Exhibitions 2
What’s in a name?
Martin Gayford
Artist Unknown
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge,
until 22 September
Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since
the publication of his Lives of the Artists,
and to an ever-increasing extent, the world
of art has been governed by the star system.
In other words, the first question likely to be
asked about a painting or sculpture is who-
dunit? And if the answer turns out to be, not
Leonardo da Vinci — as has been suggest-
ed in the case of the controversial ‘Salvator
Mundi’ — then the price tag becomes enor-
mously smaller.
Does this matter? Artist Unknown, a lit-
tle exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge,
investigates the case of the anonymous
work. This draws on the rich resources of the
museums of Cambridge — which include, of
course, the Fitzwilliam, but also collections
devoted to archaeology and anthropology,
science, polar exploration and many other
subjects.
Some of the things on display could be
hung on the walls of Tate Modern without
causing any surprise. A magnificent piece
of Fijian barkcloth, consisting of vigorous
black and white lozenges, stripes and trian-
gles (see p27), has all the visual energy and
authority that you might expect from a great
abstract painting. Indeed, over the past cen-
tury, many such objects have been shifted
from ethnographic museums to museums
of art. The Met in New York, for instance
has galleries devoted to the arts of Oceania,
filled with works just like this.
Another fabulous textile in the exhi-
bition, a rectangle of brilliantly coloured
embroidery worn by Zoroastrian women as
decorations on their trousers, is actually part
of the collection at Kettle’s Yard itself. Jim
Ede, the founder and creator of this remark-
able house-cum-modern art gallery, was
given these Iranian trouser cuffs by a friend
who had once worked as a secret agent.
Ede — a modernist who derived his ideas
from Ben Nicholson, who got them in turn
from Mondrian — would have had no trou-
ble in classifying these stripy Zoroastrian
embroideries as art. Or rather, in placing
them in the egalitarian arrangement of his
beautiful interiors in which pebbles, feathers
and bits of battered china picked up in junk
shops are placed side by side with works by
Brancusi and Miro.
Taking items from everyday life and cate-
gorising them as ‘art’ was, of course, a stand-ard modernist move. Duchamp’s bicycle
wheel, snow shovel and urinal are famous
examples but far from being the only ones.
On show at Kettle’s Yard there are a number
of items that you wouldn’t normally think of
as art, but could quite easily be re-defined
in this way. A skilfully stuffed putty-nosedmonkey — a type of West African primate
— is a virtuoso demonstration of the taxi-
dermist’s skills. But Damien Hirst, among
others, has made it quite easy to see it as art.
The case of an anonymous 19th-cen-
tury painting of a woman is rather differ-
ent. Nobody would dispute the fact that it’s
a work of art. It looks a bit like a Degas,
which is what its erstwhile owner — the art
dealer and scholar Lillian Browse — appar-
ently thought it was. But considered as a
Degas, to use the art world dismissal, it does
not look quite ‘right’.
Instead, like so many other pictures, it
must be attributed to ‘anonymous’. Does
that matter? Neil MacGregor once gave
a lecture entitled ‘A Victim of Anonymi-
ty’, in which he argued in favour of one of
those faceless figures who exist only as anLucian Freud insisted it didn’t
matter whether a picture was
by him or a forgerences felt when they heard Liszt: you just
sat there, hand on mouth, trying not to gig-
gle with delight at the sheer marvel of it all.
Imagine how compelling it might have been
if Adams had written a concerto that really
embodied Wang’s prowess and personality.
But this is classical music: the only branch
of showbusiness where ‘crowd-pleasing’ is
a pejorative term.
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Wooden head from southern Nigeria, collected by Northcote W. Thomas in 1910