Museums

On Monday 28th March 2011, the AS Level History of Art class journeyed to Cambridge, to visit the prestigious Murray-Edwards college. Other than being a renowned university college, Murray-Edwards is also home to the New Hall art collection, which is a vast range of works by female artists. These involve contemporary paintings, sculptures and prints and are displayed around the college - in corridors, stairways, dining rooms and lecture theatres. The building itself has unique architectural elements, as it was completed in the 1960’s and is therefore of Modernist style. It contrasts greatly with other more traditional, classic Cambridge colleges, which complements the exciting and interesting style of art in the New Hall collection. Because of its specialisation as an all-female collection and the vast amount of artwork that has been donated and loaned, New Hall has become world-famous and is considered the most significant of its kind in Europe.

We set off from Channing at 12 o’clock on Monday morning, and after a long coach journey, arrived in the beautiful setting of Cambridge to meet Mr Crawford’s son Joe, a fellow at Murray-Edwards college. He kindly showed us around the collection, and, after lunch in the fellows garden, we began our tour. The first artwork we encountered was Barbara Hepworth’s Ascending Form, an upright sculpture made of bronze. The sculpture represents Hepworth’s idea of a figure in landscape, and is of a Modernist style, so is therefore minimalist and open to interpretation. This sculpture was situated outside the college on the grass, so having studied this, we proceeded into the building itself.

One part of the collection was an exhibition by Joyce Gunn Cairns named Heroines, which is a group of paintings and drawings of female figures in literature, such as a painting of Virginia Woolf, and portrayals of characters in literature such as the madwoman from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. The paintings were interesting as Gunn Cairns had maintained her original drawings, and simply painted over them, and therefore created expressive lines and shading when painting the features of her subjects. The theme of the exhibition related well to the focus of the New Hall collection as a whole: a celebration of women through art, and, in this part of the collection, through literature.

We then began our search for artworks by Rhonda Whitehead, a female Modernist artist, and although we never found her paintings (as they were coincidentally being exhibited at the Highgate Contemporary Art gallery up the road from Channing), this sparked an interesting walk around Murray-Edwards. We saw varying art forms, from paintings to sculptures, some shocking and some beautiful. For example, a favourite of the class were 3 oversized bronze beetles, that were suitably placed in the centre of the floor of a spiral staircase that led us to the Murray-Edwards dining hall. Here we saw a range of paintings, for example Maggi Hambling’s Gulf Women Prepare for War, a vivid portrayal of a Muslim woman holding a gun, sitting in a desert in preparation for war. This painting held our particular interest as it was a shocking image, and it was later explained that Hambling painted this from direct observation of a picture in The Times newspaper in 1986.

Finally, we concluded our visit to the New Hall collection by viewing the painting that triggered the development of the collection: Mary Kelly’s Extase. This series of paintings and prints was acquired by Murray-Edwards (then known as New Hall college) in 1986, which caused the President of New Hall, Dr. Valerie Pearl, to see the potential of a permanent collection of 20th Century Art by women to inspire the community who would live and study among it. The overall collection’s celebration of female works not only inspired the Year 12 students, but was also extremely informative and useful for our History of Art course which consists of an exploration of feminism and gender in art. Therefore, we would like to thank Mr Crawford and his son for giving us the privilege of viewing an exciting, engaging collection of art and for a successful day experiencing the university lifestyle at Cambridge.