Art and place

James Hamilton says that regional art galleries are as evocative as local landscape

It is always a cause for celebration when a new art gallery opens. There is something about the existence of its galleries that indicates a nation’s state of health. Lively galleries demonstrate that a nation is not so caught in the imperative to pay for schools and hospitals that it can’t, in the worst of times, present the fruits of the difficult lives and hard-won insights of painters and sculptors. In Wakefield, following the Turner Contemporary at Margate, the Hepworth opened on 21 May. That two relatively small towns in the English regions should be so blessed with expensive new kit in difficult times is wonderful to see.

The architect of both galleries, David Chipperfield, has created museums from a group of blocks arranged together. In Margate, dressed in white, they shimmer on the shoreline, visible for miles from sea and land; in Wakefield, greyer and industrial in tone, they sit on the banks of the Calder, echoing the form of one of Barbara Hepworth’s own sculptures. From one of the Hepworth’s ten high, light galleries there is a view over the weir and the 14th-century Chantry Chapel that will surely become one of the sights of Yorkshire, as will the gift to the gallery from the artist’s family of 44 of Barbara Hepworth’s plasters and other works.

Amid the celebration of Hepworths in Wakefield there is, however, only a hint of the wealth of Wakefield’s own extensive art collection. The city kept alive the public purchase of modern art in the 1940s and 1950s, supporting Henry Moore and Hepworth when others rejected them. Moore’s early elmwood ‘Reclining Figure’, bought in 1942 for £150, is proudly on show among important drawings.