Apollo Magazine – January 2020
English | 102 pages | pdf | 67.42 MB
The history of art and objects is often a study of fragments: of potsherds and spolia, of miniature cuttings and orphaned predella panels, of dispersed archives and collections, of partial records. That, of course, is part of its attraction: the work of the art historian as an optimistic campaign against lost causes, with intermittent, modest victories that replenish our sense of the value and vulnerability of things made by human hands.
One such triumph, described in these pages of Apollo Magazine by Tom Hardwick, is the reuniting at Bolton Museum of two fragments of a small Egyptian bowl dating to the 18th Dynasty (c. 1550-1350 BC; see feature, pp. 62-67). Hardwick had long been fascinated by an evocative lion-headed stoneware fragment, which he first came across while fossicking the museum’s storerooms during his time as its keeper of Egyptology from 2005-09. Last year, he noticed a possible match between the fragment and a damaged bowl that had come to auction in London from a German private collection. For a four-figure price – an unassuming sun1, but still some undertaking for a local-authority museum to raise in 2019 the institution was able to acquire the larger portion and make the bowl whole once more.
This coup may seem humble, but it is one that den1onstrates just how much curatorial expertise can achieve. Bolton Museum has been able to put the bowl on display and will use the object to tell stories about not only its own collection but also, more widely, the history of Egyptian art and how it has been received. This is not the Egyptian aesthetic of Tutankhan1un’s treasures and the son et lumiere that now accompanies them on their international travels. It could hardly be further from the monumental version of ancient Egypt popularised by Hollywood epic or the pyran1id schen1es (as it were) of the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.
The Bolton bowl is an ancient artefact on a scale far more human than what we are generally accustomed to. It tells of an everyday world, of objects once handled and used, owned and prized, rather than a vision that was chiselled for pomp and posterity. And it recoups the now quite unfamiliar tastes of 19th-century collectors of Egyptian antiquities, and the circumstances in which they accumulated objects. (For another lesserknown version of Egyptian cultural history, see Raphael Cormack’s article in these pages on the crumbling vestiges of the Cairo cabaret scene of Roaring Twenties, pp. 21-22.)
I often hear talk of ‘museum pieces’ ( or the lack of them) at art fairs and auction houses, almost always in relation to works of exceptional quality, usually by well-known artists, which trail vast price tags in their wake. The Bolton acquisition, however, is a welcome reminder that careful acquisitions on a small scale can have a significant impact on how an existing collection is interpreted and displayed – and at comparatively low risk to the purchasing institution. Acquisitions have become so enmeshed in museum marketing strategies, perhaps understandably so, that less sexy supplements to collections struggle to be noticed.
From this regard, initiatives such as the Art Fund’s New Collecting Awards have become fundamental to ensuring the future of institutional collecting. Every year since 2015 a handful of curators have been awarded five-figure grants to build or develop their institution’s holdings in a particular field, giving tl1e lie to the notion that museum pieces are few and far between, or that they need break the (empty) bank. The last round of awards included funding for the acquisition of sculptors’ drawings and South Asian textiles by female artists, to curators at the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich and the Whitworth in Manchester respectively. Would that more such schemes for curators existed. Collections should not be closed – and curators deserve further opportunities
to piece together the fragments. 0 Thomas Marks, Editor
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