Ever looked at the labels on artworks in an exhibition where it says “on loan from a private collection” or simply “private collection”, and wondered who the owner is, how they came to have it, what happens in the world of art ownership?
Well, visitors to Sacrifice, an exhibition of art, artefacts and stories on the subject that opens at the Jewish Museum in London this week, will see a painting “from a private collection” whose actual owner is … me.
To be honest, it is the entirety of my collection.
I used to have a drawing by Gary Hume, but I don’t know where it’s gone. I also owned a Tracey Emin stick of rock with her name through it, but that crumbled years ago.
I got those things cheap back in the 1990s, but serious art collecting is way out of my league. I don’t even have much urge to own the majority of art I see. Most of the art I admire – from a James Turrell light space to a sculpture by Bernini – belongs, by its nature, in public space and even if I miraculously had the means, I wouldn’t want to privatise it.
There is one great exception: the art I love most is painting, and oil paintings have an aura of private space about them. When I look at a painting in a gallery I can’t help wondering what it would be like to live with. Would it still be lovely after 20 years in your living room? I think it’s impossible not to wonder such things when you are gazing at a painting you like.
So it was hard to resist when a painter I admire offered to give me a painting this summer. Julian Bell is both a brilliant art critic and historian and a painter with a rare understanding of colour and light. He can do that thing Turner used to do of making light really seem to blaze inside a painting. (Not a common skill nowadays.)
This year he illustrated the whole book of Genesis in a series of vibrant painted panels. I wrote a catalogue essay for it, and in return he let me choose one of the paintings for myself.
How could I resist? It allowed me to answer the question: what is it like to wake up every morning with real art in your home?
Awkward, at first, as it turned out. The painting I selected, Cain and Abel, is a formidable scene of fratricidal violence set in a Steinbeckian corn field. Yet there’s a fantastic light in the sky and on Cain’s guilty face.
I find it compelling, but how to do justice to it? I spent months trying to find a place to hang it properly, which meant finding a way to let it be illuminated by natural light so its sensitive depiction of the natural world can come through. I also like it in Caravaggesque darkness with the pool of blood emerging from poor murdered Abel’s head lurking like a sinister shadow. Oil paintings, this experiment in ownership has confirmed for me, are subtle, organic, almost living things that have their own secret lives.
It is not like owning an object at all. It is more like having a pet.
The painting lives its own life on the wall, in shadows, sunlight, lamplight or darkness. Then I stop and watch it for a while, watch its life. I can even stroke the surface – it’s mine after all. My pet mystery.
And then, just as I was finally happy with how I’d hung this new addition to the family, the Jewish Museum asked to borrow it. The curators wanted something from Bell’s Genesis because this strong cycle of art illuminates what in Judaism is the first book of the Torah – and they wanted the very painting I had chosen.
Of course I said yes. It adds another layer to my experiment in owning art. So yesterday I carefully took Cain and Abel to the museum in Camden to hand it over. I signed the receipt giving permission for them to keep the painting for the next five months. A small sacrifice.
When the exhibition opens this week, this intense and haunting work of art will pass once more from (my) private world into the public sphere.
Take care Cain and Abel, and come home soon.
