When this newspaper’s film critic Alexander Walker died in 2003 the fridge in his small Maida Vale flat was empty apart from five bottles of champagne.
But the flat’s walls, bookshelves and even cupboards were overflowing with a “museum standard” art collection built up over 40 years.
Now the cream of that collection — from Picasso to Hockney — is going on show at the British Museum. It will also feature in a new book before being taken on tour around the UK as a tribute to the man who painstakingly built it.
Walker, who combined what he described as “fluctuating funds” with “an abiding love of art”, was a regular visitor to galleries in London and New York where he would consult experts before carefully choosing his next purchase.
The resulting collection covered every inch of his home, with a work by Turner Prize-winner Rachel Whiteread hanging above his bath, a Jasper Johns sharing a cupboard with his vacuum cleaner and a Matisse propped up by his kitchen sink.
Walker eventually accumulated more than 200 prints and drawings which he left to the museum. Almost as importantly, his bequest was accompanied by correspondence detailing not just what he bought but when, why and for how much.
Curator Catherine Daunt said: “As well as the collection, the museum was left six lever arch files full of invoices and letters to and from dealers so his voice will be there in the book and in the exhibition labels. It means we are in the unusual but very fortunate position of knowing what attracted him to the works.”
Walker started collecting art in the early Sixties, the same time he moved to London and joined the Standard, and was still buying right up until his death aged 73. Ms Daunt said: “He clearly got so much pleasure from it. He wasn’t investing, he never sold anything. Speaking to colleagues who knew him and visited his home they say there were works propped up on bookshelves or even in cupboards when he didn’t have enough space. I think it was only in the early Nineties that he realised what he had when other people told him he had a really important collection, that he was developing a museum-standard collection.”
Among the art on show is a print by Philip Guston for which Walker paid $40,000 (£30,000) in 2000 — the highest price he paid for a work — along with pieces by Lucian Freud and Bridget Riley.
Living With Art: Picasso to Celmins runs from January 14 to March 5
