Connections/Touch

My name is Ian Wardropper, I'm curator of European sculpture and decorative arts, and my topic is touch.

Museums privilege sight. We let people look, but we discourage people from touching.

I find that using my sense of touch becomes another means of perceiving objects.

Touching something, someone, hugging someone creates an emotional response, and so touching a work of art, I think, does also unleash certain emotions in a way that might be purely abstract if you're only using your eyes.

And it's a pity that we don't allow the general public to do that, but if we let everybody touch

the acids in people's sweat would bite into metal, rings on their fingers would scratch objects and there'd

be nothing left. For that reason, the only ring I wear is my wedding ring out of love for my wife. We don't let people touch for good reason, but it fascinates me what that means.

There are certain kinds of sculpture which are meant to be held in the hand. So you are invited to touch it and to move it. You feel

the smoothness of the skin. One pose flows into another—from some angle it might seem a little bit more angular

from another it's an incredibly suave, swaying pose. We all use touch as a kind of diagnostic tool.

If you go into a clothing store, you are drawn to use your hand to assess the weight of the cloth, is it as pleasing to the touch as it looks?

So when I'm examining a work of art, I'm often looking for, so to speak, certain kinds of traits, which I can only appreciate through feeling.

If you pick up a bronze sculpture, if it's light, that may mean that it's later in date. Technologically they were able to make thinner-walled sculpture more perfectly later. I might pick up

a silver object and just judge the sheer amount of metal that went into it. Silver is inherently mercantile and the amount of silver in it means how valuable it is. But it's also about

balance—picking up two handles, was it perfectly balanced so that it feels right in the hands?

A marble statue might have had old plaster repairs that might not be immediately visible to the eye, but are

to the touch, because the marble would be cooler, the plaster would be slightly warmer.

I've had some of the most revealing and profound moments exploring a work of art with somebody who's visually impaired. That person is appreciating through keenly developed sense of touch.

Recently I went to examine a few works in our galleries with somebody who was blind. In looking at

a Pope in bronze, the blind person might immediately, for example, go to the nose to appreciate the character of the person, and understand their age from running her hand over the face. But there are always also these astonishing insights.

She said, "Well, he must be sitting down." And I said, "Why is that?" And she said, "Well, feel the belly: His weight is in such a way, his shoulders back slightly. It feels to me as if he's sitting down." Which is not something that ever occurred to me to ask myself when I was looking at the Pope. So there's this kind of logic, which is fascinating.

Touch is, through texture, one of the ways a sculptor uses different kinds of material in making an artistic statement, so

at the moment that you're looking at Gian Lorenzo Bernini's Faun Teased By Children, I think you also feel the differences between the different forms, so that the highly

polished body of the satyr is meant to play off the deliberately roughened surface of the bark of the tree that he's straddling.

Often the traces of the making of works of art disappear in the final product, but if you look closely at terracotta

you can see fingerprints, you can see the smudging of the fingerprints to create a texture, that he's taken his fingernail and made a slight little crease. You see the sense of touch, it's created this work.

And if you hold it, you feel an identity with the artist because your hand is in the same place where his was. But when you put all your senses together

you have the full appreciation of a work of art.