BRITAIN:AN ART dealer has given a collection of modern art worth £125 million (€165m) to British museums.
Sheffield-born Anthony d'Offay will receive £26.5 million (€35 million) for his donation, which is the amount he originally paid for the 725 works.
The paintings, photographs, drawings and sculptures by 32 artists, including Andy Warhol, Gilbert and George, Damien Hirst, Ron Mueck, Jeff Koons and Diane Arbus, will travel across galleries and museums in Britain.
But they will be owned and managed by the Tate and the National Galleries of Scotland, which said the art would "transform the nation's collections of contemporary art".
The department for culture, media and sport and the Scottish government have each donated £10 million to the cost of buying the works, which would fill the space of 1½ floors of Tate Modern. The national heritage memorial fund is providing £7 million and the art fund £1 million. The department has also paid the treasury £14.6 million in taxes that Mr d'Offay would otherwise have paid.
The collection was one of the most important holdings of postwar and contemporary international art in private hands and was assembled over 28 years.
The gift features 232 paintings, photographs, drawings and watercolours by Warhol alone, as well as nine works by Gilbert and George and 69 black-and-white Arbus photographs.
The collection will form a series of individual rooms devoted to particular artists, many of them conceived as installations by the artists themselves.
An art dealer in London for more than 30 years, Mr d'Offay showed works by Lucian Freud, Gilbert and George and other living artists when they were not as prized as they are today. The first displays of around 20 rooms will go on show across the UK in spring 2009.
Tate director Nicholas Serota compared the gift to the early donations that helped establish the Tate.
"Anthony is making an incredible donation of a major part of his own personal wealth to the nation. It is an extraordinary act of philanthropy. This is a man that's giving away most of his wealth . . . Anthony wanted to do this as an example to others. He has always said from the outset that he didn't want his name out there on the front. It will not be called the Anthony d'Offay collection. He wanted it to be a gift that might start a precedent that others might follow. If it bore his name, it might put people off."