Contemporary Art Society

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The Contemporary Art Society (CAS) is an independent charity that champions the collecting of outstanding contemporary art and craft for UK museum collections. Since its founding in 1910 the organisation has donated over 10,000 works to museums across the UK. From the 1930s the Society also donated works to Commonwealth museums,^[1] but since 1989 the focus has remained exclusively on UK institutions.

Each year, the CAS donates works of modern and contemporary art to more than 70 museums and public galleries in the UK, which subscribe as Museum Members. Notable acquisitions have included the first works by Paul Gauguin (1917), Dame Barbara Hepworth (1931), Pablo Picasso (1933), Henri Matisse (1935), Francis Bacon (1952), Sir Anthony Caro (1965), Sir Antony Gormley (1981) and Damien Hirst (1992) to enter UK public collections. More recent acquisitions have included works by 2016 Turner Prize winner Helen Marten in 2012, Phyllida Barlow in the same year and in 2016 the first works by Glenn Brown and Kader Attia to enter a UK museum collection.