In the editorial in the last issue of this Magazine we commented on the proposal by the management of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London (V&A), to restructure its curatorial departments along chronological lines as part of a plan to deal with the deficit caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Delays to exhibition planning caused by the coronavirus pandemic have led to the serendipitous concurrence of two separate exhibitions that explore the convergence between Auguste Rodin (1840–1917) and two artists who might have only fleetingly crossed his path, but whose modernist status is similarly eminent: the perpetually popular inventor of Cubism and evergreen stylistic acrobat Pablo Picasso (1881–1973) and Jean (Hans) Arp (1886–1966), the first-hour Dadaist, maverick Surrealist and trailblazer of biomorphic abstraction.