Tate received £350,000 a year in BP sponsorship between 2007 and 2011 and a one-off payment of £750,000 for its Cultural Olympiad film project, figures reveal.
After years of refusing to publicly reveal sponsorship figures, Tate was ordered to publish them by an information tribunal earlier this summer.
It followed sustained pressure by environmental campaigners, who argue the sums are pitifully small and evidence that Tate did not need the money. Tate has argued the figures are significant.
The figures show that Tate received £350,000 a year, apart from in 2010 when it received £1.1m. That money included a special payment of £750,000 for a project to get children involved in making an animated movie.
Emma Hughes, a spokesperson for the campaign group Platform, said the amounts were “paltry”.
She added: “The Tate gallery has been forced to reveal that during 2007-11 BP was branding its walls for a pittance, just £350,000 most years. That’s less than 0.5% of Tate’s income.”
Hughes said the 2010 figure still represented less than 1% of Tate’s funding and came at a time when “oil was gushing into the Gulf of Mexico due to BP’s Deepwater Horizon disaster”.
“The company tried to buy public support by quadrupling the amount of money they gave the Tate. As BP fought over compensation for Gulf of Mexico communities in the US courts they were throwing money at the Tate in an attempt to de-toxify their brand.”
BP’s long sponsorship of Tate Britain comes to an end in 2017. While it is not renewing with Tate or the Edinburgh festival, BP’s longstanding relationships with the British Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Royal Opera House and Royal Shakespeare Company will continue for a further five years after it announced a deal worth £7.5m in total.
Each arts organisation welcomed the deals and praised BP for its long-established sponsorship of the arts.
As well as giving money to UK arts organisations, BP has given money to institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) – donating $25m (£19m) for the ”BP Grand Entrance”.
Campaigners say the arts sponsorship money is tainted and have vowed to continue campaigning against it. That means a continuation of the letters, petitions and regular peaceful and artistically staged protests that have included spilling oily black molasses at Tate’s summer party in 2010 and whispering transcripts of the Deepwater Horizon trial in 2013.
It is not the first time Tate has been forced to reveal BP sponsorship figures. In December last year, it was ordered to disclose figures for the 17 years before 2011. That revealed a total of £3.8m in annual amounts varying between £150,000 and £330,000.
A spokeswoman for Tate said it would not be commenting further, beyond releasing the figures.
