“The World’s Most Important Wrought-Iron Collection” and Why You Should Care
Walking through The Barnes Foundation, it’s hard to look beyond the impressionist and post-impressionist masterpieces and quite easy to miss the details that sparked the idea for this year’s temporary exhibit, Strength and Splendor: Wrought Iron from the Musée Le Secq des Tournelles, Rouen. If you keep an eye out for the details, you’ll observe a variety of quirky objects- locks, bolts, nuts, spoons, forks, and the like- syecattered among gaggles of Degas’s ballerinas and Renoir’s landscapes. Strength and Splendor draws inspiration from the space between the masterpieces in the permanent collection and achieves the broader purpose of reminding us viewers that the ordinary can become monumental if we keep an open mind.