THE HISTORY OF the Contemporary Art Society provides a microcosm of British taste and collecting within the context of a broad range of modern art during the last hundred years. The Society began as a small group of ‘amateurs’ and collectors who met informally in a private house in London in spring 1909 and was launched under its present name a year later. Since those tea-party beginnings it has grown to become a highly professional organisation, its tentacles reaching throughout England and Scotland by way of its acquisitions, commissioned works and advisory role to public and corporate collections. Its centenary is being celebrated this year with numerous events and exhibitions, providing an opportunity to look at its achievements past and present.

Like most such societies, the CAS emerged out of a mood of discontent, much in the same way as did the National Art-­Collections Fund, founded a few years earlier (in fact the CAS was first envisaged as a junior branch of the NACF which at that time did not concern itself with recent art). It was felt that in the previous century ‘little or no attempt was made to secure for the nation any vital contemporary painting which has stood the test of time’1 and that the Society, through a fund raised from subscriptions and donations, would buy works by ‘modern’ artists to lend or give to national and regional public collections. It should be remembered that most public collections bought new art, if at all, from the annual summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy, at that time notably restricted in what it regarded as contemporary art. The early committee members lamented the fact that even well-established, middle-aged artists, such as Wilson Steer, Walter Sickert and William Rothenstein, were unrepresented in museums and galleries. On the first committee we find the usual suspects from the Edwardian art world – particularly a Burlington contingent that included Charles Holmes and Roger Fry (both also painters) – and quite soon several art-loving grandees were appointed, notably the first President, Lord Howard de Walden, who combined generous patronage of the arts with competitive motorboat racing. He gave the Society a princely one hundred pounds each year; the modest annual subscription was one guinea at which it remained for several decades. It soon became established that a single buyer would be appointed for a twelve-month period in which to acquire works on the Society’s behalf by ‘living or recently deceased artists’. The very first purchase (by committee) was Augustus John’s Smiling woman, a spectacular full-length portrait of a gypsified Dorelia John, given to the Tate Gallery in 1917. Artists of the New English Art Club and the Camden Town Group were predominant in the first two or three years, a taste crowned by the purchase of Sickert’s Ennui in 1914, given ten years later to the Tate. The paintings and sculpture did not languish in a storeroom but were frequently on view in touring exhibitions (Liverpool, Sheffield, Leicester and, in 1918, in Zürich). Propaganda went hand in hand with philanthropy.

By the 1920s the Society was firmly established, its purchases well mannered rather than risky. It was intimately connected to the Tate Gallery (where it had its headquarters for many years) and it enriched museums across the country which had little or no acquisition funding. It began to organise members’ visits to private collections, a valuable feature of programming to this day. In the interwar period, it should be remembered, there were relatively few private dealers specialising in contemporary art; buyers for the Society relied on the Leicester Galleries, the Lefevre, the Redfern and the Mayor Gallery and on the selling exhibitions of the London Group.

The CAS was not solely concerned with British art. A Prints and Drawings fund was set up in 1918, administered by Campbell Dodgson of the British Museum, with a special emphasis on foreign art; it was through this that examples by many French artists entered public collections in Britain for the first time – drawings by Degas, Gauguin, Rodin, Vlaminck and Picasso were early purchases. European art also came to British public collections, where it was thin on the ground, through bequests administered by the CAS. In 1933, for example, Frank Stoop left works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Matisse, Picasso and Modigliani, which are still a cornerstone of the Tate’s holdings; and in 1940 came paintings bequeathed by Montague Shearman, including works by Vuillard, Utrillo and Rouault. When the Society celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in 1960 with a large exhibition at the Tate, it was also an opportunity to register the discernment and generosity of Sir Edward Marsh through gifts in his lifetime and his bequest on his death in 1953; on show were works with his provenance by, among others, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, Matthew Smith and Henry Moore.

In the last twenty years or so considerable changes have appeared in the objectives of the Society and its public per­ception. In its fundamental role as purchaser, some competition had arisen after the Second World War when the British Council and the Arts Council of Great Britain were building their own collections of contemporary art. This competition has accelerated, especially in the field of commissions and for schemes to help museums acquire recent art tailored to their needs. In its early decades, the Society was unique; now it is just one among many organisations promoting contemporary art and has thus been somewhat sidelined. Yet it is bright ideas from within the CAS that have been taken up by its fellow organisations. There is, for example, the Art Fund’s champion-ship of the new through schemes such as the Big Art Project for public sculpture; there is the private charitable foundation Outset, closely connected to the Tate and the Frieze Art Fair; commissions masterminded by Artangel; and considerable regional initiatives from the Arts Council. Some might say that this is the moment that the CAS might be gracefully disbanded, its task already achieved; others prefer to see it continuing in an increasingly educative rather than purchasing role; and some are critical of the Society’s expanding business as consultant to corporate and private collections, allowing it to stray too far from its charitable directive. But whatever the future may bring, surely in this centenary year the Society’s name should be added to those benefactors listed at the entrance of Tate Britain, for the national collections would have been immeasurably impoverished if those decisive, early tea parties had never taken place.