On Tuesday night (22 March) Sarah Lucas revealed that it wasn't only egg yolks and custard that had inspired the brilliant yellow interior of her British pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, but also the yellow walls of the North drawing room at the Sir John Soane's Museum in London, where three of her nine plaster Muse figures from the Venice show are now currently residing under the collective title Power in Woman (until 21 May). Speaking with the curator James Putnam and the director of Somerset House Jonathan Reekie at the Royal College of Surgeons just across the square from the museum, Lucas confessed: “I didn’t know the Soane Museum all that well, but the yellow room stuck in my mind.”
It was apparently Reekie’s idea to introduce Lucas’ Muses—cast from the bottom halves of her close friends—to Sir John Soane’s drawing room and everyone agreed that these three very contemporary but also timeless topless nymphs sit very comfortably not only in the gracious 19th-century surroundings but also within the classical tradition as represented by Soane’s extensive collection of antique plaster casts. The museum is also home to William Hogarth’s famous A Rake’s Progress (1733) cycle of paintings and there’s no doubt that Lucas’s provocative trio, sporting cheeky cigarettes implanted in their various orifices, would not have felt out of place in the bawdier corners of Georgian England. Lucas professed herself very happy with her trio’s temporary home and confessed that she would be intrigued to gauge audience reaction to these new occupants of No. 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, saying “I quite fancy going in there with a beard and moustache to lurk around and see what people think.” A possible new performance work, perhaps?
