The ever-energetic Laing Art Gallery has unveiled a permanent exhibition that celebrates and records art and artefacts created by makers, manufacturers and artists from north-east England.
Northern Spirit is the result of the gallery sifting through its considerable collections, which is not as easy as it might first appear.
Most regional institutions have stacks of stodgy local stuff in their stores; portraits of politicians and patricians, plus interminable views of places, more usually measured by acreage or tonnage than by quality.
The task of curators is to identify the significant and to find ways of stimulating public interest; in short, as the test papers say, to contrast and compare.
The Laing has some local star exhibits, large apocalyptic paintings by John Martin, wood block engravings by Thomas Bewick, glass and ceramics rom Beilby, Sowerby and Maling, plus superb Newcastle silver.
These have been integrated with unfamiliar pieces and shown in a redesigned area at the front of the museum. What was once a series of small rooms is now one glass walled space, a see-through cabinet of curiosities.
Janus-like, the new exhibition has two faces. One entrance leads directly from the shop, the other via the cafe. There are three designated areas labelled Artists and Communities, Artists’ Stories, and River and City, though these are somewhat arbitrary divisions.
Newcastle upon Tyne was once the largest glass-producing centre in the world. The exhibition shows exquisite Beilby enamelled glass as well as more commercial examples from Sowerby, Davidson and others.
Maling made ceramics for 200 years on Tyneside, specialising in highly fashionable decorative wares and in commercial pottery for Ringtons tea and Keiller’s marmalade.
The area’s 40-plus glassworks are all gone. Gone too, within living memory, are Maling and others. It is not only the heavy industries of mining, fishing and shipbuilding that have been blighted in the north east.
For the past 200 years artists have been drawn to record the lives of all these labouring industries, often romantically, rarely realistically.
The Laing has many genre paintings by Ralph Hedley, who, from the late 19th century, specialised in paintings of northern folk. Skilful, but excessively sentimental and undemanding, these are popular designs for greetings cards and subjects for jigsaw puzzles.
Hedley’s representations of miners are particularly sickly, exemplified by Geordie Ha’ad the Bairn. Intelligently, the curators have hung these adjacent to the more graphic Pit Road of 1960 by the brilliant Norman Cornish, himself an ex-miner, and near the starkly authentic 10am by Harry Wilson, one of a group of painters from Ashington, a colliery in Northumberland.
It is a pity that space could not have been found for fellow “pitman painter” Oliver Kilbourn, whose End of Shift from 1941 would have highlighted the superficiality of Hedley’s Going Home.
There is much for the social historian to study. Thomas William Pattison’s huge oil 1954 painting On the Tyne shows the building of the tanker La Hacienda in the Wallsend yards of the shipbuilder Swan Hunter. It dominates one entrance of the exhibition.
At the further end of the show are a series of pictures made by artists based at Cullercoats from the late 1880s. Arthur Hardwick Marsh’s Ploughman Homeward Plods His Weary Way is fiercely poetic and Gustave Courbet-like.
Robert Jobling was inspired by a Longfellow poem to illustrate homeward-bound fishwives against the setting sun in his 1886 painting Darkness Falls From The Wings of Night. Jobling’s wife, Isa Thompson, shows women collecting seaweed and driftwood for fuel in her 1893 painting Fisherfolk.
More ostentatiously, John Charlton’s epic The Women depicts a lifeboat being hauled across land for three miles by two lines of muscular women battling a snowstorm. One can almost hear the Wagnerian mood music.
Charlton was determined to preach the nobility of the working masses, even though the records of the time might record that the boat was hauled by horses rather than teams of Grace Darling look-alikes.
The curators have also sought to find more modern artistic links with the north east. One wall shows, among other pieces, a fine Linear Motif by Victor Pasmore, a Marcel Duchamp-inspired assemblage by Lloyd Gibson and an intriguing transgender work by Lizzie Rowe.
Excellent though these are, their creators were passers-through rather than closely integrated members of the community. One more persistent visitor is almost overlooked.
