“Art feels different when it is close enough to breathe the same air,” said school principal Claire Coy, describing the thrill of being lent a painting from a national collection. “I have visited many, many galleries and loved my experience but nothing has matched this.”
Coy’s school, the Lowry Academy in Salford, has this week been the temporary home for LS Lowry’s Dwelling, Ordsall Lane, Salford, painted in 1927. It is the first time Tate has lent to a school and even though it has been for only two days, the benefits have been enormous, teachers and curators say.
The artwork shows a crowd of children on the corner of a bustling residential road and shines light on Lowry’s belief that “a street is not a street without people”.
Its physical presence has had a hugely positive ripple effect at the school, teachers said. It has spurred a number of art, history and English literature projects and led to careers workshops that may have set children on paths they had not thought about previously.
On Friday, children were finishing their designs and paintings for a large Lowry-inspired collage that will, when completed, be varnished and displayed at the 900-pupil school in Worsley.
The loan has come after months of detailed planning, discussions about security and checking of CCTV camera angles. “It takes a lot of work. This is not run-of-the-mill museum work for us,” said Helen Legg, the director of Tate Liverpool.
Legg, like all museum bosses, knows only too well that many children have never been to an art gallery and it has probably never occurred to them that they could enjoy going.
“We want young people to come to our museums,” she said. “They are their museums. But sometimes you need to make that invitation really explicit and that is what this is about.”
Heather Sturdy, the head of national partnerships at Tate, said that if having a real painting in a room used for assemblies encourages just one child to visit a gallery or think about a career in the arts, then it will have been a success.
“This project has been very buoying,” she said. “This must be how someone who owns a great painting – has it in their home – feels.”
Of the year 7 schoolchildren the Guardian spoke to on Friday, only one had been to an art gallery – Tate Liverpool, he said, to the surprise and disbelief of his friends. All of them had heard of Lowry – mercifully, since their school is named after him – and they said they were fans of his work.
Their art teacher, Jason Osman, said his pupils would know a Picasso or Leonardo da Vinci, although perhaps not a Tracey Emin. “This has been a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” he said. “It is such a great experience for the students, for the whole school actually.
“I did a poll of who had been to an art gallery and it was a very, very low number. To be able to see a painting up close, not on a screen, makes a massive difference. Some have been a bit scared of getting too close to it. A lot of the students have said ‘is that a real painting?’”
All national museums are thinking about how they can make their collections more accessible, more inspiring. The National Gallery has led the way on lending artworks to more surprising places including, in 2019, when it staged a nationwide tour of a self-portrait by Artemisia Gentileschi. Among the venues for the painting was a high school in Newcastle, a women’s prison in Surrey and a library in Walthamstow.
Tate says it is one of the world’s biggest lenders of art with more than 4.5 million people seeing a Tate work on loan last year.
The school loan was welcomed by the culture minister, Ian Murray. He said: “There’s every chance that the next iconic artist of a generation is growing up in Salford right now, and this first ever loan from the Tate to a school is the perfect chance to inspire Salford’s young people and ignite the creativity that’s inside each and every one of them.”
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