The banners have gone!
As far as I can see the only public vestige of the exhibition in and around the V&A is the banners in the Sackler Centre from the ‘Train bleu project’ and posters covering the glass on the door to gallery 38. All the orange posters and banners have disappeared from the tunnel to South Kensington tube and from around the exhibition. We have also disappeared from the Home Page of the V&A’s website so information on the exhibition may now require a little more hunting!
In the galleries the revolve with the costumes from Daphnis and Chloë continues to turn and the clouds scud over the green walls where the Rite of Spring costumes stood – somehow this last fragment of ‘life’ seems rather poignant.
The walls will soon be bare. Very few loans are left and most of the pictures still hanging are accompanied with signs ‘NOT FOR TOUR’. Watching the collection from the Wadsworth Atheneum being carefully packed for their trip back to the USA, was like saying farewell to old friends. I do think we were particularly lucky to have secured the Bakst illustration of Vaslav Nijinsky in L’Après-midi d’un faune for the exhibition (one of their most frequently requested paintings) – it paid dividends to have put our request for the loan early.
I chuckled as they were packed into their named positions in the crates because the design for Stanislas Idzikowsky’s costume as the Puppet in Jack in the Box was labelled as being for a ‘Cloud Carrier’. The number of e-mails about this design that crossed the Atlantic was considerable for it is wrongly labelled in one of their published catalogues and I was determined to get the right one. Well we did and it really was for the Puppet, I hope that confusion over the role will eventually get completely resolved.
Dear Jane,
I’m very sorry to bother you. I am contacting you as a last resort in my so far unsuccessful four year search for a poster of the brilliant exhibition you curated five years ago! Would you have any suggestions as to where I might find one? I did in fact buy one of the posters from the V&A shop at the time but then left it behind over lunch at a restaurant never to be seen again.
Apologies once again for contacting you in something like this. Thank you in advance for any help you might be able to give me.
Kind regards,
Stephen Gosztony (London)