LONDON, ENGLAND.- The British Museum will present “Matisse to Freud: A Critic’s Choice - The Alexander Walker Bequest,” on view from June 15, 2004 to January 9, 2005 at the Prints & Drawings Gallery.
Alexander Walker (1930-2003), the film critic for the Evening Standard for more than forty years and the author of many books on cinema, was one of the most influential and respected figures in the film world. Less well known is that he was also a highly discerning collector of modern art. His entire collection of more than 200 modern prints and drawings, which he carefully assembled from the early 1960s up to his death last July, has been left under the terms of his will to the British Museum. Walker was a regular visitor to the Museum’s Prints and Drawings exhibitions and study room.
The focus of his collection is post-1960 American and British art. Artists include Jasper Johns, Jim Dine, Josef Albers, Philip Guston, Chuck Close, Richard Diebenkorn and Brice Marden from the United States, and Lucian Freud, Bridget Riley, Paula Rego, David Hockney, Howard Hodgkin, Keith Vaughan and Rachel Whiteread from Britain. Picasso , Matisse and Miró, as well as Jean Dubuffet, Eduardo Chillida and Nicholas de Staël are among the School of Paris artists collected by Walker, as well as the principal exponents of British Vorticism - Nevinson, Bomberg and Wadsworth. His collection represents the largest and most important bequest of modern works that the Department of Prints and Drawings has received in the past fifty years. His bequest significantly enriches the British Museum’s expanding modern and contemporary collection. 
One year from his death, the British Museum is paying tribute to Alexander Walker and his magnificent bequest by showing nearly 150 works from his collection, revealing to the public for the first time his eye for exceptional quality. Walker kept his astonishing collection framed on the walls of his small bachelor flat in Maida Vale. Every available surface was covered, including the bathroom and kitchen, and even both sides of cupboard doors. He thought carefully before making any acquisition, being particularly interested in works which showed the artist at some critical turning point. For Walker whose day was spent in front of moving images, his collection was a welcome antidote. As he liked to say, ‘After seeing eight or nine films a week, it’s a pleasure to rest your eyes not on moving pictures but on color or black-and-white stills’.
Alexander Walker was born in Portadown, Northern Ireland and graduated in political philosophy from Queen’s University, Belfast. After lecturing for two years in the early 1950s at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he embarked on a lifelong career in film journalism and criticism.