Leeds produced many notable artists and sculptors, including
Kenneth Armitage,
John Atkinson Grimshaw,
Jacob Kramer,
Barbara Hepworth,
Henry Moore,
Edward Wadsworth and
Joash Woodrow, and was the centre for a particularly radical strain of British art. Before the First World War Leeds was the home of an unusual modernist arts organisation, called the
Leeds Arts Club, founded by
Alfred Orage, which lasted from 1903 to 1923. Notable members included
Jacob Kramer,
Herbert Read,
Frank Rutter and
Michael Sadler. As well as advocating a radical political agenda, supporting the
Suffragettes, the
Independent Labour Party and the
Fabian Society, and promoting the philosophy of
Friedrich Nietzsche, the Leeds Arts Club was almost unique in Britain as being an exponent of
German Expressionist ideas about art and culture. As a result, it staged very early British exhibitions of work by European expressionist artists, such as
Wassily Kandinsky, showing their work in the city as early as 1913, and produced its own English Expressionist artists, including Jacob Kramer and Bruce Turner. In the 1920s Leeds College of Art was the starting point for the careers of the sculptors
Barbara Hepworth and
Henry Moore, and in the 1950s, and 1960s it was one of the leading centres for radical art education in Britain under the guidance of artists such as
Harry Thubron and
Tom Hudson, and the art historian
Norbert Lynton. Their attempts to redefine what art education should mean in the post-
Second World War period led the artist
Patrick Heron to claim in 1971 in
The Guardian newspaper that "Leeds is the most influential art school in Europe since the
Bauhaus". This willingness to push at the boundaries of acceptable public behaviour from artists was also evident in 1966 when Leeds College of Art staged an exhibition of paintings by the Cypriot artist
Stass Paraskos, who taught at the college, which was raided by the police after allegations of obscenity. This radicalism continued into the 1970s when the higher education component of Leeds College of Art was split from the college to form the nucleus of the new multidisciplinary Leeds Polytechnic, now called
Leeds Beckett University. Performance art had been taught earlier at Leeds College of Art, notably by the
Fluxus artist
Robin Page during his time as a tutor there in the mid-1960s, but in 1977 a performance art work hit the national news headlines when the students Pete Parkin and Derek Wain used an air pistol to shoot a line up of live
budgerigars in front of an audience at Leeds Polytechnic. The
University of Leeds was the
alma mater of
Herbert Read, one of the leading international theorists of modern art from the mid-twentieth century, and also the teaching base for the
Marxist art historian
Arnold Hauser from 1951 to 1985. Partly due to Herbert Read's connection with the university, from 1950 to 1970 the university was the host of one of the first
artist-in-residence schemes in Britain, using funding from the then owner of
Lund Humphries books, Peter Gregory. The Gregory Fellowships, as the residencies were known, were given to painters and sculptors for up to two years to allow them to develop their own work and influence the university in any way they saw fit. Amongst those holding the fellowships were
Kenneth Armitage,
Reg Butler,
Dennis Creffield and
Terry Frost and others. Parallel Gregory Fellowships also existed in music and poetry at the university. Leeds was also a centre for radical feminist art, with one of the first galleries in Britain dedicated to showing the work of women photographers, the Pavilion Gallery, opening in the city in 1983, and the
University of Leeds School of Fine Art being a well-known centre for the development of feminist art history, under
Griselda Pollock, during the 1980s and 1990s. Possibly as a result of the strength of feminist art in Leeds, in November 1984 an exhibition of ceramics by students and staff at Leeds Polytechnic was attacked by a group of feminist activists who destroyed eight sculptures on display which they deemed to be degrading to women. The University of Leeds's School of Fine Art also specialised in
Art & Language conceptual art practice, under
Terry Atkinson, again in the 1980s and 1990s. Atkinson tutored the
Leeds 13 year group that, in 1998, provoked a national media frenzy with their Spanish holiday as art hoax. A major sculpture research centre and gallery, the
Henry Moore Institute, is located alongside
Leeds Art Gallery in the city centre, and in 2013 a new contemporary art centre, called
The Tetley, opened on the site of the former Tetley Brewery to the south of the city centre. In March 2017,
The Times voted Leeds as the number one cultural place to live in Britain. This was ahead of London,
Birmingham,
St Ives,
Stratford-upon-Avon and
Cheltenham. The citation notes that Leeds has
Opera North, the
Northern Ballet, and the
Leeds Playhouse amongst many other attractions that ranked it at number one.
Art galleries Art practice and collecting has a long history in Leeds: the city's municipal art gallery (
Leeds Art Gallery) opened in 1888.
J. M. W. Turner painted numerous scenes in and around the city, and the city was home to one of Britain's largest collections of Pre-Raphaelite Art, owned by Thomas Plint, during the nineteenth century. There was also an early history of holding large-scale public exhibitions in the city, most notably the series of 'Polytechnic Exhibitions' held regularly from 1839. Leeds Art Gallery houses important collections of traditional and contemporary British art, with the best twentieth century collection outside London and a colourful wall painting for the Victorian staircase by Lothar Götz. Just next door, The
Henry Moore Institute is dedicated to celebrating sculpture. In the iconic building, they host a year-round changing programme of historical, modern and contemporary exhibitions presenting sculpture from across the world. Located in the striking art deco headquarters of the former brewery,
The Tetley is a centre for contemporary art, centred on creativity, innovation and experimentation. There is also an art gallery within the Mansion Conservatory in
Roundhay Park. ==Architecture==