Gillian Spencer obituary

Other lives: Pioneering curator who revitalised Wakefield’s museums and galleries

My former boss, the art gallery and museum director Gillian Spencer, who has died aged 95, was one of the pioneering curators in Yorkshire in the 1970s and 80s. With Frank Constantine in Sheffield and Robert Rowe in Leeds, she led the renaissance of museum services in the county, brightening their local appeal with a sense of purpose, direction and style.

When appointed in 1973 to Wakefield as museums and art galleries officer, Gillian found the city’s collections crumbling in a polluted, coal-heated building that she described as “a machine to destroy the collections”. Likewise, she found the City Art Gallery, with its incomparable collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture, being run with a policy to hang pictures on the basis of “largest and lightest”.

The gallery held crucial early works of two celebrated local artists, Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth. Gillian embarked on a revealing correspondence with Hepworth when she discovered the artist’s Mother and Child sculpture (1934) damaged in store. Hepworth responded with fury, but was calmed by Gillian’s gentle and insistent manner describing the realities in Wakefield, and confiding how Hepworth’s 1968 exhibition at the Tate had given her strength during her divorce. Hepworth offered immediately to repair the sculpture. Instinctive understanding of the value of art for education and human happiness led Gillian to support acquisitions of contemporary art, including works by Norman Adams, Bryan Kneale, Nicholas Pope and Euan Uglow.

Born in South Norwood, south London, Gillian was the first child of Peter Chapman, a schoolteacher, and Ada (nee Bryne). With her younger brother, Robin, she was evacuated during the second world war to live with their mother’s sisters in Blaina, south Wales. Both children later went to Selhurst grammar school, Croydon, after which Gillian studied history at Newnham College, Cambridge, graduating in 1958. This was followed by a postgraduate diploma in archaeology at University College London.

Gillian began as a trainee at Winchester City Museum, in 1958 becoming curator of Saffron Waldon Museum. In 1959, she married the writer Colin Spencer, a childhood friend, and they had a son, Jonathan. The couple separated in 1965, divorcing in 1968.

Posts in the education departments of Bristol City Museum and Norwich Castle Museum followed until her appointment to Wakefield. Her priority there, at local government reorganisation in 1974, was to assemble a group of young curators in art, archaeology and local history; I was appointed keeper of art.

Conversations with Gillian were literate and thoughtful, while her political nous enabled her to grow Wakefield’s stature as a city for art, opening the former Elizabethan grammar school as an exhibition gallery in 1976, and laying the ground for the arrival of the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1977 and the Hepworth Wakefield, which replaced the City Art Gallery in 2011.

After retirement in 1991 Gillian remained in the city, and served on the fabric committee of Wakefield Cathedral.

She is survived by Jonathan, three grandsons and two great-grandchildren.