David Hockney threatens to 'give up' on Bradford if it sells art collection | Art and design | The Guardian
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David Hockney threatens to 'give up' on Bradford if it sells art collection
Painter angered by suggestions that home city's council should auction valuable art to stave off cuts to services
David Hockney at his A Bigger Picture exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London in 2012. Photograph: Stephen Simpson / Rex Features
Vanessa Thorpe and Nigel Burnham
Saturday 30 November 2013 17.50 EST
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The relationship between Bradford and one of its most famous sons has reached breaking point over calls for the city's art treasures to be sold off. David Hockney has said he is on the verge of "giving up" on his birthplace over the sale, which would include some of his own paintings.
The Labour-led council needs to make deep spending cuts and last week, following the discovery that the city's art collection was worth many millions of pounds more than had been realised, Liberal Democrat and Conservative councillors said that the paintings should be sold.
Hockney's pool picture Le Plongeur , made from coloured and pressed paper pulp, is a key piece in the authority's collection and is currently on loan to Liverpool's Walker Art Gallery. The Cartwright Hall art gallery in the Manningham district of Bradford also holds Hockney's four major series of prints: Six Fairy Tales from the Brothers Grimm, The Blue Guitar, A Rake's Progress and Illustrations for Fourteen Poems from CP Cavafy.
When the artist learned that councillors had been debating the sale of these and other valuable works, including LS Lowry's important 1952 painting Industrial Landscape (Ashton-under-Lyne) , he told the Telegraph and Argus newspaper: "I've almost given up on Bradford. This would do it."
Hockney, 76, who last month was in Los Angeles, where he and film director Martin Scorsese were honoured at a gala dinner in the city's county museum of art, was born in Bradford and went to grammar school there. In the late 1960s he moved to the west coast of America and was based there for 25 years before he returned to work in his native Yorkshire in 1996. Only weeks ago, Bradford College announced it was going to call its new campus the David Hockney Building. Hockney, an alumni of the college when it was known as Bradford Regional Art School, said: "I am thrilled that Bradford College has requested to name its new building after me, and of course I am delighted to give my consent." Hockney graduated with honours in 1957.
Councillor Jeanette Sunderland, the leader of the city's Liberal Democrats, has called for the sale to be considered in order to fund threatened frontline services. She argued that the move could be of benefit to culture in the Bradford area. "We could set up a trust, we could do all sorts of things," she told the Bradford newspaper.
The local politician is arguing that an independent gallery might be able to give better public access to the artworks and allow the council to provide crucial services that were now at risk, such as its youth services and children's centres. The councillor added that a lot of the council's 4,000 artworks are kept in storage.
"Given that they are saying they cannot afford to provide care to 2,000 elderly and disabled people in Bradford, and they are talking about cutting funding to young people and closing children's centres, maybe what they want to do is sell off some of this art collection that we actually just tuck away and pay the insurance on," she said.
Her remarks have been backed by the leader of the council's Conservative group.
The authority's entire art and museum collection had been insured for £20m, but last month it emerged that an auction house valued a fraction of its fine art at a much greater figure. The auction house examined 195 items and judged them to be worth a total of £30.1m.
If the rest of the collection has been undervalued to this extent, it could be worth more than £600m.
However, David Green, the Labour leader of Bradford council, has dismissed the suggestion of selling off the art collection. One-off sales could not be made use of to fund any ongoing services, he said, adding: "It demonstrates why we have inherited such a difficult financial situation from the previous administration."