Our collection is not for sale, says Penrose

THE man whose family has lent or sold a string of key 20th century paintings to the National Galleries of Scotland in recent decades says he has no intention to put any loaned works on the market.

Anthony Penrose, whose family has two Picassos and other works on long-term loan to the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, said yesterday he was surprised by the "unkind" backlash over the 30 million sale of a JMW Turner painting this week.

He stressed that the Penrose Collection was not intending to sell any works - but if it did, the Edinburgh gallery would be the first choice.

The collection was built up by his father, art expert Ronald Penrose, and his mother, the model and photographer Lee Miller.

Mr Penrose urged the Scottish and UK governments to keep the national collections alive and appealing, with more funding for acquisitions or tax breaks for donors, recognising they were national assets and a "tourist magnet".

Mr Penrose regularly met Picasso as a child and knew other major artists who visited the family farm in Sussex, where he has run the Lee Miller Archives and the Penrose Collection for 25 years.

The collection comprises some 2,000 works by artists including Picasso, Man Ray and Max Ernst, as well as 60,000 negatives of Millers' photographs and an estimated 20,000 vintage prints.

He spoke at the opening of 'Another World', a major summer exhibition of hundreds of surrealist works that fills two floors at Edinburgh's Dean Gallery, part of the SNGMA. On Monday he will talk about his parents' lives and work at the Hawthornden Lecture Theatre on the Mound.

Prominent Scottish art experts spoke out angrily this week after the Earl of Rosebery sold his Turner painting, Modern Rome - Campo Vaccino, for 30m at auction.

It hung in the National Gallery of Scotland for 30 years. But Mr Penrose dismissed the "unkind" suggestion that private lenders used exposure in public galleries to boost the value of their works.

After Lee Miller's death in 1977, an inheritance tax deal dependent on the works being shown in public saw the first loans to Edinburgh of about 20 artworks, he said. The gallery has since bought several stunning works by Rene Magritte, Joan Miro and others from the Penrose collection.

Key works that it now lends to the gallery include a Picasso portrait of Lee Miller. "She's been here for nearly 30 years," Mr Penrose said, although the work also routinely travels with Miller photography shows around the world, with the gallery's consent.

"It's the kind of place she would feel comfortable," he added, praising the gallery's "ethos of scholarship and generosity of spirit".

Another Picasso loan is Nude Woman on the Beach, which has been at the gallery since 2001. "If it went anywhere outside of the family I would very very much hope it would come here," he said. "But that's not something which is planned."

The Penrose collection works without public support, but has a staff of 12. It works with galleries worldwide, including two current exhibitions of Miller's photography in Croatia and Oslo. Mr Penrose said the goal was now to keep all the major works, without more sales, in a "sustainable" collection if at all possible.

The SNGMA acquired Roland Penrose's books and papers in the mid-1990s. Several works by photographer and artist Man Ray featuring Miller's image - such as Indestructible Object, a pendulum on which he placed a moving photograph of her eye - are on loan to the SNGMA.

Mr Penrose praised the gallery yesterday for hosting the exhibition, which includes works by other household names like Salvador Dali, as well as British surrealists, at "a time of austerity".z