Stepping forward to look at sculpture

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Sculpture and the Museum

Edited by Christopher Marshall

If all too often art museums are thought of as picture galleries, Sculpture and the Museum not only rectifies that impression but reveals how exhibitions of sculpture throw light on the practices of both sculptors and curators.

The opening essays consider collections initiated by sculptors and their heirs, investigating how an artist’s reputation could be self-consciously developed through exhibits. This reveals an intriguing aspect of museum display that is not always obvious. For example, it might have been thought that Canova’s heroic status would have been increased after his death by the custom-built Gipsoteca to house his collection. But its out-of-the-way location in his home town, Posagno, and its emphasis on his sculpture’s Catholic significance had the opposite effect, although ultimately redeemed by a modern museum extension with greater prominence for Canova’s innovative maquettes.

In the case of Rodin, the Hôtel Biron in Paris not only upheld his reputation by providing a museum venue for viewing his work, but also by playing an active role in producing bronze editions. These facilitated the development of major collections elsewhere. The changing display circumstances for Rodin are in contrast to the more academic environment for Flaxman’s sculptures, which are a permanent part of the architectural fabric of the Octagon of University College London.

These three case studies related chiefly to bequests after the death of sculptors. But the ‘politics’ of artistic reputation is nowhere more clearly evident than in Toronto’s relationship with Henry Moore during his lifetime. After initially negative responses to Moore’s works in the city, a group of patrons actively courted the sculptor in their aim to make the Art Gallery of Ontario contemporary, ultimately obtaining an important collection of the artist’s full-scale plasters. But Moore was equally canny, using the gift as a pawn in his own negotiations to ensure his strong representation at the Tate Gallery in London.

The second section of the book takes a more institutional angle, looking at museum tactics. These essays explore how the way a work is displayed affects our understanding of it, and asks, for example, whether casts can have the same educational value as originals and why sculpture is often more readily exhibited with applied arts than with paintings. Intersections between anthropology, archaeology and art also raise intriguing questions for the exhibition of such works as Malvina Hoffman’s ethnic studies in the Field Museum, Chicago, or the majestic Sultanganj Buddha in the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery.

What editor Christopher Marshall aptly calls ‘competing curatorial agendas’ are examined in different institutions. He cites the changing exhibitions of the Renaissance collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, or the display of a single sculpture of prodigious scale, Barnard’s Struggle of the Two Natures of Man, at the Metropolitan Museum, New York. The latter was moved from an iconic position in the Great Hall to the Charles Engelhard garden court, and was later relocated yet again in the newly developed American galleries.

Architectural contexts are a potent factor in the way sculpture is read, in terms of visual settings as well as spaces for phenomenological responses (i.e those based directly on experience), which is discussed in the final essays. The Duveen sculpture galleries at the Tate, for example, were felt to be too assertive by some curators, who preferred the neutrality of the modernist white cube. More recently, their distinctive spaces have been deployed to advantage for contemporary installations. This unexpected use of its neoclassical grandeur provides a fascinating counterpoint to the Unilever commissions for the Tate Modern turbine hall, a seemingly banal industrial space which is nonetheless monumental in scale.

The enormous popular success of these Tate commissions has demonstrated that sculpture can be as compelling to the public as painting, and gives this book an added pertinence and appeal. As well as exploring the challenges that sculpture sets for curators and art historians, it provides insights that suggest that, far beyond the spectacular Tate projects, sculpture has many insights to offer attentive viewers. The lively discussions in Sculpture and the Museum make it clear that sculpture should never be just ‘something that you back into while trying to get a better view of a painting’.

This collection of essays in the ‘Subject/Object: New Studies in Sculpture’series, published in association with the Henry Moore Institute, is aimed primarily at academics and students, but will interest thoughtful gallery visitors and sculpture aficionados as well. While affording a variety of topics and approaches, the book’s unusual and refreshing focus on the collection and display of sculpture holds the different contributions together.

Sculpture and the Museum edited by Christopher Marshall is published by Ashgate, 2011. 181 pp., 64 mono illus. ISBN 9781409409106