THE exhibition sub-title is Fifty Years of Collecting Modern Art: The Collections of Ronnie Duncan and Greville Worthington.
The 'fifty' refers more to Duncan, whose passion was sparked by the St Ives abstract school of Roger Hilton, Alan Davie and Terry Frost; Worthington began his art-buying "conversations" in his Eighties' days at Edinburgh University with fellow North Yorkshireman Jay Jopling, now the art dealer du jour in London.
Despite the generation gap between Duncan and Worthington in age and artistic taste (paintings versus anything but paintings), they share an admiration for Ian Hamilton Finlay's screenprints: indeed one upstairs wall segues from Duncan into Worthington's Hamilton Finlay collection.
They are also linked by what Duncan calls a "need to live with paintings and sculptures and keep up a dialogue with them". If so, they must be suffering from withdrawal symptoms, given how many works they have loaned this autumn.
There are so many that one of the gallery's express wishes behind mounting the exhibition takes on a secondary importance, usurped by the desire to see all Duncan and Worthington selections. The exhibition notes talk of a "remarkable juxtaposition of modern and historic art", with the City Art Gallery's permanent artefacts standing cheek-by-jowl in every room with the post-war private collections of Duncan and Worthington, and yes, suddenly far more 20th century art is on display than normal to complement the old oily masters and the William Ettys.
Being flippant and fashion-obsessed for a second, the 12 woollen blankets of Paul Bradley's The Red Cloud, from Worthington's collection, suit the red walls on which they hang, but overall the greater joy lies in following the yellow label road than seeking to compare and contrast past and present. Those yellow labels, distinct from the salmon pink ones for the gallery's works, mark out the temporary additions and it is the label comments of the serious Hudson and the more flippant, if occasionally Pseuds Corner, Worthington that are the most enlightening feature.
Be it Duncan describing Alan Davie's works looking at him, or Worthington provocatively calling Joseph Beuys the most important artist of the 20th century, they entice you to converse with art anew. What's more, they both reveal an eye for art history in the making, be it Hilton or Damien Hirst.
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