It is commonly assumed that major museums and galleries have stores stuffed with works of art that are rarely shown and are deeply inaccessible to the public. The media in particular seems to relish this situation, complaining that works acquired with taxpayers’ money or through gift or bequest are not publicly on view. Of course there is some truth to the first part of this assumption, especially in the case of large national or city collections. But that they are difficult of access is by no means always the case. Appointments to see specific objects in store are relatively easy to make. Identifying what one wants to see has been made easier through online catalogues and, with paintings, the publications of the Public Catalogue Foundation (and the invaluable online resource ‘Your Paintings’). The pervasive culture of ‘accessibility’ has only been of benefit in this regard. But complaints about overstuffed storerooms ignore the obvious practicalities of space and display to which museums that actively acquire are subject. Storage does indeed present problems.
The exhibition Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray: Framing Sculpture, at the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (closed 25th May), featured three artists who are not the most obvious bedfellows. Brancusi is the modernist sculptor par excellence, all streamlining and polish; Rosso is essentially a nineteenth-century Impressionist sculptor, all bumps and shadows; and Man Ray is best-known as a photographer and Dadaist. They all lived in Paris, but one was Romanian, one Italian and the third American. Man Ray and Brancusi were good friends, but it is unlikely that either of them ever met Rosso. What the three have in common, as the exhibition’s subtitle implies, is that they sought to exercise control over the presentation of their sculpture, and did this through photography. All three photographed their own work, taking infinite care with lighting, plinths and presentation, and insisting that particular shots were used in publications. More than that, all three wrestled with the inherent contradiction between three-dimensional sculpture and the two-dimensional format through which it is promulgated.
Two highly decorated coral cabinets (1670–73) commissioned by the Prince de Ligne in Sicily, now on permanent loan to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Plaster reliefs for interiors in Ireland based on designs of the 1770s by Angelica Kaufmann.
John Nash’s designs (c.1813) for Frederick North’s unrealised house on what is now Waterloo Place, London, are published here for the first time.
A re-examination of a marble bust of Giovanna Riario Sforza (1821–22) by Bertel Thorvaldsen in the Maritime and Historical Museum, Rijeka, Croatia.
Watercolour drawings of Cairo bazaars (c.1843–44) by John Frederick Lewis.
A small ink sketch of Young pipe players (c.1851) in a Canadian private collection is attributed to William Holman Hunt, as a possible early study for The hireling shepherd.
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