Gallery strikes a canny bargain
Fiachra Gibbons, arts correspondent
The Scots have long tried to live down a reputation for extreme caution in matters pecuniary. But even by the standards of proverbial Caledonian canniness, the deal done by the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art for a large collection of the art of Joseph Beuys was heroic bargaining.
The gallery has managed to bag a large slice of the output of the artist who, after Andy Warhol, was arguably the most influential of late last century, for £605,000 - hardly enough to buy you the pickled hind quarters of a Damien Hirst. The drawings, lithographs, photographs, books and sculptures amount to a third of the German artist's multiples, editionalised versions of his works he produced to bring his art to the widest public. Beuys' creations often sell from between £2m and £3m - sums which would have maddened the man who declared "everyone is an artist". The gallery, however, negotiated a remarkable deal with the artist's friend Jurg Schellmann, who had amassed more than 200 of the multiples. The Art Fund and the Heritage Lottery Fund pitched in with £300,000 between them to seal it. Keith Hartley, who is curating a show of the collection which opens at the Edinburgh gallery today, said the works gave a near complete spectrum of Beuys' work. Beuys has become a guiding light to the past two generations of artists, elevating such materials as fat, felt and rags, and pioneering "actions" which brought art out of the galleries. The Edinburgh collection includes one of his felt suits. Beuys, a pilot during the second world war, claimed to have survived his bomber crashing only because nomadic Tartars covered his burned body in fat and wrapped him in felt. Although Mr Hartley conceded the story had little basis in fact, it held a metaphorical truth for an artist who had lived through some of the worst horrors of the 20th century. Beuys, who died in 1985, worked regularly in Scotland.