Exhibitions

Throughout the 19th century well-loved or well-respected people were ‘immortalised’ in portrait busts by a wide-range of sculptors. Despite the number of busts, and the range of their subjects and authors, there is a remarkable overall consistency in their form; a unity which over-rides their diversity. This uniformity has tended to inform our response to the portrait bust, which has - and especially in comparison to its painted counterpart - been largely neglected in recent times. This exhibition addresses that apparent uniformity, challenging contemporary minds to understand how a formula might be not only liberating, but actually revealing of invention and skill.

This then, is not an exhibition which traces the history of the portrait bust, but aims instead to have us look again at how an outer form might mask more intimate inflections, setting up a dialogue between a portrait bust and its viewer, and a conversation between one portrait bust and another.

The works on show will span the period from the late 18th to the mid-20th centuries. They are drawn from the collections of the National Portrait Gallery, the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and Leeds Museums & Galleries. They represent well known sculptors (Nollekens, Chantrey, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein) alongside less familiar practitioners like Joseph Gott, Samuel Joseph and Kathleen Scott. They represent famous sitters (Pitt, Fox, Galsworthy) alongside little known family members, and will set old age alongside youth, vigour beside repose, the extrovert against the introspective. The selection was made by looking at all the busts in each of the three collections, and reflects the cumulative and shared experience of looking at the form in detail.

The exhibition curators - Penelope Curtis, Peter Funnell, Nicola Kalinsky - represent the three collaborating institutions. The exhibition will open at the Henry Moore Institute, which is dedicated to developing the study of sculpture, and which will publish a fully-illustrated catalogue with essays by Malcolm Baker and John Gage. In Leeds Return to Life follows on from Hounds in Leash and continues the Institute’s current focus on sculpture’s link between the representation of animate life and contemporary values.