 | This biography of a living person includes a list of general references, but it lacks sufficient corresponding inline citations .(April 2011) |
Julian Spalding (born 15 June 1947 in Lewisham, South London) [1] is an English art critic, writer, broadcaster and a former curator. Considered to be a controversial maverick and outspoken critic of the art world, he has frequently contributed to arts, news and current affairs programmes on radio and TV.
 | This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(August 2023) |
Spalding grew up on a council estate in St Mary Cray, South London. His upbringing there played an important part in shaping his subsequent outlook, particularly with regard to understanding how social inequality and cultural deprivation have a negative impact on people's lives.
He studied art history at the University of Nottingham and art at Nottingham Art College, and after a brief spell as an artist and designer he chose to work in museums and galleries. Spalding started as an art assistant at museums in Leicester and Durham before becoming director of galleries for Sheffield, and then Manchester. In 1989 he was appointed director of Glasgow Museums, responsible for the largest collection managed by a local authority and Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
| This section of a biography of a living person does not include any references or sources .(August 2023) |
During his career as a curator he established several award-winning, innovative galleries and museum services, including the Ruskin Gallery in Sheffield; the St Mungo Museum of Religious Life and Art and The Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA) in Glasgow; and the Open Museum. In 2000, he also instigated the now international Campaign for Drawing.
In 1999, he was awarded the Lord Provost's Prize for Services to the Visual Arts in Glasgow for his directorship of Glasgow Art Galleries and Museums, although his curatorial career was cut short the same year when his post, along with others, was abolished by Glasgow City Council. Spalding subsequently spoke internationally and advised museums and galleries about new and innovative approaches, later outlined as what he describes as a practical philosophy in his 2002 book The Poetic Museum. He is also a Companion of the Guild of St George, and served as Master from 1996 to 2005.
Since 2001, he has concentrated chiefly on his writing, winning the Banister Fletcher Prize in 2006 for his book The Art of Wonder.
His latest book "Art Exposed" (Pallas Athene) 2023 is an account of his professional life and the many people he has met and has had dealings with, from David Hockney to the Queen, Henri-Cartier Bresson to Niki de St Phalle, Jack Jones to David Bowie.
In 2024 he wrote to the National Gallery (copy to the King) asking them to remove the cut-off date of 1900 they themselves imposed on their collection in 1996, without any public debate, and continue to bring their collection of great paintings slowly and magisterially up-to-date, as they had been doing since their foundation 200 years ago. The art of painting didn't die in 1900. It is still very much alive. As Dalya Alberge said in her article about his letters in the Guardian 'they are creating a terrible fossil'. [2]
Laurence Stephen Lowry was an English artist. His drawings and paintings mainly depict Pendlebury, Greater Manchester as well as Salford and its vicinity.
David Hockney is an English painter, draughtsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Paul Sandby was an English map-maker turned landscape painter in watercolours, who, along with his older brother Thomas, became one of the founding members of the Royal Academy in 1768.
Marcus Harvey is an English artist and painter, one of the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Nancy Spero was an American visual artist known for her political and feminist paintings and hand pulled prints.
The Hon. Sir Nicholas Andrew Serota is a British art historian and curator.
Emilie Cosman, known as Milein Cosman, was a German-born British artist. She was best known for her graphic work of leading cultural figures, dancers and musicians in action, such as Francis Bacon, Mikhail Baryshnikov, T. S. Eliot and Igor Stravinsky.
Nicholas Krushenick was an American abstract painter, collagist and printmaker whose mature artistic style straddled Pop Art, Op Art, Minimalism and Color Field. He was active in the New York art scene from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s, before he began focusing his time as a professor at the University of Maryland. Initially experimenting with a more derivative Abstract Expressionist style, by the mid-1960s he had developed his own unique approach, painting increasingly decisive compositions marked by bold, colorful, geometric fields and forms simultaneously flattened and amplified by strong black outlines, in a style that eventually became known as Pop abstraction. In 1984, the biographical dictionary World Artists, 1950-1980 observed that Krushenick "has been called the only truly abstract Pop painter." Today, as other artists have been carefully folded into the same paradoxical genre, Krushenick is not only considered a singular figure within that style but also its pioneer, earning him the title "the father of Pop abstraction."
Emilio Sanchez (1921–1999) was an American artist known for his architectural paintings and graphic lithographs. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes de La Habana, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Bogotá Museum of Modern Art, La Tertulia Museum, and the National Gallery of Australia.
Ingrid Kerma is a German artist.
Ian A. C. Dejardin is an art historian who was director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery in Dulwich, England. In August 2016 Dulwich Picture Gallery announced that he would be leaving to become chief executive of the McMichael Canadian Art Collection in Ontario in April 2017. He is married to Eric Pearson, his partner since 1987, and lives in Toronto, Canada.
Tobias G. Natter is an Austrian art historian and internationally renowned art expert with a particular expertise in "Vienna 1900".
Gerald David "Gerry" Badger is an English writer and curator of photography, and a photographer.
Mark Haworth-Booth is a British academic and historian of photography. He was a curator at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London from 1970 to 2004.
Jim Whiting is a British artist and inventor. He was born in Paris and spent his early childhood in Salisbury, Zimbabwe before returning to the UK with his family in 1959. He studied Electronic Engineering & Systems Control at Queen Mary College and then sculpture at Saint Martins School of Art after a foundation at High Wycombe Art College.
Nerys Ann Johnson was a Welsh artist and art curator.
Hugh Graham Belsey, MBE, is a British art historian who is an authority on the art of Thomas Gainsborough. For 23 years he was the curator of Gainsborough's House in Sudbury. His most recent contribution to Gainsborough scholarship is his catalogue raisonné of Gainsborough's portraits published in February 2019 by the Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
The Museum Barberini is an art museum in Potsdam opened in 2017. Its exhibitions range from the so-called Old Masters to contemporary art, with an emphasis on impressionist painting. Centered around works from the collection of its founder and patron Hasso Plattner, the Barberini presents three temporary exhibitions per year, featuring loans from international museums and private collections. Academic conferences serve to prepare these exhibitions. At the same time, shorter gallery displays – the so-called “art histories” – put works from the collection into constantly shifting contexts. The museum aims to offer a diverse programme of events and educational activities as well as digital offers like the Barberini App and the 4K Smart Wall in the museum.
John Myers is a British landscape and portrait photographer and painter. Between 1973 and 1981 he photographed mundane aspects of middle class life in the centre of England—black and white portraits of ordinary people and suburbia within walking distance of his home in Stourbridge.
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Other | |
