Walking through The Barnes Foundation, it’s hard to look beyond the impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces and quite easy to miss the details that sparked the idea for this year’s temporary exhibit, Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen. If you keep an eye out for the details, you’ll observe a variety of quirky objects- locks, bolts, nuts, spoons, forks, and the like- syecattered among gaggles of Degas’s ballerinas and Renoir’s landscapes. Strength and Splendor draws inspiration from the space between the masterpieces in the permanent collection and achieves the broader purpose of reminding us viewers that the ordinary can become monumental if we keep an open mind.
Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen, opened to the public last Friday 9/18. It emphasizes the extraordinary beauty in these commonplace items located around the museum and in our daily life. The collection presents approximately 150 wrought iron objects from the medieval times to the early 20th century- such as jewelry, escutcheons, locks, plaques, keys, signs, strongboxes, and tools- which complement the 887 pieces that find their place amongst the museum's permanent collection.
Though iron is considered to be a coarse and inelegant metal, the collection demonstrates to us the opposite-- in its jewelry, we perceived incredible beauty and fragility - yet we were also impressed by its utility in the variety of iron contraptions people used in their daily lives. Its versatility, we concluded, is boundless- as is its artistic potential.
The works at the Barnes were unlike a lot we had encountered in any art history course. Our studies, though comprehensive, can make us prejudiced against seemingly "low-brow" forms of art. Though we walked in expecting to see rusty medieval locks, impressive due to their age, we found artistic value in both the pieces and the display --and walked out with a new appreciation for the craft and craftsmen of yesteryear.
The beauty of the Strength and Splendor collection lies in its anonymity and ordinarity. Though the majority of the items are commonplace, their craftsmanship and labor are certainly not. Each piece was carefully crafted, and in both form and function make you reexamine your own notion of beauty.
