Tag Archives: Norwich

Sainsbury Centre (3)

Mark Fisher has written a comment on my blog about the Sainsbury Centre to the effect that the displays reflect the beliefs of writers including Herbert Read and Ernst Gombrich (and most of all Roger Fry) that there is a universal language of the eye.   I’m sure it’s correct that Robert and Lisa Sainsbury who started collecting seriously in the 1930s are likely to have been influenced, if only at second hand, by the writings of Herbert Read, whose interests in ‘primitive’ art, modernist sculpture and ceramics (he had been an Assistant Keeper in the Ceramics Department at the V&A) mirrored their own.   The problem is that Read’s belief in a universal language of the eye has been discounted, if not discredited, by the next generation of art historians who have concentrated on the idea of specificity of context and on cultural content rather than aesthetics (sorry, this is a long answer to his comment).   I am posting some images of the display technique:-

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Sainsbury Centre (2)

I remember someone being faintly dismissive of the way that the Sainsbury Centre decontextualises objects by the randomness of its displays, treating them indiscriminately as if they belong to the same visual language.   But I like and find it refreshing to be made to look, not quite sure if an object is two millennia old or from the last century and whether it is Mexican, Inuit or Hindu.

This century breast ornament is from Santa Cruz:-

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A Mesopotamian votive figure:-

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Sainsbury Centre

I love the Sainsbury Centre for its strange mixture of the pre-Columbian and the contemporary such that you never quite know what will be in the next case.   It had begun to look a bit shabby, but has been completely renovated, everything except the original system of display lighting.

A memorial head from the Celebes:-

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A pot by Rupert Spira:-

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Norwich Roller Skating Rink

We were taken to admire the old roller skating rink in Norwich with its magnificent Russian pine ceiling.   It was opened on 19th. September 1876 at a cost of over £9,000 with music provided by an automatic piano and closed the following year when it was turned into a Vaudeville Theatre.   This didn’t last either and in 1880 it was turned into a store for tinned meat:-

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UEA

I love the campus at UEA with Denys Lasdun’s strange space age ziggurats rising out of the parkland and Norman Foster’s Sainsbury Centre still astonishingly modern in the way that it combines large-scale, semi-industrial space with the intimacy of examining small-scale objects from different visual cultures arranged informally in vitrines across the floor plane:-

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Francis Bacon and the Masters

We went on a quick day trip to the Sainsbury Centre to see the exhibition Francis Bacon and the Masters:  a wonderful exhibition not just because it helps to demonstrate Bacon’s astonishing visual eclecticism.   It’s a completely convincing demonstration of the way his imagination fed on imagery of past art, not only Velázquez, but Titian and Van Gogh and Soutine and Hellenistic sculpture, never copying, but always adapting pose and composition.   It’s also a wonderful exhibition for the wealth and range of work lent by the Hermitage, which Bacon never actually visited, but which is able to supply examples of every sort of art that Bacon might have devoured.

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