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, 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. Funding The Contemporary Art Society raises funds from a number of sources. 12% of its income comes from Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation (NPO), the remainder raised is a combination of private and corporate philanthropy, income from fundraising events and art consultancy services. History The Contemporary Art Society was established by seven prominent individuals whose vision it was to do for contemporary art what the National Art Collections Fund, founded in 1903, was doing for art of earlier periods. An inaugural meeting took place on the morning of 9 April 1909 at 44 Bedford Square, London, the home of Philip Morrell, and was attended by Charles Aitken, Director of the Whitechapel Art Gallery; Roger Fry, painter/critic and curator of Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Charles J Holmes, painter/critic and Director of the National Portrait Gallery; Ernest Marsh, expert on Martinware pottery; DS MacColl, painter/critic and the first Keeper of the Tate Gallery's collection; Philip Morrell, a Liberal MP and Lady Ottoline Morrell, patron of the arts. Lady Ottoline Morrell recorded in her diary after that first meeting:"…. I feel strongly that every penny one can save ought to be given to young artists. At least, we who really feel the beauty and wonder of art ought to help them. There are heaps of people who understand philanthropy…. and young creators have such a terrible struggle."It was not