My former boss, the art gallery and museum director Gillian Spencer, who has died aged 95, was one of the pioneering curators in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s. With Frank Constantine in Sheffield and Robert Rowe in Leeds, she led the renaissance of museum services in the county, brightening their local appeal with a sense of purpose, direction and style.
When appointed in 1973 to Wakefield as museums and art galleries officer, Gillian found the city’s collections crumbling in a polluted, coal-heated building that she described as “a machine to destroy the collections”. Likewise, she found the City Art Gallery, with its incomparable collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture, being run with a policy to hang pictures on the basis of “largest and lightest”.
