Celebrating a hundred years of Leeds Art Fund

Next week sees the latest in a series of talks organised by LAF, presented this time by writer, lecturer and curator Dr Michael Paraskos.

The author will use the work of famous Leeds Jewish artist Jacob Kramer, alongside the work of Stanley Spencer, as well as other artists in the gallery’s collection, to present a radical new theory, based on his study into Orthodox Christian icon painting, to suggest instead that art is a window into another world.

Dr Paraskos’s talk is the latest in a series organised by LAF, one of the oldest supporting ‘friends’ organisations for the visual arts in Great Britain, which in 2012 celebrates 100 years since its inception.

The organisation has helped to buy, for the collections at Leeds Museums and Galleries, more than 430 works by artists including Warhol, Bacon and Moore.

In the years before the Second World War, the LAF helped to buy a number of important works by Stanley Spencer, one of the artists Dr Paraskos will discuss during his talk next week.

From 1934 to 1945, the director of Leeds Art Gallery was Philip Hendy, an active supporter of contemporary artists of the day who bought work by artists who he believed had the potential to become significant. The artists he supported included Ben Nicholson, Walter Sickert, Graham Sutherland – and Stanley Spencer.

In the space of just six years he bought no less than five pictures by Spencer, one of Britain’s most renowned 20th Century artists, three of them with the help of LAF.

Two of these paintings are now on display at Leeds Art Gallery, in a small exhibition which opened this week, alongside two paintings by Spencer’s younger brother Gilbert.

Created close together in time, just after the brothers returned from the First World War, the paintings show the two brother’s quest to paint a vision of their native Cookham-on-Thames, experienced as an everyday Christian idyll; their work was never to share quite the same vision as expressed in these paintings.

How these paintings came to be in Leeds is a story involving a jilted second wife, and Hendy, as Leeds Art Gallery’s Director, taking on the metropolitan-focused forces of the Contemporary Art Society.

Dr Paraskos will refer to these paintings, along with others from the Leeds Art Gallery collection, in his talk next week.

“We have come to think of art as a way of talking about things in our world. That could be political events, social situations, or even our personal feelings,” he says.

“I will present a theory to suggest instead that art is a window into another world.”

Dr Paraskos’s talk is just one of a series of events celebrating the centenary of LAF. The major part of the celebration is an exhibition Art In Our Time, on show at Leeds Art gallery until August 26.

The exhibition includes Lucien Pissarro’s painting Wells Farm Railway Bridge, Acton and England’s avant garde futurist artist R W Nevinson’s Searchlights from 1914, two of the Fund’s earliest acquisitions.

Dr Paraskos, The Gates of Paradise, Art as the Garden of Eden, July 11, 6.30pm, Leeds Art Gallery. Tickets on 0113 247 8256.