St Albans Town Hall, I have described in the past as the ugliest building in England. Maybe unfair but growing up and going to school there, seeing the decaying mock classical edifice on a daily basis informed my view. Can you imagine my delight now seeing it in its new form as twenty-first century Art Gallery and Museum. The Corporation have done a wonderful job presenting the old courtroom, cells and assembly room as a modern open gallery. We visited while  the Barbara Hepworth Artist in Society 1948-53 exhibition was ongoing.

Hertfordshire County Council were seen as a pioneering authority following the Education Act 1944, which created a universal free secondary education system and their Chief Education Officer, John Newsom should take great credit for their achievements. The architecture of the secondary schools and technical colleges in the 1950s can be regarded as the exemplar for post war Britain. Most importantly Newsom proposed that part of the construction budget should be set aside for the display and commissioning of contemporary works of art. Hertfordshire children were thus given the opportunity to see modern art immediately and in their own environment.

Eocene, 1948-49, Hepworth’s carving of a mother and child in Portland stone, was bought by the Education Authority in 1952 and placed in St Albans Grammar School for Girls (now St Albans Girl School.) Sitting on top of a five foot black marble plinth this lovely shrouded  figure presents a striking proto-feminist countenance. You see in this work her figurative strengths but also a nod to the egg like sculptures of one of her mentors, Brancusi, see Eve in WALL-E.

Vertical Forms is very different. Firstly, rather than being purchased by Hertfordshire County Council, it was commissioned specifically for their new Technical College at Hatfield. The carving in Hopton Wood Limestone is of three interlocking abstract forms and it hung outside on the steel and glass building. Hepworth said of it “I tried to express a quality of aspiration to learning and called it Vertical Forms”. In the exhibition the sculpture is next door to a drawing,Three Figures – Project for Sculpture,probably used before the commission. The exhibit is opposite five of Hepworth’s Hospital Drawings from around the same period.

The University of Hertfordshire, on the site of the former Hatfield Technical College, are one of the sponsors of this delightful exhibition and the curation by Dr Sophie Bowness, (Hepworth’s grand-daughter) is excellent. She emphasises the importance of Hepworth’s public art after the Second World War as well as recording the lead Hertfordshire was taking in the wider education of its children.

Maybe as a recognition of that pragmatism, this product of the Hertfordshire Education system will revise his view of St Albans Town Hall!

The Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, claims in its introduction, to be the world’s oldest purpose built public museum; founded in the world’s oldest University (in the English speaking world.) The initial collection was based on the curios assembled by the Tradescant  dynasty in Lambeth, in the seventeenth century. It was opened by Elias Ashmole in 1683. Under its roof is a world class display of art and archeology spanning several millennia. So how did seventeen pieces of very modern sculpture by Jeff Koons sit alongside its historic art and artefacts. 

Koons is a very modern, modern artist. He is challenging, commercial, innovative and popular (and of course with all modern celebrity equally unpopular). The show opens with an interview between the artist and Ashmolean Director, Xa Sturgis. Sturgis is, of course, interested in Koons’s response to curating an exhibition in Oxford. Koons obliges saying ‘he couldn’t think of a better place to have a dialogue about art today.” And it is Jeff Koon’s understanding of art today that makes him such an attraction – Kindergarten mouldings, comic book colours, overt voyeurism and brilliant use of new materials, often laid over or appropriating very traditional images.

The Ashmolean exhibition is set out in three rooms. The highlight of the first for me is his iconic floating baseball. This is typical Koons employing a familiar object and using technology for the transformation into art. In this case combinations of distilled water in the ball and salt water in the tank render the ball weightless. Quite why this needs Nobel prize winning quantum physicist, Richard P. Feynman to work out only the artist knows.

The second piece is Rabbit from 1986. This, for all the world, looks like one of those twisty balloon sculptures you get at the fairground but unbelievable is made from the stainless steel. The plastic-like creases are so real you cannot believe it is steel – quite stunning.

Rabbit anticipates the second room which features some of the best exhibits, in what the artist calls the antiquity series. I think the Ballerinas is the star of the show. Here he transforms what looks like a delicate pottery table top porcelain figurine into an immense, larger than life size sculpture in steel with subtle colours. The images echo the Venus and Satyr, which features in many of the works in this series alongside.

The Gazing Ball series fills the final room. Here the artist employs gazing balls, similar to the types sold in American Garden Centres attached to the front of, or on top of studio reproduced works from the canon of western art, such as Titian’s ‘Diana and Actaeon’ or Géricault’s ‘Raft of the Medusa’. I suffered two sensations in this room which started with the admiration for the originality (seeing yourself inside these great paintings, but quickly developed into some level of annoyance, as if these balls were really interlopers.

All in all though a great success for Oxford and a chance to see some of the iconic work of Jeff Koons, the great celebrity, at close hand. The exhibition is on until the 9th June and I am looking forward to visiting it again before it closes.

Images © Jeff Koons