走向现代—英国美术三百年 来自英国西北部的公共艺术收藏

2012年9月21日 至 11月04日, 湖南省博物馆

2012年11月15日 至 12月23日, 中华世纪坛世界艺术馆

2012年12月31日 至 2012年3月3日, 辽宁省博物馆

2013年3月14日 至 4月21日, 江西省博物馆

2013年4月30日 至 6月14日, 广东省美术馆

2013年6月25日 至 8月9日, 河南博物院

这批作品是一笔由英国艺术家创造的非凡财富，藏于曼彻斯特及邻近城市的博物馆与美术馆之中。由于工业革命的巨大影响，此地区的艺术发展呈现出一派繁荣景象，这使得富有的制造商与商人们能够资助支持艺术家的创作，同时他们也能大量收藏优秀作品。

许多艺术家都将自己的作品遗赠给了大曼彻斯特郡下各个城镇的公共美术馆。同时，英格兰西北部的博物馆和美术馆也购入了历史名作和当代画作，增加了自身馆藏量。此次《走向现代——英国美术三百年》将展示这批丰富的艺术文化遗产，这不仅来自于英格兰西北部人民的精心收藏与资助，同时也是各个机构自发收藏的成果。此次展览还将颂扬当地人民的开放思想、自由精神以及他们坚定的信念，坚信艺术具有普世意义，能够造福于全人类。

虽然不同的美术馆和博物馆收藏的展品都具有各自的独特属性、各有优劣，但通过对大曼彻斯特公共藏品中所有类型的绘画风格和特点的梳理，此次展览将对18世纪中期到今日的英国绘画发展情况进行全方位综合性考察。展览既会展示先锋派画作，又会展示传统绘画作品；既囊括了主流艺术画作，又囊括了反叛传统的艺术作品。展览也将网罗不同的绘画流派，从传统的历史和宗教主题，到肖像画和风景画(这是英国艺术中最为熟悉的两大类型)， 再到捕捉普通英国人日常生活片段的“艺术白话文”。

此次展览同样会展示创作于21世纪的画作，与200多年前的作品一同呈现于观众面前，从陈列的布局也能发现出不同时期作品的异同之处。本次展览讲述的艺术进化史并未有任何顺畅可测的模式可循，也很少优先欧洲的创作。此次展览将展现英国艺术的独特性与光怪陆离之风，以及复杂精致与高超非凡的固有技巧。英国艺术的复杂性与奇特性将使这场展览具有极为丰富的可观赏性，为观众带来最激动人心的体验。

Toward Modernity: Three Centuries of British Art

21 September to 4 November 2012, Hunan Provincial Museum

15 November to 23 December 2012, Beijing World Art Museum

31 December 2012 to 3 March 2013, Liaoning Provincial Museum

An extraordinary wealth of works by British artists exists in the museums and galleries of Manchester and neighbouring cities. The great prosperity that has existed in the region, a consequence in large part of the Industrial Revolution which established there in the late eighteenth century, led to the patronage of artists and the forming of magnificent collections by wealthy manufacturers and business people. In many cases, these individuals have in turn bequeathed works to the public galleries that were founded in the towns and cities that cluster together to form the larger Manchester conurbation. At the same time, the museums of the North West of England have themselves bought historical and contemporary works, thus augmenting their founding collections. The exhibition, ‘Toward Modernity: Three Centuries of British Art’, will draw on the great richness of art that is the legacy of collecting and patronage by the men and women of the North West and the programmes of acquisition by the institutions themselves and will be a celebration, both of their open-mindedness and the liberal spirit that exists throughout the region, and of their belief that art has a universal meaning and is of great benefit to all people.

Although each of the galleries and museums from which works will come has an individual character and particular strengths and lacunae, by drawing on the entire spectrum of styles and specialisations represented within the public collections in Greater Manchester the exhibition will be in a position to construct a comprehensive survey of the development of British painting from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. This will take account of the polarities of the avant-garde and an art produced for an establishment, by including works that represent an artistic mainstream and others that demonstrate a rejection of convention. It will include examples of different genres of painting and drawing, from the grand tradition of history and religious subjects, to portraiture and landscape (two of the most familiar staples of British art), to paintings and drawings which will offer glimpses of the actualities of everyday life for Britons of every kind and which form a kind of artistic vernacular. It will likewise show works made in the twenty-first century in conjunction with paintings and drawings which are more than two centuries old, and across the range of exhibits patterns of consistency and of divergence will be explored. The exhibition will tell the story of an artistic evolution which hardly at all follows a smooth or predictable pattern and which only on rare occasions shows a dependence on European precedence or practice. It will celebrate the individuality and eccentricity of British art as well as its sophistication and extraordinary levels of intrinsic skill.

It is the complexity and eccentric variety of British art which will make this exhibition rich and rewarding to look at, and which will offer most exciting surprises. In Britain, because no academic system of artistic education has ever been properly established, painters have enjoyed an unexampled liberty to express their own particular creative bents without untoward concern about the wider expectation of taste or artistic utility. Individuals who have sought to reform the practice of art in this country have usually done so from a position of artistic non-conformism or personal idiosyncrasy – one thinks for example of the drawings of William Blake, or the early experimental works of the Pre-Raphaelites, or the uniquely visionary canvases of Stanley Spencer – and, although the consequence may be an overall artistic development that is confusing and complicated to explain, nonetheless it is one which is fabulously characterful and distinct. In this sense, painting and drawing offer a fascinating parallel to the wider intellectual, cultural and also the political life of the nation; for this was a period during which Britain emerged as a modern nation, not by outright revolution, but by the impassioned lead of remarkable and idiosyncratic individuals, often themselves non-conformists in the religious or political sense, who drove forward change on the part of the population as a whole. This was especially true in Manchester, where in the nineteenth century was established a new and progressive school of economists and in which city was fostered a political alternative to the London-based conservative hegemony.

This is an exhibition which will demonstrate the creativity and imagination of generations of British artists, and which will offer insights into the mentality and self-perception of people in this country which will be of great interest to audiences abroad.

（来源：英国使馆文化教育处，编辑 Helen）