Around a corner, half hidden by a stack of cafeteria chairs, is LS Lowry’s spiky evocation of a chapel near City Road in inner Newcastle in 1965. It alone is worth a visit to the exhibition.
Another delight, unexpected this time, is the impressive woodcarving by the 19th-century craftsman Gerrard Robinson, the archetypal local boy made good. He trained at the Newcastle School of Design, established a successful business in London, then returned to become a Freeman of the City.
His huge three-dimensional overmantel depiction King Alfred in the Herdsman’s Hunt is fascinating. “Some fireplace that,” exclaimed one visitor. “Not if you have to dust it,” was the riposte.
But what of the star players, Bewick and Martin? The displays of Bewick’s woodblocks and illustrations are handled with a combination of tact and wonderment.
This is in marked contrast to the treatment of Martin. We were promised, in advance publicity material, “a dramatic new hanging” of his canvas The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The result is an aberration.
The picture is hung in a darkened bus-shelter construction and bombarded with red flashing lights and B-movie sound effects. Martin’s canvases have their own in-built theatricality. They need space around them, not this imposed vulgarity.
Overall, the Northern Spirit gallery is a major achievement and astonishingly good value for expenditure of only just over £1.5m. What enlivens and extends the displays is an interactive programme devised with the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University.
This explores the relationships between artworks, place and people via computers and an interactive map of photographs from private individuals and the archives of Beamish and Newcastle City Library. The information is easy to find, non-patronising, and – wonder of wonders– was fully functional on all the three visits I paid to the Laing.
My New York-based, Newcastle-born son was moved and impressed by the scale and tone of the interpretation of his birthplace and would have stayed all day in the exhibition.
Indeed, I had already noticed the very thorough and interested way in which everybody moved through the exhibition. To persuade visitors to slow down, think and seek connections is a major achievement.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Cost £1.5m (TWAM budget, £1.05m)
Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund £250,000, Department for Culture, Media and Sport/Wolfson Foundation £100,000, Arts and Humanities Research Council £112, 935 (awarded through Newcastle University’s International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies)
Curator Julie Milne
Display cases Click Netherfield
Northern Spirit is the result of the gallery sifting through its considerable collections, which is not as easy as it might first appear.
Most regional institutions have stacks of stodgy local stuff in their stores; portraits of politicians and patricians, plus interminable views of places, more usually measured by acreage or tonnage than by quality.
The task of curators is to identify the significant and to find ways of stimulating public interest; in short, as the test papers say, to contrast and compare.
The Laing has some local star exhibits, large apocalyptic paintings by John Martin, wood block engravings by Thomas Bewick, glass and ceramics rom Beilby, Sowerby and Maling, plus superb Newcastle silver.
These have been integrated with unfamiliar pieces and shown in a redesigned area at the front of the museum. What was once a series of small rooms is now one glass walled space, a see-through cabinet of curiosities.
Janus-like, the new exhibition has two faces. One entrance leads directly from the shop, the other via the cafe. There are three designated areas labelled Artists and Communities, Artists’ Stories, and River and City, though these are somewhat arbitrary divisions.
Newcastle upon Tyne was once the largest glass-producing centre in the world. The exhibition shows exquisite Beilby enamelled glass as well as more commercial examples from Sowerby, Davidson and others.
Maling made ceramics for 200 years on Tyneside, specialising in highly fashionable decorative wares and in commercial pottery for Ringtons tea and Keiller’s marmalade.
The area’s 40-plus glassworks are all gone. Gone too, within living memory, are Maling and others. It is not only the heavy industries of mining, fishing and shipbuilding that have been blighted in the north east.
For the past 200 years artists have been drawn to record the lives of all these labouring industries, often romantically, rarely realistically.
The Laing has many genre paintings by Ralph Hedley, who, from the late 19th century, specialised in paintings of northern folk. Skilful, but excessively sentimental and undemanding, these are popular designs for greetings cards and subjects for jigsaw puzzles.
Hedley’s representations of miners are particularly sickly, exemplified by Geordie Ha’ad the Bairn. Intelligently, the curators have hung these adjacent to the more graphic Pit Road of 1960 by the brilliant Norman Cornish, himself an ex-miner, and near the starkly authentic 10am by Harry Wilson, one of a group of painters from Ashington, a colliery in Northumberland.
