Art and place

James Hamilton says that regional art galleries are as evocative as local landscape

It is always a cause for celebration when a new art gallery opens. There is something about the existence of its galleries that indicates a nation’s state of health. Lively galleries demonstrate that a nation is not so caught in the imperative to pay for schools and hospitals that it can’t, in the worst of times, present the fruits of the difficult lives and hard-won insights of painters and sculptors. In Wakefield, following the Turner Contemporary at Margate, the Hepworth opened on 21 May. That two relatively small towns in the English regions should be so blessed with expensive new kit in difficult times is wonderful to see.

The architect of both galleries, David Chipperfield, has created museums from a group of blocks arranged together. In Margate, dressed in white, they shimmer on the shoreline, visible for miles from sea and land; in Wakefield, greyer and industrial in tone, they sit on the banks of the Calder, echoing the form of one of Barbara Hepworth’s own sculptures.