15/6/23 - Acquisition - Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art - Watching its victims from one fair to the next, from Frieze Masters to Tefaf, this striking effigy of Medusa waited until the last edition of the Maastricht fair to strike the emissaries of the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art with its petrifying gaze. Offered on the stand of London dealer Stuart Lochhead, who was selling it in partnership with Gillis Goldman Fine Art, this Shield with the Head of Medusa by Arnold Böcklin (ill. 1 to 4) was spotted by Vanessa Sigalas [1] and Matthew Hargraves, director of this museum since the summer of 2022. Purchased with funds from the Douglas Tracy Smith Dorothy Potter Smith Fund, the sculpture will naturally feature prominently in the "Styling Identities: Hair’s Tangled Histories" exhibition scheduled for early 2024. As impressive as it is familiar, this Medusa is one of Böcklin’s most famous creations, created in several variations from an original model conceived in his Swiss studio around 1885 and then sent to Berlin for an exhibition from which he sadly returned broken.
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- 1. Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901)
Shield with the Head of Medusa
Polychrome plaster and
papier-mâché - H. 60.5 cm
Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Photo: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture - See the image in its page
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- 2. Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901)
Shield with the Head of Medusa
Polychrome plaster and
papier-mâché - H. 60.5 cm
Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Photo: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture - See the image in its page
The Shield with the Head of Medusa was an instant hit, if the many surviving versions are anything to go by, several of which came onto the market in the 2000s. Sotheby’s offered a version in London in December 2003, followed by a second in June 2006 and a third in November 2007, which was judiciously purchased by the Musée d’Orsay (see the news item of 24/8/08) as part of a spectacular wave of acquisitions of Symbolist works (see the news item of 30/4/08). The following year, the sculpture graced the cover of the catalogue for the exhibition "Masques, de Carpeaux à Picasso" (see article), before taking pride of place in "L’Ange du bizarre. Le romantisme noir de Goya à Max Ernst" (see article). Quickly becoming a museum icon, the work is clearly in great demand, and was also a highlight of the fine exhibition "Les contes étranges de N. H. Jacobsen : un Danois à Paris (1892-1902)" (see article).
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- 3. Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901)
Shield with the Head of Medusa
Polychrome plaster and
papier-mâché - H. 60.5 cm (detail)
Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Photo: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture - See the image in its page
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- 4. Arnold Böcklin (1827-1901)
Shield with the Head of Medusa
Polychrome plaster and
papier-mâché - 60.5 cm (detail)
Hartford, The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art
Photo: Stuart Lochhead Sculpture - See the image in its page
It will come as no surprise, therefore, to see the Paris copy absent from the Musée d’Orsay’s picture rails, which is currently lending it to the attractive exhibition "Sous le regard de Méduse" at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Caen (article to follow). Alexis Merle du Bourg, one of the curators of the exhibition, looks back at the history of the work in his extensive catalogue entry: the first version, painted in 1885 and on loan to the Königliche Nationalgalerie in Berlin, was part of the intellectual debate on the polychromy of antique works at the time, and was ideally suited to fin-de-siècle sensibilities. The face-to-face encounter with death offered by Böcklin’s sculpture was bound to appeal to viewers at the end of the nineteenth century, prompting the artist to produce a large number of copies in a variety of materials. Böcklin sometimes worked in plaster, sometimes in papier-mâché, and in the version acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, he also collaborated with his son-in-law, the sculptor Peter Bruckmann (1851-926).
Presented by the artist to Hugo Falkenheim (1866-1935), this Medusa waited until 2020 to be auctioned: kept in a private collection since its creation, it was a great success at Sotheby’s in London. The catalogue note for this sale jokingly reports that its first owner was a member of a Munich club - also frequented by Böcklin and Bruckmann, who had moved to the Bavarian capital in 1887 - whose regulars were all promised a copy of Shield with the Head of Medusa by a presumably inebriated Böcklin. It is not known exactly what part his son-in-law played in the execution of his sculptures, as the two artists probably enjoyed experimenting with different materials for the Medusa, a theme that Böcklin had already had occasion to treat in painting. Since 1978, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, has held another version of the sculpture, while the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, holds the second version of Isle of the Dead, the most famous work by Arnold Böcklin, who is certainly well represented in institutions in the north-east of the United States.
