THE Tate Gallery has for many years set an exemplary standard in the quality of its Biennial Report and its separately published biennial Illustrated Catalogues of Acquisitions. The latest of these marked the retirement of Sir Alan Bowness, under whose Directorship the Gallery has made outstanding acquisitions, successfully opened the Clore Gallery for the Turner Collection and the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, and organised exhibitions which have helped to increase visitors to Millbank to a figure exceed- ing for the first time those of the V & A and the Natural History Museum. The new Director, Nicholas Serota, paid tribute to Sir Alan's achievements in a press conference held last December in which he outlined his own hopes and fears for the Tate.

It was by no means in Sir Alan's more cherished areas of interest alone that the gallery made its important acqui- sitions. His liberal sympathies have immeasurably enhanced the Tate's earlier modern holdings with outstanding works by Picasso, Mir6, de Chirico, Schwitters, Beckmann, Duchamp and Picabia. Pollock and Rothko are now well represented and certain key artists of the 1980s can be seen - if not always at their best. All works acquired are published in the long-running series of biennial catalogues, which has reached its apogee in the superb Illustrated Catalogue of Acquisitions 1984-86.* This indispensable reference book - often entertaining, sometimes bizarre, always informative - runs to over 570 pages. Wherever possible living artists have been consulted and have approved the entries, which range from important general statements of aesthetic purpose to the minute particularities of facture, method and installation. This unique and invaluable document is a testimony to curatorial time well spent.

It is essential that the Tate be enabled to continue to build on these achievements. With its annual acquisition grant still frozen at £1.8 million, it seems unlikely that the Gallery will any longer be able to afford masterpieces from the first half of this century - unless they are deemed, like Picasso's Weeping woman, to have become 'heritage' items. The recent generous gift by an anonymous donor in New York df $6.5 million to buy American art may mean that some progress can be made here - not only in the contemporary field, but also in representing transatlantic art before abstract expressionism. But grants with- out strings or specified destinations are desperately needed in a world in which, as Sir Alan Bowness pointed out in this year's Walter Neurath memorial lecture, artists no longer necessarily live where private patronage is found. Much help continues to be provided by the Friends of the Tate and the Patrons of New Art, but this is no substitute for enlightened public investment.

As long as acquisition budgets are tight it is all the more essential that existing strengths in the modern collection be shown to the best advantage. The displays so far held at the Liverpool Tate Gallery - surrealist and minimalist art, Rothko and Sickert - have shown the possibility of making convincing groupings of work by individual artists and movements. Such concentrations should be maintained and, where possible, expanded by acquisition and loan. For maximum impact such works must, of course, be authoritatively shown. Good hanging can also be flattering to works not necessarily of the first calibre, and a definitive look to the galleries can attract private benefaction. Much re-decoration is necessary, especially in those rooms that even the latest Biennial Report terms 'a disgrace'. Other rooms, however, have already achieved distinction a year or two after re-installation, and can be viewed with pleasure at their familiarity as much as for their continuing revelations.

If we can judge from Nicholas Serota's record at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, it seems likely that a more ag- gressive exhibitions policy is being devised - and this should be welcomed. In the 1986-88 period covered by the Biennial Report, the star attractions were retrospectives of Kokoschka, Gabo and Bomberg: hardly an adequate response to the art of recent decades. There was nothing comparable to the Hamilton, Warhol, and Robert Morris shows of 1970-71, for example - mid-career retrospectives of artists of international stature.

Fortunately, the magnificent Late Picasso exhibition last year succeeded in combining retrospective nicety with contemporary relevance. But many in Britain have lamented the fact that great shows such as the Degas and Gauguin exhibitions of 1988-89 have not come to London. They do not perhaps always appreciate the reason for this - that the National Museums do not and never will have the holdings by these artists that would have formed the basis for negotiation of loans. This month's issue completes our coverage (begun in the March 1988 issue) of the Degas exhibition, and Denys Sutton's article on p.266 is especially pertinent, chronicling as it does the National Gallery's pathetic failure in 1918 to acquire works by Degas at the sale after the artist's death, despite the enthusiastic initiatives of Roger Fry and Maynard Keynes. Which economic adviser of today will have the vision to realise the benefits that great twentieth-century art, acquired now, would bring seventy years hence?