Last Monday, I was at the National Gallery in London to attend a talk about an exhibition by Paula Rego, which opened last week. Afterwards, I was walking along the museum’s entrance with a historian friend who, pointing to the floor, said “have you seen these?”
I looked at my feet, and a kaleidoscopically coloured mosaic pavement emerged, as if silently sprawling beneath hurried gallerygoers. I couldn’t believe that, while I have spent my life going in and out of this museum, I had never thought to look down.
The mosaic celebrates learning, culture and everyday life and is divided into three sections: The Labours of Life, The Pleasures of Life and The Modern Virtues. It was completed between 1928 and 1933 (with the third added in 1952) by Boris Anrep, a Russian refugee artist associated with the Bloomsbury group. It features famous names immortalised as mythological figures: Virginia Woolf sits as Clio, muse of history, Greta Garbo poses as Melpomene, muse of tragedy, Winston Churchill acts as “defiance”; nameless figures are also depicted in scenes evoking an “open mind”, “humour” and “folly”. Others, more humorously, are dedicated to British culture: “Christmas pudding”, “mud pie” and “conversation”.
The fact that I hadn’t noticed these extraordinary mosaics made me think about all the other artworks that hide in plain sight, requiring us to look up or down – or further. Take the ceiling of the front hall of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. It is home to four painted roundels by artist Angelica Kauffman (one of two female founder members of the institution), in which she immortalises a woman as the four elements of art: invention, composition, design and colour.
As an institution that failed to elect another woman as a Royal Academician until more than a century after its founding – and didn’t admit women into the life drawing room until the 1890s – these roundels show not only that women of course were capable of being artists, but also the limits in which they had to abide. In ‘design’ we see a woman studying from a muscular body cast, the Belvedere Torso: her substitute for a male life model.
Then there are the artworks we might pass on our morning commute, but go our entire lives without noticing. If you live and work in London, have you ever seen, on the John Lewis flagship store on Oxford Street, a colossal sculpture by Barbara Hepworth? Although Hepworth had a knack for creating works that seem as though they have existed for ever – that can accentuate the natural environment or enhance the modern architecture around them – this sculpture dominates the corner of the building. Yet, when I recently passed the sculpture, I didn’t see anyone pay it any attention.
However, the buildings that surround us speak volumes, both about the past and what they represent now – for instance, the building that is now Bafta on Piccadilly, formerly the home of the Royal Institute of Painters in Water Colours, whose name is still engraved under its eaves. Below are busts of eight male artists. Looking up the facade of the National Portrait Gallery, I noticed that it bore the busts of nine male artists. It’s interesting to notice how proudly institutions wear these narratives.
The exhibition I attended at the National Gallery was Rego’s 1992 mural Crivelli’s Garden, which she completed while an artist-in-residence at the museum (she had initially refused the residency on the grounds that it “is a masculine collection”). The work, which charges female biblical figures with strength, was originally placed in the dining hall rather than the main gallery, which made me wonder whether there is a correlation between the works often hidden from view and artists sidelined by art history.
But it also made me think about where our attention is directed. It’s not as though these stories or works never existed, it’s the fact that museums haven’t, for the most part, enabled us to notice them. So what we can do is seek out and direct others to these artworks, artists and stories, so we no longer miss out on what is right in front of us.
