Most art collections include inherited works, the latest Art Basel and UBS Survey of Global Collecting reports. According to the data, 72% of the 3,100 HNWIs surveyed had received works from family or friends. Being the recipient of a family collection is an incredible gift but also an enormous responsibility – from issues around taxes and upkeep costs to questions around differing tastes and family legacies, how does a collector decide whether to keep or disperse inherited works?

Start estate planning early

While the circumstances around bequeathals can vary enormously, they are often made in difficult times, such as on the death of a loved one, making dealing with questions around the future of a collection particularly sensitive. ‘It is far easier to think about the future of a collection during the collector’s lifetime than after their death, when families are dealing with both administration and grief,’ says Clarissa Levi, Art & Heritage Counsel at the London law firm Wedlake Bell. ‘Ultimately, the right [estate planning] solution depends on the collection, the family’s objectives. and whether the priority is preservation, philanthropy, succession planning, or liquidity. However, according to Rachel Peart, Art Advisory Specialist at UBS Global Wealth Management, ‘a lot of the time these valuable “passion assets” get very much overlooked when someone is making their estate plan’ – and more often than not wills are minimal or non-existent.

This is the situation that Huma Kabakci faced at 19 years old when her father Nahit Kabakci passed away suddenly, leaving her a collection of more than 500 works and no specific estate plan. Nahit, a Turkish businessman who founded the Ramko Art Gallery in Istanbul in 1986, acquired works by mostly Turkish, Russian, and Azerbaijani artists and later expanded his remit to Central Asian and Eastern European countries. He also collected prints by well-known US and European artists, including Pablo Picasso, Joseph Beuys, and Robert Rauschenberg.

As an only child of divorced parents, the full responsibility of the collection – which her father had named after her just a year before – fell solely to Huma. ‘At that age you have no kind of identity or idea of who you are or what you want to be,’ she says, reflecting on her father’s bequest. ‘I was both honored and proud, but also quite clueless.’ She went on to study curating at the Royal College of Art in London in an effort to become a better custodian of her family collection, and now works as an independent curator, writer, and creative consultant in London.

When you first inherit, ‘the most important thing is to stop and take an overview of the collection,’ Peart says. ‘The second is to work out the timeline for making a decision for the collection because this is going to help you understand how you can put together your resources and start to explore what you have,’ she adds. Rudy Capildeo, a Partner and Head of Art & Luxury Law at Wedlake Bell, also emphasizes the importance of not rushing decisions. ‘Before anything is sold, moved, or divided, it is important to understand what is owned, how it is held, whether it is insured, and whether there are any tax or estate-planning issues to consider. For international collectors, ownership can sometimes be complicated by trusts, companies, or family structures,’ he explains.

For Huma, the works she inherited were insured and held at the family home in Istanbul across two floors that had been converted into storage, but they weren’t being preserved in the best conditions. She invited the director of Istanbul’s Pera Museum, Özalp Birol, to help assess the works. ‘He gave the exact specifications of how they run their storage unit [at Pera] – what percentage humidity it should be, how to darken the room, and so on. So, we implemented all of those guidelines and now the works are all on dividers and numbered,’ Huma says.

Inheritance tax: what are the exemptions?

Where a benefactor and beneficiary reside also determines the laws surrounding inheritance. In the UK, art forms part of a person’s estate for inheritance tax purposes in much the same way as cash, investments, or property. ‘The standard rate of inheritance tax is 40%, generally charged on the part of the estate above the available nil-rate band, which is currently £325,000. This can create a significant liquidity problem: If you inherit a painting worth GBP 2 million you may well not have the cash to meet the potential GBP 800,000 inheritance tax bill,’ Capildeo explains. Such scenarios may lead to a need to immediately sell works or other assets.

‘There are important exemptions and reliefs, including for transfers between spouses or civil partners and to charities, and the overall position depends on the rest of the estate and the allowances available,’ Capildeo adds. Other relief programs in the UK include the Conditional Exemption regime – where works of national, scientific, historic, or artistic interest can potentially pass on death without an immediate inheritance tax charge, provided the owner looks after the object, keeps it in the UK, and provides reasonable public access to it – and the Acceptance in Lieu scheme, where inheritors settle tax bills by donating important works to public institutions.

According to the 2026 Survey of Global Collecting, the majority of respondents (75%) had kept at least some of the works that they had inherited over the years. In Huma’s case, she initially tried to keep her father’s collection intact, while acquiring some additional works. ‘The more I got into my curating course and experimented in London, I saw that that wasn’t a sustainable approach,’ she says. ‘I had to add what it meant for it to be a second-generation collection – I needed to bring my own identity.’ Huma cocurated an exhibition of the collection with the art historian Esra Aliçavuşoğlu at the Pera Museum in 2016. ‘We called it “Memory and Continuity” to emphasize the dialog between the works that I’ve included and the works that my dad chose,’ Huma says. In 2024, she changed the name to the NHK Collection to stress its intergenerational character.

Over time Huma began selling some works in order to acquire new ones. As the collection grew to include more than 900 works by 200 artists, maintenance costs mounted. She spent more time in London than Istanbul, and she actively stopped buying and began to think about deaccessioning. ‘My dad always had the idea that a collection should be a core of 150–200 works, and that they should be the best or most prominent works by each artist. The rest he said he would sell,’ Huma says. ‘I have made a core list now, but not all of the remaining works are sellable.’

‘Selling art is rarely as straightforward as people expect,’ Capildeo says, especially in instances of inheritance. ‘Buyers, dealers, and auction houses will often ask detailed questions about provenance, ownership history, and authenticity. Missing paperwork that seemed irrelevant years ago can suddenly become very important,’ he adds. In the UK, collectors selling art that has gained in value while in their possession may also be liable for capital gains tax.

The delicate act of gifting

If an inheritor decides to gift some or all of their collection, choosing an institution can also be a difficult and overwhelming decision, Peart says. Some may favor a museum that their family has a personal or regional connection to; some might focus on how their works could contribute to an already established collection; and others may think about what ways an organization would maintain the family’s legacy. ‘It’s about finding that pairing where an institution is excited and passionate about bringing the collection in, and about how they will make sure that it has exposure,’ Peart adds.

To make her collection more manageable, Huma has now decided to donate parts of it, with the first group of 65 works gifted to the Lidice Art Collection in the Czech Republic in June this year. The choice of institution was partly ideological – Huma was touched by the fact that it is one of the world’s few ‘solidarity museums’; it was formed in 1966 to commemorate the massacre of the village during the Second World War and is made up of donations from hundreds of artists including Gerhard Richter, Mona Hatoum, and VALIE EXPORT. It also includes works by artists from the region that are well represented in the NHK Collection. The one condition of the donation is that the museum keeps the NHK Collection name and doesn’t deaccession any works.

For Huma, this is just the start of her gifting journey. In the future she hopes to include a map on the collection’s website showing all the locations where the dispersed works reside. For now, she is continuing to search for other institutions that ‘make sense’ for donations, like the Lidice Art Collection. ‘Going to the public opening and seeing [the collection] there, and talking to the people who work there, there was just so much emotion and gratitude. It made me feel at ease,’ she says. ‘It was like home.’