Richard Brown Baker, a savvy, prescient New York collector, got behind British artists early: Ben Nicholson, David Hockney, Bridget Riley, and more. His collection of British art, and works acquired with a bequest after his death in 2002 to expand that collection, are now on view in “Made in the UK: Contemporary Art From the Richard Brown Baker Collection’’ a generous, enthralling show at the Museum of Art at Rhode Island School of Design.
Baker acquired contemporary art internationally and left much of his meaty collection to the Yale University Art Gallery (at his alma mater), but he bequeathed the British art to the RISD museum. As a native of Providence, he was tapped as a Rhodes Scholar and went to England; he wanted to bring a bit of England back to Providence. The result is remarkable: RISD has the best collection of British postwar art in the United States, better even than the Yale Center for British Art.
“Made in the UK,’’ organized by Jan Howard, RISD’s curator of prints, drawings, and photographs, and Judith Tannenbaum, the museum’s contemporary art curator (whose position was endowed by Baker), is as avid and wide-ranging as the collector’s passions, ambling from abstract expressionism through Pop Art, Op Art, and photo realism, on into the explosion of conceptually cocky artists in the 1990s, such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, known as the YBAs, for Young British Artists.
The show does not serve as a comprehensive survey of British art in the past 55 years. It’s more eclectic and personal than that. Missing, for instance, are London’s dark figurative expressionists Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. Maybe Baker was caught up with Pop Art when their work was affordable. Perhaps the emotional rawness of their art didn’t appeal to him. As if to make up for that lack, in the 1980s he did acquire a group of quirky, gritty Scottish neo-expressionist figural narratives by artists such as John Bellany and Ken Currie.
Baker liked to discover artists. He bought Hockney before that artist’s first New York show. The collector had an instinct, and he was careful with his money. Although he was well to do, he often paid for works in $85 or $100 installments, Tannenbaum says in an interview in the show’s catalog.
