The hard slog
We are up to 34,000 visitors and are now in what I would call the 'viral stage'. After most of the press coverage has happened, it's now word of mouth and returning visitors - there are around 6 hours of items - if you read every caption, every panel, listened to the 77 audio items and watched all the films. The exhibition is free, so it's ideal for those wanting to dip in and out.
It's an exhibition that British Library readers should be interested in but we are very reluctant to canvas them directly.
Yesterday, I talked to around 60 Camberwell Foundation students - the Foundation course is so much part of the Vhutemas/Bauhaus legacy that it surprises me that I have to explain what the avant garde means/meant. But they ask some interesting questions - what happened to the magazines: who bought them, kept them, and why have so many (relatively) have survived.
I fix up a session with Jo who wants to bring a party of Royal College of Arts printmakers - they have a publications project. And tomorrow I'm treble booked most of the day - one to ones, a meeting on the Arts & Humanities Strategy, two sessions with Chelsea graphic students in the exhibition, an Executive Team debrief, and then the Themerson film evening in the Conference Centre. Hope the Tubes are working tomorrow - unlike tonight.
I was in London two days ago, and visited this exhibition, which I found extremely interesting. The reason I'm writing, anyway, is that I found a mistake in a caption on one of the panels, where the famous image of the "chance meeting on a dissecting table of an umbrella and a sewing machine" is wrongly attributed to Max Ernst.
Instead, the image comes from Isidore Lucien Ducasse, Comte de Lautréamont.
Hope to have been of help.
r
Posted by: Roberta | 10 January 2008 at 09:52 PM