THERE IS NO doubting that private collectors serve the public good. They do so variously, mostly through their patronage of artists, or by lending to exhibitions or making generous loans or gifts to museums. One major benefit from a private collection in recent times has been Lucian Freud’s bequest of Frank Auerbach’s paintings, valued at £16.2 million, which, under the AIL (acceptance-in-lieu) scheme, has gifted works by this artist to several regional art galleries in Britain, at a time when few, if any, could contemplate purchasing the same. But a still greater benefit came in March of this year when the Portland Collection went on public view at Welbeck, Nottinghamshire, in the newly opened Harley Gallery.

ON DISPLAY IN the fascinating exhibition Dadaglobe Reconstructed at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (to 18th September)1 is a work by Marcel Duchamp with the exhortatory title To Be Looked At (From the Other Side of the Glass) with One Eye, Close to, for Almost an Hour (Fig.70). By offering a specific set of instructions, Duchamp aspired to ‘eliminate the antithesis between producer and recipient’, as Peter Bürger noted.2 Notably, Bürger’s main examples include Tristan Tzara’s ‘How to make a Dadaist poem’ and André Breton’s account of the process of automatic writing in the Manifesto of Surrealism.The work of art is no longer an object of contemplation but a stimulus to activity, even if that activity is as seemingly useless as Duchamp’s title suggests. There never was a declaration of ‘How to make a Dada exhibition’, but Dadaglobe Reconstructed uses a set of instructions as its organising principle, and in doing so raises fundamental questions about the status of the Dada work of art.

GEORGE KNOX, who died in Vancouver on 28th September 2015 at the venerable age of ninety-three,was a colourful personality, a real character, as his many friends and colleagues used to say. As a scholar, his name is forever linked to the study of Venetian eighteenth-century drawing and painting. In fact, together with Michael Levey (his doctoral supervisor), George discovered and revealed the Venetian settecento to the Anglo-American public and, in a sense, to the non-Italian world at large.