My friend Richard Verdi, who has died aged 81, had two roles at the University of Birmingham – as a professor of fine art and as director of the university’s Barber Institute of Fine Arts.
The Barber Institute had been opened in 1939, but until the arrival of Richard in 1990 had been treated as a kind of private club, reserved mainly for students and lecturers for research purposes and largely unknown to the wider world.
