THIS exhibition is so long overdue, it is a wonder the statue of William Etty has not upped sticks and left Exhibition Square in a huff.

Etty (1787-1849) is York’s most famous artist – which some might argue is no greater status than Shed Seven being York’s most successful pop act – but he unquestionably warrants re-evaluation. Not least so that passers-by can stop wondering why he is forever set in stone outside York Art Gallery.

The first comprehensive reassessment in half a century of “one of Britain’s most significant artists” bears the eye-catching title of Art & Controversy. Always a provocative word, controversy, and the exhibition is sure to stir up a debate over Etty’s artistic merits. “Wonderful colourist, good at male bodies and women’s heads, not so good at men’s heads and women’s bodies, and as for feet…” came one verdict after the preview, but letter writers to The Press have enthused.

Three years in the planning and two years in the researching by Dr Sarah Burnage, the exhibition explores Etty’s equivocal status.

On the one hand, stalwart of the Royal Academy, elected to be an Academician ahead of John Constable; on the other, exiled from the artistic elite because of what was seen as a “perverse” passion for the voluptuousness of the female nude.

Rubens and Titian’s pulchritudinous paintings had no such jibes thrown at them, and Lucien Freud’s lardy, hardly flattering portraits of fleshy females escape opprobrium by comparison. “But it’s a question of taste and aesthetics,” says Laura Turner, curator of art at York Art Gallery. “Some things just fall out of fashion.”

Consequently, Laura had put Etty at the forefront of her exhibition wish list when applying for the post.

“In many ways people have seen him as a problematic artist, which you would have thought would have made him interesting, but he’s been sidelined and neglected in modern critical assessment,” she says.

“In York his memory has been kept alive, but he has not had any national or international coverage. Look at how few books there have been: Leonard Robinson’s William Etty came out in 2007 and before that the last significant work was as long ago as 1958, Ennis Farr’s Etty.”

The exhibition of 100 works was set in motion after Laura gained the support of Professor Mark Hallett, head of the history of art department at the University of York, whose clout helped to secure funding from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art for a research curator.

Sarah Burnage duly undertook that work, playing the leading role in preparing the full-colour catalogue that now accompanies the exhibition, edited by Burnage, Hallett and Turner, with new essays on Etty.

“Etty is without doubt one of the most significant artists of his generation,” argues Sarah.

“He was described by contemporaries as ‘one of the finest specimens of historical talent that the English school has yet produced’ and revered for his skills as a colourist.

“Yet despite the significant acclaim he secured in the period, history has seen Etty systematically marginalised and neglected. This exhibition aims to drag Etty’s art from the doldrums of art historical obscurity and offer a fresh opportunity to look at the works of this remarkable artist”.

Paintings and sketches from York Art Gallery’s collection are complemented by loans of larger works from the Tate, the Royal Academy, Manchester Art Gallery and elsewhere for an exhibition that spreads beyond the main ground-floor gallery into the gallery next door in order to accommodate more than 100 Etty works. It also enables the exploration of four themes central to Etty’s artistic practice: Art & Controversy; Etty and the Masters; Etty and the Life Class; and Etty and Portraiture.

And so the exhibition goes beyond the big-bottomed women and heroic male figures to the sensitive and delicate studies he made in the Royal Academy life class he attended for so much of his working life, through to his historical canvases and commissioned metropolitan portraits.

And then there are his copies, or pictorial memorials as he called his re-workings of the Old Masters, Titian, Rubens, Poussin and Reynolds. Memorials is just the right word for them What is beyond question is Etty’s mastery of colour and skin tone. Everything else, from fulsome female curves to strange-shaped feet, is up for debate.

• William Etty, Art & Controversy, runs at York Art Gallery until January 22 2012, and is open daily from 10am to 5pm. To accompany the exhibition, you can discover Etty’s York in the Etty: York Walk, a 45-minute tour with eight stops selected by York Museums Trust.

• A symposium, entitled Art and Controversy: British Art in the Nineteenth Century, will take place at the University of York in November 2011 to complement the research undertaken for the exhibition.