LONDON — Their works may be coveted by collectors, but artists often have a predilection for building eccentric collections of their own. Many like to pick up bric-a-brac from curiosity shops, market stalls and auction houses. Predictably enough, Damien Hirst owns skulls and stuffed animals. Less widely known is that Peter Blake hoards vintage shop signs, while Martin Parr boasts an impressive collection of Soviet souvenirs.
“Magnificent Obsessions: The Artist as Collector” features these artists and 11 others in an exhibition of miscellany at the Barbican Art Gallery here through May 25. Spread over two levels, the show presents about 8,000 objects from the artists’ personal collections. Most are exhibited just as the artist keeps them, in an environment that resembles the artist’s studio, and next to one or more examples of his or her art.
Not every display has the same thrift-shop, idiosyncratic feel hinted at in the exhibition’s title. Yet “Magnificent Obsessions” does demonstrate that collecting is a trait shared by many artists — and one that offers interesting clues to their work.
The idea for the exhibition came to the Barbican curator Lydia Yee a few years ago, she said, after she noticed objects in artists’ studios that were not being used in their work. Persuading them to lend the paraphernalia “wasn’t straightforward,” she noted, as those collections were not meant for public display. Organizing the show allowed her “to get behind the thought process of an artist,” she said, “to think the way they think, and to look at the world in their eyes.”
Mr. Blake, 82, the British Pop Art pioneer famous for the Beatles’ 1967 “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” album cover, comes across as one of the exhibition’s most formidable hoarders. “Most people collect something: I think it’s a natural instinct, even if it’s only shoes that you wear,” he said in a telephone interview. “Sometimes it works to a degree where it’s almost a disease.”
His own collecting habits can safely be described as obsessive. “I used to go to markets at five in the morning to try and get things before other people could get them,” he said. The dozens of items in his display are a hodgepodge with no overarching logic. They include musket balls fired during the 1643 siege of Arundel Castle (in their original Victorian cabinet of curiosities); a stuffed hare with the horns of another creature weirdly tacked on; old signage (“Wallpaper, Glass & Colour Department”), and elephant figurines.
Mr. Blake was only 7 when World War II broke out, and he said he went through childhood with little to play with besides bird eggs. As a result, he said, for decades afterward he frantically bought objects. These appear occasionally in his art. One car-related sign originally slated for the Barbican exhibition was unavailable because Mr. Blake had incorporated it into another work, curators said. The only Blake work on show, “Kamikaze” (1965), is an acrylic-and-collage-on board piece incorporating a toy airplane, a mask and postcards.
In the case of Mr. Hirst, the link between the collecting and the art is even more evident. Famous for creating works with dead animals (like sharks in formaldehyde), he has lent items to the Barbican that include a majestic Somali stuffed lion (c. 1880), a stuffed vulture (c. 1920), and a large human skull. The Hirst artwork in the show, “Last Kingdom” (2012), is a large, mirrored cabinet of attractively displayed butterflies, beetles and other entomological specimens.
Ms. Yee said that one participant who took little persuasion to join the show was Edmund de Waal, perhaps because he is better known for his collection of carved Japanese netsuke figurines (kimono toggles) than for his pottery. In his best-selling 2010 memoir, “The Hare With Amber Eyes,” he traces the dramatic trajectory of the figurines, which he inherited from wealthy Jewish ancestors who were dispossessed during World War II.
Many of the netsuke are now at the Barbican show. So are fossils, coins and medals, Victorian toothpicks and other odds and ends that Mr. de Waal lovingly arranged and rearranged in a vitrine in his childhood bedroom. His artwork is not unlike that early display case. In the show is his “From the Collection of a Private Man” (2011), a white wall cabinet filled with precisely arranged immaculate porcelain pots. “Collecting is a kind of poetry: It’s a shuffling around of objects and spaces until they make sense,” he said in a phone interview.
In some cases, collecting becomes a way of prolonging childhood, Ms. Yee said, “the moment where we have the most creative freedom in our lives, are able to try things out, arrange our worlds.” Artists can make it last without feeling self-conscious, she added.
Andy Warhol is a perfect (and well-known) example. A vast shelving unit in the exhibition is stocked with his gleaming cookie jars, ceramic containers shaped like a clock, a rocking horse or a panda. These and other objects that he accumulated “signified comfort, family life, stability,” Ms. Yee said.
The other series that suggests childlike enchantment belongs to Mr. Parr. His cigarette cases, clocks and tin confectionary boxes bear images of the stray dogs that the Soviet Union sent on space missions in the 1950s. With names like Laika, Belka and Strelka, the happy-looking hounds are depicted wearing colorful life vests, sometimes with tongues hanging out. Mr. Parr, whose photographs are often sarcastic portrayals of leisure and tourism, is drawn to image-based, mass-produced objects that have political connotations, Ms. Yee said.
Of the 14 artists in the exhibition, only two are women: the California multimedia artist Pae White and the German conceptual artist Hanne Darboven, who died in 2009. Ms. Yee said she had wanted to include more women, but had found that “the person who is more likely to focus in a very singular manner on a particular type of acquisition often tends to be male.”
That left Ms. White as the only living woman in the show. “I’ve never considered that a male impulse — buying cheap, beautiful things,” she said of the divide suggested by Ms. Yee.
Ms. White’s display is an installation of colorful patterned textiles by the designer Vera Neumann hung like pennants on slanting rows of stretched wire. The collection started with two scarves bought from a thrift store and now contains more than 3,000 pieces.
Why collect? “It’s small victories on a regular basis,” Ms. White said, pointing to the textiles. “If nothing has gone well that day, you got this 59-cent scarf unexpectedly, on the way to the bank.”
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