SINCE ITS FOUNDATION in 1934, the British Council has fulfilled, with increasing success and effectiveness, its remit to ‘promote overseas an enduring understanding and appreciation of British culture’.1 Its emphasis has always been on educational cooperation, winning friends and the forging of links between Britain and other countries through cultural exchange. It has become one of the great British institutions. Over the decades it has created a worldwide network through its language-teaching centres, literature programmes, its touring exhibitions, drama and music and the assistance it has given to foreign educational initiatives, especially in Africa, China and the Middle East. Although funded by government grant-in-aid – and thus subject to volatile financing – it has remained politically independent (even though it began its life under the aegis of the Foreign Office) and without parti pris. For over seventy years it has quietly got on with its work, a magnificent cumulative record of achievement against a background of political turmoil, changing concepts of nationalism and the very questioning of culture itself. At moments in the past, the Council has been menaced with dismantling or absorption, threats fortunately never carried through. But recent structural changes and a knowing neglect by the government have already begun to undermine severely its independence and humane raison d’être.

We are particularly concerned here with the effects these changes are having on the Council’s Visual Arts Department. This essential wing of the British Council’s work came to international prominence after the Second World War with its organisation of the British contributions to the Venice Biennales and its support of exhibitions, large and small, of British art abroad. The reputations of figures such as Moore, Hepworth, Sutherland, Nicholson and Freud were immeasurably enhanced by the Council’s professional promotion, as has been the case, more recently, with younger artists such as Kapoor, Whiteread and Ofili. At the same time, it aided the showing in Britain of exhibitions from abroad. Running parallel with such activities, a fine-art collection was being assembled through appointed buyers and advisers of high calibre who often purchased outstanding works by British artists who were yet to make their names. This collection was intended for loan abroad – in British Council offices and in museums – and to provide coherent exhibitions that could be toured. Drawings and prints were particularly effective for easily transportable, non-bulky shows destined for out-of-the-way locations or places often previously untouched by contemporary art. Although it has missed acquiring works by one or two important figures (Bacon in particular), the collection ranges widely over the distinct styles and movements of modern British art.

One further accomplishment of the Council’s Visual Arts Department has been the funding of British artists’ visits to art schools and galleries abroad, for residencies, lectures and teaching, and the reciprocal visits of foreign artists to Britain. A Polish artist and teacher, for example, is on record as having valuable experience in the difficult 1970s from a Council-sponsored stay in Britain that led to significant results in his native country. At another level its cooperation with the Spanish Ministerio de Cultura in the unsteady post-Franco years was of great and lasting benefit to both Spain and Britain.

One might think that with these achievements the Council’s position was unassailable. This is not so. Between the end of 2005 and early this year, several crucial staff resignations occurred when it became clear that a new, government-directed policy included plans to cut a number of specialist posts within the Visual Arts Department; exhibition technicians have been reduced; the important role of Librarian is to become a part-time post and the role of Grants Officer has been abolished. Instead of the former close dialogue with individual countries, the Council is now expected to operate in huge regions – South America, South East Asia, for example – that cover many languages and nationalities with the resulting loss in personal communication and specific needs. The days of the British Council’s presence in Europe are numbered through the imminent suppression of the few remaining arts staff. The growth and usefulness of its collection is threatened by further downgrading of staff and the non-appointment of advisers.

The damage being done to the Visual Arts Department has to be seen, of course, as a specific example within a wider perspective. Government spending cuts, particularly in the arts, to meet ‘realistic’ targets and provide value for money is one context. Another is the ambiguous attitude to concepts of Britishness in a multicultural society. Some may feel that an organisation such as the British Council still retains the body odour of cultural chauvinism from the period of its foundation. But everywhere there is proof that this is not the case and that the Council has tailored its international brief to meet contemporary susceptibilities. At a time when we are being urged, from pulpit, platform and press, to engage with other peoples’ religious and cultural practices and beliefs to stem the tide of aggressive prejudice, surely the work of the British Council is of inestimable value? But the Council stands not just for education but for art, and in the present climate art must be seen to be anything but itself. Of course art can be ‘accessible’, ‘regenerative’ and ‘life enhancing’, but those characteristics can only come about within a free culture, not one that is based in strings-attached propaganda or ‘strategic management’. The insidious control now detectable in the restructuring of the British Council and the realignment of its objectives to be ‘consistent with governmental medium and long term goals’2 shows the dangerous hand of political interference. It cannot go unchallenged.

1  Julian Andrews, former Director of the Visual Arts Department, in: The British Council Collection 1938–1984, London 1984, p.9.
2  See Lord Carter of Coles’s Review of Public Diplomacy (2005), p.4; it is available
on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website.