What’s in a name? | 8 August 2019

Perhaps we should blame Vasari. Ever since the publication of his Lives of the Artists, and to an ever-increasing extent, the world of art has been governed by the star system. In other words, the first question likely to be asked about a painting or sculpture is whodunit? And if the answer turns out to be, not Leonardo da Vinci — as has been suggested in the case of the controversial ‘Salvator Mundi’ — then the price tag becomes enormously smaller.

Does this matter? Artist Unknown, a little exhibition at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, investigates the case of the anonymous work. This draws on the rich resources of the museums of Cambridge — which include, of course, the Fitzwilliam, but also collections devoted to archaeology and anthropology, science, polar exploration and many other subjects.

Some of the things on display could be hung on the walls of Tate Modern without causing any surprise. A magnificent piece of Fijian barkcloth, consisting of vigorous black and white lozenges, stripes and triangles (see p27), has all the visual energy and authority that you might expect from a great abstract painting. Indeed, over the past century, many such objects have been shifted from ethnographic museums to museums of art. The Met in New York, for instance has galleries devoted to the arts of Oceania, filled with works just like this.

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Another fabulous textile in the exhibition, a rectangle of brilliantly coloured embroidery worn by Zoroastrian women as decorations on their trousers, is actually part of the collection at Kettle’s Yard itself. Jim Ede, the founder and creator of this remarkable house-cum-modern art gallery, was given these Iranian trouser cuffs by a friend who had once worked as a secret agent.

Ede — a modernist who derived his ideas from Ben Nicholson, who got them in turn from Mondrian — would have had no trouble in classifying these stripy Zoroastrian embroideries as art.