.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
'Butler was acutely conscious of environment and scale throughout his career as a sculptor ... The tower sculptures of the early 1960s were followed by a succession of Lilliputian figures collected together as one work, 'Musée Imaginaire' 1963. Butler modelled these thirty-nine effigies in a very small room, placing each one in a recess in the wall formed by a blocked-up window whose dimensions eventually became those of the display cabinet' (R. Calvacoressi, exhibition catalogue, Reg Butler, London, Tate Gallery, 1983, pp. 14-15).
After the Hanover Gallery exhibition in 1963, in which this work was titled Series of Small Bronzes, Butler renamed it Musée Imaginaire after Andre Malraux's 1947 essay of the same name. Malraux conceived the idea of this as 'the 'Museum without Walls', whose local habitation is solely in the mind of each of us' (A. Malraux, La Métamorphose des Dieux, 1957). Margaret Garlake discusses these bronzes: they 'recall objects for play, for handling, for the imagination, dream figures too far removed from everyday sculpture to exist on any but the private scale of the small room in which they were made ... All were conceived as female although many of them are far from human in appearance, as if made to resemble primitive objects' (M. Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, Much Hadham, 2006, p. 162).
Other casts of Musée Imaginaire are in the public collections of Tate, London, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.
After the Hanover Gallery exhibition in 1963, in which this work was titled Series of Small Bronzes, Butler renamed it Musée Imaginaire after Andre Malraux's 1947 essay of the same name. Malraux conceived the idea of this as 'the 'Museum without Walls', whose local habitation is solely in the mind of each of us' (A. Malraux, La Métamorphose des Dieux, 1957). Margaret Garlake discusses these bronzes: they 'recall objects for play, for handling, for the imagination, dream figures too far removed from everyday sculpture to exist on any but the private scale of the small room in which they were made ... All were conceived as female although many of them are far from human in appearance, as if made to resemble primitive objects' (M. Garlake, The Sculpture of Reg Butler, Much Hadham, 2006, p. 162).
Other casts of Musée Imaginaire are in the public collections of Tate, London, and Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington.