Worth Seeing in the Manchester Art Gallery

Had a couple of hours in the Manchester Art Gallery yesterday, scribbled down notes of things worth seeing. Fully intend to find digital images of all these to add but might not have time:

All of Francisco de Goya's 'Fantasies, Follies and Disasters' (temporary exhibition until Feb 2010)

Jim Medway - Oxford Road
Isabel Dacre - portraits
Ingo Maurer - Porca Miseria
Andy Hazell - Theatre of Life
Ken Currie - At the Edge of the City
David Kemp - Mask of the Taillight Warrior
Stephen Dixon - The Levantine Chess Set
Craigus Horsfield - Plaice Ascending

Of the 18th and 19th century stuff, there is a lot that is really really awful - some of it straightforward awful, some of it so over-the-top bad that you actually begin to admire it. Straightforward awful are the things by Gabriel Rossetti and Holman Hunt. Thank God Andrew Lloyd Webber has taken it into his head to collect Pre-Raphaelite stuff and get it out of the public eye. There are chokingly garish but brilliant classical and mythological canvases by Etty (The Sirens and Ulysses) and von Wagner (Chariot Race), whereas the kitschness and soft porn is tempered in Dicksee's Viking Burial, and Mengin's Sappho. There is almost no drama in Goodall's scene set on the Nile, but it is brilliant.

Two big representations in the permanent collection are Lowry and Valette. Lowry is deified nowadays, but I find Valette's stuff to be infinitely better: I imagine that brash Mancunian sense of self-sufficient worth wouldn't allow a Frenchman to be accorded the same honours, a hundred years later, as a native, but please check it out.

There is a Chapman brothers thing in alongside the Goya that isn't worth mentioning: much more interesting, in a similar medium, is Stephen Dixon.

Temporary exhibition on Women and Surrealism - didn't have the time, had to get on a train, no slight intended.