“Rebels and Martyrs'’ is the title of a new show at London’s National Gallery. It could just as well describe the mood in museum circles after a spate of record- breaking art sales.

The chief rebel is Charles Saumarez Smith, 52, director of the National Gallery since 2002. Minutes after the exhibition press view, he joined me, coffee cup in hand, for a chat about the art market and the $135 million paid for a Gustav Klimt portrait by cosmetics magnate Ronald Lauder.

Nayeri: This latest rash of art-market sales seems to have driven you to despair.

Saumarez Smith: It’s sort of depressing. Since I’ve been at the National Gallery, most of what we look at as possible acquisitions costs no less than 500,000 pounds ($910,000). Now, with the booming art market, the sorts of things that we’re likely to be interested in are costing between 5 and 10 million, or more, and the Klimt will have established a new benchmark.

There are these hugely wealthy private individuals who are able to outbeat even international institutions, let alone national institutions.

Meanwhile, we only have the same amount of money to spend as we’ve had in the past. The gap between our aspirations and the reality of what we’re able to acquire gets greater and greater as the weeks go by.

Astute Buyers

Nayeri: Paintings have been turned into international commodities, and the art market is becoming like the stock market. How does that make you feel?

Saumarez Smith: The people who are buying at the top end of the market tend to be extremely astute and thoughtful buyers. Ron Lauder has done this absolutely beautiful, ravishing small gallery just north of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, a conversion of an early 20th-century house into one of the most immaculate smaller museums. The Klimt will go on display there. He specializes in early 20th-century Austrian and German painting. The Klimt becomes available: He does what we would do if we had the money, which is to buy.

It’s not, as some people sometimes imply, Russian oligarchs just buying gratuitously and without a sense of knowledge and intelligence. Most people who are buying at this level of the market tend to be both very knowledgeable and well advised.

Contemporary Market

Nayeri: What about contemporary art?

Saumarez Smith: I was interested that, on Wednesday, both Bridget Riley and Peter Doig broke through the million-pound barrier. Peter Doig is a very good painter, but he’s aged, what, 45? He’s well established, and whoever bought for a million pounds is probably making a perfectly shrewd and sensible investment, but it’s incredible, that sense of a contemporary artist being sold on the secondary market for such huge prices.

Nayeri: What’s the solution for museums like the National Gallery to expand their collections?

Saumarez Smith: One possible solution might be for the government to set up, as was proposed in 1922, some sort of national acquisitions or national purchase fund which could be used not just by the National Gallery, but by the Tate to buy contemporary works, and by the V&A to buy design. This is a national problem, not just a National Gallery problem.

Museums and galleries in other parts of the country have effectively had to give up on the idea that they are a living entity. They’re becoming frozen collections.

There is a difference in the way people respond and relate to museums and galleries between an institution which just has things from the past, and a living organism which is continually adding and adapting and adjusting in the light of current taste.

More Philanthropy

Nayeri: Do you not think the U.K. should revert to a U.S.- style tax write-off system?

Saumarez Smith: The Treasury should look at ways of encouraging these people not just to buy for themselves, but to buy in perpetuity in order to give things to the nation, in the way it happened in the 19th century.

After all, the big collections outside London — in Birmingham and Manchester and Liverpool and Newcastle — were built by the big manufacturing moguls of the mid- to late 19th century, who had a sense of public duty and would come down to the Royal Academy summer show and buy things for their city.

Somehow, we’ve got to create an environment which reconstructs some of that sense of civic duty, and an attitude to philanthropy which is very well developed in the States.

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