L&T 200

The Moment I Fell In Love With Modern British Art

3 February 2026

Simon Hucker

As Lyon & Turnbull marks its 200 year anniversary, we’re sharing reflections from across the business on the experience and knowledge that sits behind the work we do today.

In this piece, fine art specialist Simon Hucker reflects on the moment he first fell in love with Modern British Art, not so much through formal study, but through looking at an artist whose world felt immediately familiar.

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'It’s that disappearing world that I grew up in that so obsesses me, and which makes British art of the 20th century the thing I keep coming back to, as it is the lens through which I understand place, culture, history, but also a way of being in the world. It’s home, I guess.'

Simon Hucker

Despite studying art history at undergraduate and postgraduate level, I never took a course on Modern British Art. Instead everything I know, I’ve learnt on the job. I first worked with a couple of dealers who specialised in Modern and Contemporary British art and I learnt so much from them – and I was lucky too that some of the artists who I love were still alive and I got to work with them directly. From there I spent nearly a decade at Sotheby’s in the Modern British department, a quick stint curating a sculpture park and now I’ve been at Lyon & Turnbull for three years, back where I belong working mainly on British art of the 20th Century.

In some ways, it’s no surprise that I was drawn to this field, as it’s all the world I grew up in. All the social, cultural and historical contexts I know, it’s in my bones. As a child of the Eighties, traces of the Second World War, the new social contract of the fifties, the swinging sixties, the industrial unrest of the 70s were all still there, layered on top of each other. The ‘old’ world was still very present, whilst computers, Walkmans, MTV - all those Eighties things – were something ‘new’.

It is hard to pinpoint an exact moment when I fell in love with Modern British Art, but I wonder if it was an exhibition I saw at the Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry in 1988. I was fifteen. My mother worked as a cashier in a bank in the city centre and in her lunch breaks she would go the gallery to listen to talks – they had a brilliant and engaging curator there. One day she took me along to a Lowry exhibition – I can’t remember much about the show itself, but I still have the catalogue and I also had a little poster from the show on my wall until I was about eighteen. The image on the front cover — Man Smoking on a Wall — is still one of my favourite works by Lowry.

It’s funny - there’s a humour to Lowry that often doesn’t get acknowledged, but which is a really important counterpoint to the grimness. His paintings are absolutely about isolation and dislocation – it’s what makes his work so important in the wider history of 20th century art – and they are heavy, but there are also moments of real lightness too. In Man Smoking on a Wall, the factory chimney deliberately mirrors the man’s cigarette, Lowry delighting in the visual pun – and I would say, if you look at Lowry, look at the buildings as actors, characters, not just backdrop. Then there’s the suitcase, with Lowry’s initials on it (like a signature), so he’s playing with the idea of a painting in a painting, a self-portrait that’s not strictly a self-portrait. Everyone wants Lowry to be this kind of naif, but this is a man who saw Pirandello’s absurdist masterpiece Six Characters in Search of an Author about six times.

Specialist

Simon Hucker

Associate Director, Senior Fine Art Specialist

Coventry in the 1970s and ’80s was a world Lowry would have recognised – a post-industrial city stuttering to its end, but where the rhythm of life still rolled along Victorian lines – ‘factory fortnight’ holidays were still a thing (Coventry one week, Birmingham the next, all off to Weston-Super-Mare, as Lowry and Manchester had gone to Lytham-St-Annes), the car factories were still the main employer, red-brick terraces were everywhere, apart from that temple to 50s modernism and optimism, The Precinct, where we’d go shopping on a Saturday.

Lowry was always painting a world that was disappearing – in fact the disappearing is his real subject. Nostalgia, but not the soft-focussed kind, more like ‘the pain from an old wound’ as Don Draper famously monologued in Mad Men when describing the Kodak slide carousel as a time machine. And it’s that disappearing world that I grew up in that so obsesses me, and which makes British art of the 20th century the thing I keep coming back to, as it is the lens through which I understand place, culture, history, but also a way of being in the world. It’s home, I guess.

Looking back through that Lowry catalogue, I can’t quite believe that I ended up selling some of the works that were in that show, including Father and Two Sons from 1950, one of the great Expressionist works of the 20th Century. If you had told the fifteen-year-old me that this is what I’d end up doing, I wouldn’t have believed you, as I had no idea what I’d be, or that I’d spend every day looking at art and holding paintings in my hands. So in a way, I owe the Herbert Art Gallery, and Mr Lowry, everything.