by In a room called “identity”, William Hogarth’s 18th century portraits of a wealthy merchant family are on display again. But now they will share space at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge with a groundbreaking contemporary portrait by Black British artist Joy Labinjo, which imagines 18th-century African abolitionist Olaudah Equiano and his mixed-race family.
In another room, labeled “interior”, a 1916 Ethel Walker painting Silence of the Ravine – thought to be the earliest female nude painted by a lesbian artist in the UK – waiting to be exhibited for the first time. Nearby, a wall of paintings from the 1720s to the 1920s depicts the same activity, once considered scandalous and unnatural: women reading.
When the university’s museum reopens its main painting galleries on March 15 after a major five-year renovation, its director, Luke Syson, hopes his radical overhaul of the way its permanent collection is displayed will attract which is world famous many visitors. – but without much controversy.
“I’d love to think there’s a way to tell this larger, more inclusive history that doesn’t feel as if there’s a need to push back from those who try to suggest that there’s any interest in the work of women artists or artists of color – or content that brings us into the world of LBGT culture – being ‘radical chic’ or what would be called ‘woke’ now,” said Syson. “Being inclusive and representative should not be controversial; it should be enriched. We should all welcome the opportunities to better understand each other through the eyes of great makers and artists.”
Recent major overhauls of permanent collections, such as those at the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery, have been criticized by art critics as “preachy” and “primitive” attempts to tell people what to do. to think, applying “current concerns about slavery, empire, sexuality. identity and gender” on popular art in a “glib”, “patronising”, and “belittling” way.
The new book at the Fitzwilliam, which Syson said “suggests, without demanding, some new ways of looking”, shows the museum’s large, iconic works close to important “new discoveries” from its 208-year-old collection, according to its together. well-known painters, and major new acquisitions by leading contemporary artists such as Labinjo, Barbara Walker and Jake Grewal.
Gone are the somewhat esoteric rooms filled with chronological displays of British and French masterpieces from the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. Instead, each room has a simple theme, which is explained on a front panel. Paintings dating back to the 1600s from across Europe are hung in the same room as contemporary works, to bring them into a “thought-provoking dialogue” with each other, said curator of the new re-territory, Dr Rebecca Birrell.
“We want to continue to promote the creativity and strengths of our canon artists, celebrate their work and give it the space it deserves. But we also want to put it back in dialogue with artists who were underrepresented in the museum before,” she said.
She hopes the recurring themes – including “men looking at women”, “migration and movement” and “nature” – will reflect a dialogue between paintings across time and place, and highlight recurring motifs in art from different periods: “By grouping together seemingly disparate works that express similar ideas, you can hear those conversations more clearly.”
In “men looking at women”, for example, the sensual nude in Eugène Delacroix’s Odorist (c1825) in contrast to Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s good intentions Joan of Arc (1883) and Patricia Preece’s stirring portrayal of women’s sexual power in Stanley Spencer’s Self-Portrait (1937).
Like Syson, Birrell hopes the exhibition will avoid the controversy of another rerun: “What I was very aware of, in doing this particular rerun, is that you want to provide the audience with stories without being too prescriptive or determining the meaning of a work of art. . It’s just an attempt to provide possible readings, possible ways of making them available, rather than definitive explanations,” she said. “You want the work to have space to speak for itself.”
She also knows that visitors may react differently to the same display. “Part of the role of being a curator is to create opportunities for people to experience art on different levels at the same time, and for your exhibition to be open to their response, but also to guide them towards ideas that that response could enrich,” she said.
Be aware that Rossetti’s Joan of Arc “A kind of fantasy of femininity” It will not prevent you from enjoying its beauty, she said. “I think it makes you think more, and people are able to have more complex ideas about art than just ‘it’s beautiful’.”
Syson thinks the Fitzwilliam Museum, founded by the University of Cambridge in 1816 out of shares in the slave-trading South Sea Company, has a responsibility to create a place for debate and discussion about the legacies of history, and to “think harder” about who comes to art galleries and how art can challenge prejudice. “If we do not understand our history, and the images that embody them, we cannot hope to repair some of the damage caused by those legacies. We cannot establish new relationships that take us in new directions.”
For Birrell, it’s a question of history – “who was writing the history books – especially from the perspective of women artists. Depicting them in museums gives an inaccurate image of history. They are in dialogue with these more famous canonical artists in our collection because they were always in dialogue with them when they were alive.”
