A few surprises at New Walk Museum, Leicester

I managed to get out of London at last to make a long-planned visit to the New Walk Museum in Leicester. It was on my list primarily because I had heard it contained the best collection of 20th-century German art in England, a generally neglected area in this country. I found the museum was a handsome building in a handsome situation: the New Walk is a 200-year-old pedestrian-only promenade lined with substantial 19th-century dwellings, presumably a result of Leicester's heyday as a hosiery manufacturer. The interior consists of large light-filled areas, which give a very good setting for a variety of displays. David Attenborough of nature documentary fame first became interested in natural history because of visits to the dinosaur exhibits (his father taught at Leicester University). There is also an interesting room devoted to craft work from around the world, and many activities aimed (successfully) at children.

Red woman

I was slightly disappointed with the German art room, however, as it is a fairly small display and a good proportion is of prints rather than paintings. Nevertheless, once one has adjusted to this there are some real gems to be seen: Franz Marc's Red Woman of 1912 is the most striking - he used colour symbolically, red being seen as warm, brutal and heavy. Other works which particularly caught my eye were a very attractive Gabriele Munter Portrait of Anna Roslund 1917 (she is also represented in the Courtauld Gallery), a 1938 Karl Schmidt-Rottluff landscape, and two characteristically brutal lithographs by George Grosz - one from 1920 The toads of property (shown lording it over the poor in the background) and a surprisingly late 1954 work Nazis. The German works are shown in rotation, so what is actually on show varies - I don't know if I was lucky or not.

The works in the contemporary gallery were a surprise and are quite impressive; they included a Peter Doig called Concrete Cabin which I seem to recall from a Tate Britain retrospective some years ago, and a slyly satirical Michael Landy 1998 large C-type photographic print. This latter was called Our limit is that of the desire and imagination of the human mind and at first sight is a straightforward portrait of a boiler-suited cleaner. However, the corporate logo says "Scrapheap Services", and the rubbish the operative (who turns out to be Michael Landy himself) has speared is a stylised cut out male figure. Quite an effective dig at current capitalism (though couldn't it have been done as effectively as a newspaper cartoon? - probably not as seeing it in a gallery context is what fooled me into taking it literally at first).

The biggest surprise was a gallery devoted to Picasso ceramics. They were donated by David Attenborough's brother Richard Attenborough, the actor and director, in memory of his daughter and granddaughter who perished in the 2004 tsunami. I had seen some of this at the Christie show (171 pieces subsequently went for £2.8m), but the effect of a large number of works of this quality is stunning. The ceramicists were specially taught by Picasso himself to produce work to his designs, and it is fascinating to see how Picasso was not only able to master a new medium at the end of his life but to do so in such a fruitfully co-operative way (shades of the collages of late Matisse I suppose).

Like many provincial museums, New Walk arose out of the local 19th-century philosophical society's collection, and it is pleasing to see that their typically eclectic interests are being reflected in the varied collections on show, and that this clearly suits modern tastes just as much as it did the Victorians.

The real excitement in Leicester at the moment is of course the rediscovery of the remains of Richard III in what is now a car park near the Cathedral. Leicester wants to make a big thing of reinterring the bones in Leicester Cathedral, but others are demanding they are buried in York Minster beside his wife and son, as was Richard's stated wish. I don't wish to get caught up in the controversy, but I was amused to see not everyone takes the matter too seriously......