Michael Sadler (educationist) - Leeds Arts Club

Leeds Arts Club

Whilst in Leeds Sadler became President of the avant-garde modernist cultural group the Leeds Arts Club. Originally founded in 1903 by Alfred Orage, the Leeds Arts Club was an important meeting ground for radical artists, thinkers, educationalists and writers in Britain, and had strong leanings to the cultural, political and theoretical ideas coming out of Germany at this time.

Using his personal links with Wassily Kandinsky in Munich, Sadler built up a remarkable collection of expressionist and abstract expressionist art at a time when such art was either unknown or dismissed in London, even by well-known promoters of modernism such as Roger Fry. Most notable in his collection was Kandinsky's abstract painting Fragment for Composition VII, of 1912, a painting that was in Leeds and on display at the Leeds Arts Club in 1913. Sadler also owned Paul Gauguin's celebrated painting "The Vision After the Sermon", and according to Patrick Heron, Sadler even had Kandinsky visit Leeds before the First World War, although this claim is uncorroborated by other sources

With Frank Rutter, Sadler also co-founded the Leeds Art Collections Fund to help Leeds City Art Gallery. In particular the aim of the Fund was to bypass the financial restraints placed on the Gallery by the municipal authorities in Leeds, who had, in the opinion of Sadler, a dislike of modern art.