Top Ten Exhibition Reviews: #9 Eleanor Birne's "At New Hall"

Lucy Raverat, Dreaming in the Bath (1991) 

Certain exhibition reviews stick in my memory. Eleanor Birne’s “At New Hall” (London Review of Books, June 29, 2017) is one of them. It’s an account of Birne’s visit to the New Hall Art Collection at Murray Edwards College in Cambridge. What makes it memorable (for me, at least) is its description not only of Murray Edwards’ art collection, but of Murray Edwards itself – a “brilliant work of Brutalist architecture.” Birne writes,

There are moments when the art collection and the building interact wonderfully well. Three giant bronze beetles, by Wendy Taylor, huddle at the bottom of a spiral staircase, encouraging you to look down at them and take in the perfect curve of the concrete at the same time. A Barbara Hepworth sculpture – Ascending Form (Gloria), on loan from the Hepworth Estate, a circle in an oval in a diamond – stands in the middle of a green courtyard, flanked by two pale brick student accommodation blocks. Rowena Comrie’s Capsize, an expressionist oil painting rising from yellow ground through reds to brightest blues, has found a prime spot above the SCR’s minimalist mantelpiece. In the dining room, a large Maggi Hambling canvas, Gulf Women Prepare for War (1986), showing women in chadors firing rocket-launchers in a dusty pink desert, hovers over the end of high table. Paula Rego’s response to it, Inês de Castro (2014), hangs alongside: King Pedro I of Portugal kneels before the exhumed body of his aristocratic Castilian lover, dressed in stately robes with a skull for a face. Gwen Raverat – a Cambridge institution, granddaughter of Darwin and friend of Virginia Woolf and Stanley Spencer – doesn’t suit all this drama, and the 18 Raverats that were bequeathed to the college, paintings and woodcuts of Grantchester and Newnham and a drawing of swans, are confined to a small meeting room off the entrance lobby. On the other hand, her granddaughter Lucy’s Dreaming in the Bath (1991) is situated next to the sign for the toilets and the gym.

My favorite part of Birne’s piece is her inclusion of a remark made to her by one of Murray Edwards’ maintenance men:

It takes a lot of work, and money, to keep the place looking this good. I visited on a day when the academics and the admin, kitchen and maintenance staff were having lunch together in the main dining room – one of the egalitarian things they like to do at Murray Edwards. I said to one of the maintenance men that the building looked in good condition. He laughed at me: would I like to borrow his glasses? He described the leaking roofs, the rotting wooden window frames in the student housing blocks that all need to be replaced with metal. He shook his head a lot. The college’s director of development told me about the time two of the domes slid off their perches: the concrete had worn out and they’d come unstuck; they had to be rebuilt and the remaining ones strengthened. I looked up at the massive dome overhead again – a little nervously this time.

Eleanor Birne’s “At New Hall” is an excellent example of an exhibition review that’s attentive not only to the art, but to the total experience of the visit. I enjoyed it immensely.