating to the first director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), Ewan Phillips, who as one of the ‘Monuments Men’ organised the return of thousands of confiscated church bells to their original homes all over Europe. It is striking how often the material illuminates links between the visual arts and the wider cultural world: Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes among the Bloomsbury material, for example, textile design in the E.Q. Nicholson archive, or inter-war jazz in the record collection of Edward Burra. Room has also been found for off-beat items, such as the catalogue for an exhibition of chimpanzee art curated by Desmond Morris at the ICA in 1957 and a 1980s computer keyboard owned by the writer David Sylvester, an early adopter of new technology (unfortunately the hard drive of the computer itself proved unsalvageable). There are also quite a few ‘If only I’d been there’ moments, notably a 1962 receipt by David Hockney for £50 paid by the dealer John Kasmin for two paintings.

Despite the Burlington’s fear that the Tate Archive had been started too late, in at least two important ways it was well in advance of the main collections. In 1970 the Tate did not officially collect photographs, yet the archive quickly established an enormous collection. It has over 100,000 that are classified as ‘documentary’ – such as photographs of artists at work or of exhibitions – but many others, by such artists as Eileen Agar, Nigel Henderson or Paul Nash, that might once have seemed ‘documentary’ now seem firmly to be works of art. Similarly, decades before Tate had a curator for performance art the archive collected material recording performance – an especially evocative item in the present exhibition is the fragment of a Biba dress worn by Yoko Ono for Cut piece, her contribution to the 1966 ‘Destruction in art’ series of events organised in London by Gustav Metzger, in which members of the audience were given scissors to cut pieces off her clothing.

Until the pandemic struck, the archive and Tate’s library were together receiving some 20,000 researchers a year and lending around 1,000 items annually to exhibitions. The curtailment of such activities is partly compensated for by the archive’s well-developed programme of digitisation, which now extends to over 65,000 items. These include examples from its collection of over nine hundred artists’ sketchbooks, digitised as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund’s ‘Archives and Access’ project. Cataloguing has continued through the lockdown and to date an impressive seventy per cent of the archive is fully catalogued. The archive also continues to support research, notably through Tate’s Arts and Humanities Research Council Collaborative Doctoral Partnership. Among current archive-based projects are PhDs based on the collections of the artist and author Ithell Colquhoun and the Kolkata-born collector Nimai Chatterji.

In 1970 the Burlington stated that the growth of the archive will depend on the ‘good will and generosity of artists, dealers, collectors and their relatives and friends’. This remains true: in any year around three quarters of acquisitions are gifts or are offered in lieu of tax (the route that brought Kenneth Clark’s papers to the archive, for example). The other quarter consists of purchases, funded by Tate Members and Patrons or paid for through Tate’s acquisitions budget – among the items on display in the exhibition is an example of Edward Burne-Jones’s correspondence with Agnes Graham, bought at auction last year. The archive has also benefited from generous charitable grants. Its creation was supported by the Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Charitable Trust and the spacious reading room it has shared since 2002 with Tate’s library was paid for by the Hyman Kreitman family as part of a project that brought the archive and library collections, previously scattered across six locations, into one well-fitted out store on the ground floor of Tate Britain. Such philanthropic support will be ever more important in a post-covid world, whenever that comes to pass. For the moment, the sight of the catalogues and private-view cards in the archive’s exhibition is a poignant reminder of what we are missing.

 1. ‘Editorial: The Tate Archive’, THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, 112 (1970), p.655.

2. Tate Archive is 50 (12th October–autumn 2021).