SHARING WITH ME

The three of us, Pierrette, Borgy and I were off to see an exhibition called « The Silent Partners - Artist and Mannequin from Function to Fetish » at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. I really didn’t know what to expect. Obviously, from now on I will be looking at earlier portrait painting differently. For centuries, the mannequin, was little more than a studio tool, a piece of equipment as necessary as an easel, pigments and brushes. This exhibition was to show the multiple purposes the mannequin served  – from fixing perspective, understanding the fall of light and shadow and painting reflections to acting as a support for drapery and costume. From the 19th century, the mannequin moved to centre stage and became the subject of the painting, and eventually, a work of art in its own right. The mannequin, in my book is somewhat ambiguous and here we were  to see how much so.  From the Renaissance to the present day all notions of realism and artifice in representational paint