LONDON, ENGLAND.- The Hayward Gallery celebrates the centenary of the National Art Collections Fund (Art Fund) with a major exhibition in autumn 2003, spanning 4,000 years of art history, from prehistory to the present day. Masterpieces of every kind - sculptures, paintings, drawings, ceramics, costumes, textiles, archaeological treasures and ethnographic material - which the Art Fund has helped acquire for public collections around the UK, will be juxtaposed in a revealing and provocative survey of the achievements of the Art Fund over 100 years.

Susan Ferleger Brades, Director, Hayward Gallery, South Bank Centre, said: "The Hayward Gallery is delighted to be collaborating with the National Art Collections Fund in hosting the centenary exhibition. Their achievements have been extraordinary. It is wonderful to be able to reveal and celebrate them at the Hayward and to bring to the fore key issues relating to patronage, heritage, collecting and taste." 

David Barrie, Director of the National Art Collections Fund, said: "The exhibition at the Hayward Gallery is one of the highlights of our centenary year. The Art Fund is delighted to be working with the Hayward in bringing together some of the most celebrated and best-loved works of art from museums and galleries across the country that we have supported over the last hundred years."

The astounding richness of the exhibition, and the variety and quality of over 300 works on display, will highlight the Art Fund’s extraordinary and continuing contribution to public collections nation-wide. For the first - and perhaps only - time, armour from the Royal Armouries in Leeds will hang alongside Pablo Picasso’s Weeping Woman (Tate). Other spectacular works include the extraordinary jewels recovered by divers from the Spanish Armada shipwreck of the Girona (Ulster Museum), ancient Egyptian artefacts and the carved prow of a Maori war canoe. A study by Michelangelo for the Creation of Adam in the Sistine Chapel (British Museum) will be seen with the celebrated Luttrell Psalter from the British Library. Of the many well-known treasures that will also be on show are Botticelli’s Virgin Adoring the Sleeping Christ Child, Canova’s Three Graces, Velazquez’s Rokeby Venus and Turning the World Inside Out by Anish Kapoor from Bradford.

Many of these works of art would have disappeared from public view into private collections or left the UK without the Art Fund’s crucial intervention. Woven into the exhibition will be the fascinating and dramatic stories behind the acquisition of many of the nation’s most treasured works. Documentary material, including photographs, legal documents, letters and press cuttings, will illustrate the history of the Art Fund and its members.