My pal Anne Goodchild, who has died aged 77, was an artwork historian who rose to turn into senior curator of the Graves artwork gallery in Sheffield, the place she had began as a researcher again within the early Nineteen Seventies. She retired in 2007, simply earlier than the introduction of laws that will have enabled her to proceed within the put up she beloved a lot.
I met Anne in 1976 when she organised a touring exhibition of Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a part of a sequence of exhibits for Sheffield Metropolis artwork galleries dedicated to Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-century artists in want of clever re-evaluation. JW Waterhouse, William Strang and Gerald Brockhurst adopted, amongst many different exhibitions and scholarly shows.
In a later existence as a freelancer, Anne supported artists as a trustee to S1 Artspace, printed Expensive Winifred (2013), Christopher Wooden’s letters to Winifred and Ben Nicholson, and organised a number of touring exhibitions, usually with good-looking accompanying publications. A present of the Camden City group was adopted by a significant research of Victor Pasmore, a bravura survey of British abstraction, The Expressive Mark, and a sublime reappraisal of Ivon Hitchens. She was busily engaged on a brand new interpretation of Barbara Hepworth earlier than her dying.
Anne lived for many of her life within the Sheffield suburb of Broomhill, John Betjeman’s “prettiest suburb in England”. An enthusiastic cinemagoer, she was additionally an avid traveller, at all times stylishly dressed, putting as any Brockhurst portrait, and happiest taking a practice in direction of a brand new escapade; with a glass in hand after monitoring down a constructing by Le Corbusier; entertaining buddies with exuberant anecdotes over a bottle of wine; or sending postcards in her effective italic hand. She was my common, excellent flat-sitter in Marylebone, central London, the place she maintained her childhood and artwork world connections.
Born in Ilford, Essex, Anne was the one little one of Marjorie (nee Lincoln), a housewife, and Rupert Goodchild. Her father labored for the Forestry Fee, and he or she went to Prebendal Home college in Chichester, West Sussex, after which Aylesbury highschool, Buckinghamshire.
Outings to London together with her mom have been at all times through Marylebone, usually to the Wallace Assortment. She developed her ardour for artwork in school, then Amersham School of Artwork and the Ruskin Faculty of Artwork, Oxford. She subsequently studied the historical past of artwork on the Courtauld Institute of Artwork from 1968 to 1971, throughout which era she lived with a household within the precincts of Westminster Abbey. She beloved London all her life.
Anne labored tougher at friendships than anybody I do know. One in all her glorious exhibitions was The Absent Presence and her many buddies will really feel that deeply.
