Ruskin Galleries

This gallery was a private art gallery located in the centre of Birmingham and functioned between 1925 and 1940. The gallery provided a venue for the exhibition of what was then considered modern art which was very much against the prevailing conservative trends not only in the second city but elsewhere in the UK. Although historically Birmingham had pioneered some radical art movements in the 19th century, by the pre-World War I era the city had reverted to safer tendencies and had thus resisted emerging modernism. The ‘infamous’ Post-Impressionist Exhibition championed by Roger Fry travelled to the city in 1917 and was shown at the Royal Birmingham Society of Artists. It met with much hostility and the local press considered it as ‘puerile insanity’. In 1925 local man John Gibbins, (1878-1932) the son of a picture frame maker began exhibiting not only work by local artists but by artists from the international avant-garde. One of the first exhibitions put on by the gallery included works by Matisse, Bonnard and Vlaminck. In 1928 it hosted a groundbreaking exhibition of contemporary Russian artists, featuring 70 paintings by 15 artists including Natalia Goncharova and Mikhail Larionov. During the decade from 1925, it also 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 and in 1927 the gallery exhibited the work of local nationally-know artist Joseph Southall. Gibbins received national press acclaim for his endeavours with statements that included ‘Mr Gibbons has almost revolutionised the artistic life of Birmingham. Despite its founder’s death, the gallery continued for a further 8 years and its closure in 1940 only occurred due to the onset of the Second World War.

Other artists who exhibited included local artists Alice Coats, Clifford Webb, Ethel Henriques, Joseph Simpson and at a nationally-known level, Jacob Epstein, Christopher Nevinson, Lucien Pissarro and many more.