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not a Victorian wood nymph or a pale Pre-Raphaelite lady in sight.
Because, unlike many provincial art galleries, Abbot Hall has no
high Victorian art. For it did not start with a collection but a
building. The only Grade I-listed building in Kendal, other than
the parish church, Abbot Hall was, by the 1950s, virtually derelict
and threatened with demolition.
It was saved
by a group of local enthusiasts, who then had to find a use for
it, and turned it into a gallery. As a Georgian building it made
sense to start with a local artist, Romney, who was working during
the same period as the house was built.
With no guaranteed
funding, the gallery has relied for the past 45 years on benefactors,
the Art Fund, government funding and the generosity of private individuals.
The result is a fine collection of 19th-century watercolours with
a special emphasis on works that relate to the Lake District, including
those by Turner and one of the biggest collections of John Ruskin
in the country.
Given its location,
it would have been easy for such a gallery to have rested on its
laurels, simply showcasing historic works with links to the area.
But
what has put Abbot Hall on the map has been its bullish policy
of showing and collecting modern British art.
Among the best
represented is the St. Ives School, with three works by Ben Nicholson,
a Terry Frost, Peter Lanyon's 1946 The Yellow Runner and
a Roger Hilton, Space, painted in 1962. This spare, edgy
work of charcoal and oil on bare canvas, although purely abstract,
evokes something of the rock formations and space to be found in
the wild Cornish landscape.
There is also
a good still life by one of the Scottish Colourists - the tartan
answer to Fauvism - SJ Peploe, and a number of significant landscapes
by Neo-Romantics such as Graham Sutherland and John Piper. The gallery
also has a collection of works by the German refugee artist, Kurt
Schwitters, who sought unlikely sanctuary from the fascism during
the 1940s in Ambleside.
The collection
also highlights that some of Britain's most important 20th-century
artists, such as Freud and Auerbach, came to this country as children,
Jewish refugees from Hitler's Germany.
It
was, arguably, Abbot Hall's exhibition of Lucian Freud that placed
it in a league that guaranteed other significant contemporary
artists would want to be shown at the gallery.
This has led
to associations with artists such as Paulo Rego and Sean Scully.
The featured Regos are among her most powerful, produced in response
to a referendum in Portugal on the relaxation of abortion laws,
which meld her strong graphic sense with a talent for storytelling.
A recent Sean
Scully exhibition resulted in the acquisition of Wall of Light,
Red Summer, an important work where the grid-like forms bleed
into one another, catching the effects of the changing light playing
on the crumbling stone walls of the ruins of Yucatan, Mexico, which
was its source of inspiration.
Other acquisitions
are those of the painter Celia Paul, who, though influenced by Freud,
shows the spiritual sensibility of an artist striving to find universal
truths through painterly exploration, and a Tony Bevan. His bold
Horizon, a painting of two monumental heads reduced to
a map of architectural scaffolding executed in ox-blood reds, reveals
something of the existential isolation of modern life and suggests
that not all contemporary painting has to follow the well-worn path
of easy-irony.
Although the
Abbot Hall collection focuses mostly on painting, there are also
sculptures, such as the bullet-bodied bird by Elizabeth Frink, Harbinger
Bird II. While there are undeniably gaps,
one
of the strengths of this collection is that it is being built
with a particular aesthetic focus regardless of the whims of metropolitan
fashion and is fast developing into a showcase for the best and
most enduring British art.
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