Instead of “do not touch”, visitors to the Sainsbury Centre in Norwich are invited to stroke the cool contours of Henry Moore’s Mother and Child, and urged to close their eyes and recall their first memory of being held and protected as an infant.
In an accompanying guide relayed through an app, Jago Cooper, the centre’s executive director, says: “Art isn’t a set of symbols to be read, it’s an emotional state of mind … If you can access that emotional connection, you can release the power of this living entity.”
Moore’s 1932 sculpture plays a leading role in what is billed as a groundbreaking concept at the huge museum and gallery on the edge of the University of East Anglia campus. The Sainsbury Centre is marking its 50th anniversary by becoming, it says, the first museum to “understand art as a living entity”.
According to Cooper, the museum world is a little bit stuck in a Victorian-era model. “That model is based on the idea that art and material culture is treated as property. A museum owns this property, and the public can come and benefit. But it doesn’t allow you the real emotional power of [these] amazing manifestations of human creativity.”
Cooper and his team have spent the past 18 months preparing ways for visitors to the centre to forge a relationship with art rather than simply looking at it. They can become a living exhibit in a glass showcase under 12 spotlights, surrounded by an “audience” of sculptures and paintings. They can sway gently in a hammock beneath a suspended portrait by Alberto Giacometti of his brother Diego in what Cooper describes as a “discombobulating” experience.
They can listen to the sound of a 200-year-old Māori flute, dance with first millennium Tang dynasty figurines, and create their own artworks.
“We are trying to reconceptualise what a museum is,” said Cooper. “We want people to have a different emotional relationship with art. Great art is the physical embodiment of some of the greatest individuals, movements, societies and cultures that have ever existed. And if you can find a way of connecting with them, that’s an amazing experience.”
Not all of the 5,000 works in the centre’s collection were suitable for touching and other interaction, said Cooper. “Lots of stuff will remain in cases, whenever we think conditions or contact with people could be damaging. But anything we feel can be and wants to be touched will be touched.”
Henry Moore had told Robert Sainsbury, the centre’s founder, that anyone who thought they could sell his art without touching it knew nothing about sculpture, Cooper said. Continual touching of Mother and Child would give it a patina, “but that, for me, is part of the ageing process. I’m not trying to preserve it in a pristine state … Art isn’t something frozen.”
The Sainsbury Centre was created as a home for works collected by Robert Sainsbury, the son of the grocery entrepreneur, and his wife, Lisa. The younger Sainsbury introduced pensions and sickness benefits for shop staff and supported the postwar government’s creation of the welfare state. The centre was designed by Norman Foster.
In March, it became the first museum to introduce a “pay if and what you can” entrance policy across the board. Previously it earned £350,000 a year from ticket sales.
Major national museums that offer free entry to their permanent collections increasingly rely on revenue from high-profile “blockbuster” shows.