It is a pity that space could not have been found for fellow “pitman painter” Oliver Kilbourn, whose End of Shift from 1941 would have highlighted the superficiality of Hedley’s Going Home.
There is much for the social historian to study. Thomas William Pattison’s huge oil 1954 painting On the Tyne shows the building of the tanker La Hacienda in the Wallsend yards of the shipbuilder Swan Hunter. It dominates one entrance of the exhibition.
At the further end of the show are a series of pictures made by artists based at Cullercoats from the late 1880s. Arthur Hardwick Marsh’s Ploughman Homeward Plods His Weary Way is fiercely poetic and Gustave Courbet-like.
Robert Jobling was inspired by a Longfellow poem to illustrate homeward-bound fishwives against the setting sun in his 1886 painting Darkness Falls From The Wings of Night. Jobling’s wife, Isa Thompson, shows women collecting seaweed and driftwood for fuel in her 1893 painting Fisherfolk.
More ostentatiously, John Charlton’s epic The Women depicts a lifeboat being hauled across land for three miles by two lines of muscular women battling a snowstorm. One can almost hear the Wagnerian mood music.
Charlton was determined to preach the nobility of the working masses, even though the records of the time might record that the boat was hauled by horses rather than teams of Grace Darling look-alikes.
The curators have also sought to find more modern artistic links with the north east. One wall shows, among other pieces, a fine Linear Motif by Victor Pasmore, a Marcel Duchamp-inspired assemblage by Lloyd Gibson and an intriguing transgender work by Lizzie Rowe.
Excellent though these are, their creators were passers-through rather than closely integrated members of the community. One more persistent visitor is almost overlooked.
Around a corner, half hidden by a stack of cafeteria chairs, is LS Lowry’s spiky evocation of a chapel near City Road in inner Newcastle in 1965. It alone is worth a visit to the exhibition.
Another delight, unexpected this time, is the impressive woodcarving by the 19th-century craftsman Gerrard Robinson, the archetypal local boy made good. He trained at the Newcastle School of Design, established a successful business in London, then returned to become a Freeman of the City.
His huge three-dimensional overmantel depiction King Alfred in the Herdsman’s Hunt is fascinating. “Some fireplace that,” exclaimed one visitor. “Not if you have to dust it,” was the riposte.
But what of the star players, Bewick and Martin? The displays of Bewick’s woodblocks and illustrations are handled with a combination of tact and wonderment.
This is in marked contrast to the treatment of Martin. We were promised, in advance publicity material, “a dramatic new hanging” of his canvas The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. The result is an aberration.
The picture is hung in a darkened bus-shelter construction and bombarded with red flashing lights and B-movie sound effects. Martin’s canvases have their own in-built theatricality. They need space around them, not this imposed vulgarity.
Overall, the Northern Spirit gallery is a major achievement and astonishingly good value for expenditure of only just over £1.5m. What enlivens and extends the displays is an interactive programme devised with the International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies at Newcastle University.
This explores the relationships between artworks, place and people via computers and an interactive map of photographs from private individuals and the archives of Beamish and Newcastle City Library. The information is easy to find, non-patronising, and – wonder of wonders– was fully functional on all the three visits I paid to the Laing.
My New York-based, Newcastle-born son was moved and impressed by the scale and tone of the interpretation of his birthplace and would have stayed all day in the exhibition.
Indeed, I had already noticed the very thorough and interested way in which everybody moved through the exhibition. To persuade visitors to slow down, think and seek connections is a major achievement.
Peter Lewis is a writer and a past director of Beamish, the North of England Open Air Museum
Project data
Cost £1.5m (TWAM budget, £1.05m)
Main funders Heritage Lottery Fund £250,000, Department for Culture, Media and Sport/Wolfson Foundation £100,000, Arts and Humanities Research Council £112, 935 (awarded through Newcastle University’s International Centre for Cultural and Heritage Studies)
Curator Julie Milne
Display cases Click Netherfield
