Frank Constantine, who has died aged 95, took Sheffield's art collection to a standard that rivalled that of many other British cities, and created a public programme of education and inclusion that was ahead of its time and widely imitated. When he was appointed the director of Sheffield City Art Galleries in 1964, only the Graves Gallery, above the Central Library, was open, and one of his first tasks was to bring the Mappin Art Gallery back to life. The Mappin, now no longer an art gallery, but incorporated into Weston Park Museum, had suffered a direct hit during second world war bombing. Keen to bring to Sheffield the modern and contemporary art on show in London, Frank rebuilt the Mappin with white interlinked open spaces that prefigured the capital's Hayward Gallery.
He built strong ties with other organisations, particularly the then Arts Council of Great Britain, on whose panels he sat, and which was responsible for touring many of the great exhibitions of the 1960s and 70s. In the Mappin, Frank introduced new facilities for hanging both the temporary exhibitions that drew people in among them Landseer and His World (1972), British Painting 1900-60 (1975), Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1976) and Homespun to Highspeed: A Century of British Design 1880-1980 (with David Mellor and Fiona MacCarthy, 1980) and the permanent collections that kept them coming back.
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