Tate Gallery Given $6.5 Million to Buy American Works of Art

A British businessman in New York has given $6.5 million to buy American paintings and sculptures for the Tate Gallery, the state art museum announced today.

The anonymous donation is the second largest to the Tate after the $13.6 million given by Britain’s Clore Foundation in 1980 to house the works of J. M. W. Turner.

The Tate said the gift will be invested to establish an American Fund for the Tate Gallery and the income from it used for purchasing.

“It’s a marvelous gift and we shall be buying modern works,” said Sir Alan Bowness, director of the Tate, which houses the national collection of British art and modern foreign art.

The Tate owns the most important collection of American 20th-Century art of any museum outside the United States. It includes six paintings by Jackson Pollock, 13 by Mark Rothko and major works by Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

“We have a good collection of American abstract Expressionism but we have nothing by Edward Hopper or Georgia O’Keeffe, for instance,” Bowness said.

“The relatively high cost of American art has made it difficult to continue to add to the collection, and with the American Fund we hope to make at least one major acquisition each year,” the director said.

He said the donor is an art collector who has lived for many years in New York and wants to remain anonymous.