Throughout the last three decades of the 20th century Michael Parkin, who has died aged 82, was one of the most colourful fixtures of the London art world. Operating from a small, unprepossessing gallery in a quiet corner of Belgravia its walls still clad in fading beige hessian long after the vogue for pristine white spaces had achieved ubiquity he mounted a programme of exhibitions that made unexpected connections across the whole landscape of modern British art. Some of the most memorable were centred on his two artistic heroes, James McNeill Whistler and Walter Sickert, and their pupils. Almost single-handedly he rediscovered the work of the Grosvenor School of linocut artists from the 1930s, led by Claude Flight, which was unseen for 40 years and now enjoys widespread critical and commercial acclaim.
He also devoted well-researched solo exhibitions to a number of underrated or overlooked painters, often from the bohemian fringes of modernism, including Jacob Kramer, Alvaro Guevaro, Nina Hamnett, William Roberts, Christopher Wood and John Minton, as well as to maverick spirits such as Cecil Beaton and Stephen Tennant. An elaborate host, a legendary luncher, sports car enthusiast and an irrepressible narrator of witty, scabrous and occasionally tall stories, he lived up to the exploits of his favourite fictional character, Toad of Toad Hall.
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