Spalding, J. (2010) The Best Art You’ve Never Seen: 101 Hidden Treasures From Around the World. London. Penguin.

This was a review book from the Good Book Guide which explored the various ways we do not see some art, either because it is actually destroyed or vanished, and more intriguingly, is obscured before our eyes. The book is quite mainstream, but some of the ideas move towards the abstract and the conceptual.

In my own work, I tend toward making work which may well be unobscured, but you often have to actively look in order to see it and understand what is seen. I am very in love with those ideas about hiding art in plain sight, and destabilised imagery:

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/destabilised-imagery.html

Examples from my own work:

Eleanor MacFarlane. Which alters when it alteration finds. 2014

http://eleanormacfarlane.blogspot.co.uk/2014/02/which-alters-when-it-alteration-finds.html

Eleanor MacFarlane. Vessels. 2012

http://www.galleryofwonder.co.uk/Info%20Eleanor%20MacFarlane.html

There are various reasons why artworks may not be on general view, such as having been hidden in private collections, concealed by inaccessible locations, neglected by shifts in fashion or politics, or degraded by time.

The book is rather mistitled in that you may or may not have seen the art – it features pieces in major museums that the author assumes have been overlooked, simply because they are placed amongst so many other artworks, such as the marble figurine Voltaire Naked by Pigalle. Several images are fairly well known, although the erotic The Origin of the World by Gustave Courbet has not always been to public taste.

However, there are plenty of treasures here, and the point is well made that not all artworks receive equal attention through the ages, and indeed, that some pieces are conceived through intrigue and danger, such as Auschwitz victim Felix Nussbaum’s Self Portrait with Jewish Identity Card, made in secret in the most oppressive circumstances.

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is probably the most famous painting in the world, yet is included because we can never now truly see it, hidden behind its permanent layer of barrier glass and the unrestored patina of age. There are layers of seeing, and art does not journey seamlessly into a preserved state in a gallery, but has a more hidden history.

11th November 2014