The Ruskin Galleries was a private

art gallery An art gallery is a room or a building in which visual art is displayed. In Western cultures from the mid-15th century, a gallery was any long, narrow covered passage along a wall, first used in the sense of a place for art in the 1590s. The long ...

located in what is now

Chamberlain Square Chamberlain Square or Chamberlain Place is a Town square, public square in central Birmingham, England, named after statesman and notable mayor of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. The Victorian square was drastically remodelled in the 1970s, with ...

Birmingham Birmingham ( ) is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in the metropolitan county of West Midlands (county), West Midlands, within the wider West Midlands (region), West Midlands region, in England. It is the Lis ...

, England between 1925 and 1940. It provided a venue for the exhibition of

modern art Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the tradit ...

at a time when Birmingham's other major artistic institutions were marked by a high degree of artistic conservativism. Birmingham had been at the forefront of the emergence of several radical art movements in the 19th century, but during the early 20th century the city was largely resistant to emergining

modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...

trends in the visual arts. In 1917 the

Royal Birmingham Society of Artists The Royal Birmingham Society of Artists (RBSA) is an art society, based in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham, England, where it owns and operates an art gallery, the RBSA Gallery, on Brook Street, just off St Paul's Square, Birmingham, St Pa ...

hosted an exhibition of

Post-Impressionist Post-Impressionism (also spelled Postimpressionism) was a predominantly French art movement that developed roughly between 1886 and 1905, from the last Impressionist exhibition to the birth of Fauvism. Post-Impressionism emerged as a reaction a ...

works curated by

Roger Fry Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English painter and art critic, critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent ...

, but it met a hostile reception, with a review in the ''

Birmingham Post The ''Birmingham Post'' is a weekly printed newspaper based in Birmingham, England, with distribution throughout the West Midlands. First published under the name the ''Birmingham Daily Post'' in 1857, it has had a succession of distinguished ...

'' condemning its works for their "puerile insanities" and "the unbelievable squalor of their production". An editorial in the ''Birmingham Post'' in 1925 asked "Why is it that Birmingham has ceased to count as an important centre of Art?", criticising the RBSA as being controlled by "a small group of men who have arrogated to themselves the responsibility for deciding what is and isn't art ... entirely out of sympathy with modern movements .... having stood still for at least twenty years" The Ruskin Galleries were opened by John Gibbins in 1925 and exhibited work both by local artists and by artists from the international avant-garde. One of the first exhibitions put on by the gallery included works by

Matisse Henri Émile Benoît Matisse (; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French visual arts, visual artist, known for both his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a drawing, draughtsman, printmaking, printmaker, ...

, Bonnard and Vlaminck. In 1928 it hosted a nationally groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary Russian artists, featuring 70 paintings by 15 artists including Filipp Malyavin,

Konstantin Korovin Konstantin (Constantin) Alekseyevich Korovin (; 11 September 1939) was a leading Russian Impressionist painter. Biography Youth and education Konstantin was born into a wealthy merchant family of Old Believers

Natalia Goncharova Natalia Sergeevna Goncharova (, ; 3 July 188117 October 1962) was a Russian avant-garde artist, painter, costume designer, writer, illustrator, and set designer. Goncharova's lifelong partner was fellow Russian avant-garde artist Mikhail Lariono ...

Mikhail Larionov Mikhail Fyodorovich Larionov (; – May 10, 1964) was a Russian avant-garde painter who worked with radical exhibitors and pioneered the first approach to abstract Russian art. He was founding member of two important artistic groups Knave ...

. During the 1920s and 1930s it provided a venue for the local Artist-Craftsmen Group, which evolved into the Modern Group, providing an outlet for the emergence of progressive Birmingham artists such as the sculptors Gordon Herickx and Alan Bridgwater. The galleries hosted a one-man show by Joseph Southall in 1927. The gallery's immediate impact was noted in the national press in 1926: "when Birmingham seemed hopeless and the modernists felt like exiles in the desert, a miracle happened .... Mr Gibbons has almost revolutionised the artistic life of Birmingham". Although its founder John Gibbons died in 1932 the gallery continued to present exhibitions by local and international artists throughout the 1930s and remained open until 1940, when it was closed due to the onset of the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War (1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945) was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War II, Allies and the Axis powers. World War II by country, Nearly all of the wo ...

. In November of that year the ''

Birmingham Mail The ''Birmingham Mail'' (branded the ''Black Country Mail'' in the Black Country and ''Birmingham Live'' online) is a tabloid newspaper based in Birmingham, England, but distributed around Birmingham, the Black Country, and Solihull and parts ...

'' reviewed its influence: "For over a dozen years it has been an institution in the cultural life of Birmingham where contemporary art has been displayed and modern craftsmanship exhibited in greater variety than anywhere else ... more than one painter may be said to have been discovered there."

References

Bibliography

* {{Citation, last=Hall, first=J. Barrie, year=2002, title=A Review of the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists, 1821-1999, publication-place=Birmingham, publisher=RBSA Archive Art museums and galleries in Birmingham, West Midlands Art museums and galleries established in 1925