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The
big London openings are over; this is the weekend when several regional
museums show their colours with the launch of high-profile exhibitions,
from Impressionism in Wales to Picasso in Edinburgh...
...Few
rural galleries have the flair of Abbot Hall in the Lake District.
Fifty years
ago, work began to transform the crumbling 18th-century mansion
set among splendid lawns and trees, which had stood empty for decades,
into a thriving museum. Many excellent shows, especially those offsetting
the building's serene Georgian interior with work by troubled 20th-century
masters such as Walter Sickert and Stanley Spencer, have followed.
Abbot Hall opened, however, with no permanent collection, and this
major summer exhibition recounts the twists and turns, campaigns
and accidents, compromises and triumphs, by which it acquired a
substantial and interesting one over the past half century.
The result
is a condensed panorama of British art from Turner to now, as reflected
in recent collecting taste. There is local flavour - Kendal-trained
George Romney's pioneering masterpiece of childhood portraiture
"The Gower Children"; Turner's watercolour "Windermere";
John Ruskin's "Dawn, Coniston" - but the most popular
work in the collection is a still life by the Scottish Colourist
Samuel Peploe, there is a significant St Ives presence including
"Crowned Head", Ben Nicholson's profile of Barbara Hepworth,
and the most rivetting aspect is edgy modern British works acquired
over the past decade. The largest group of Freud etchings in a public
gallery, Paulo Rego's "Abortion Series" triptych, Spenser's
claustrophobic, chillingly bleak depiction of his lover Daphne Charlton
and an equally claustrophobic, boxed-in abstraction by Sean Scully,
Kitaj's portrait "Poet" of 2006:
this
is the sort of intelligent, focused collection that proves that
all does not have to be doom and gloom for cash-strapped regional
galleries.
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