The Hereford Screen: A Personal Interaction

By Christopher J Garcia

There are some moments when one comes into contact with a work of art. It
happened to me a lot in the 1990s, while trying to justify a minor in Art History. I’d go to
the latest special exhibit at the MFA in Boston and find myself, for no good reason,
welling up at the way they presented the last series that Lichtenstein had painted, or the
series of illustrations from Arab scientific manuscripts. I’d spent hours at all distances
from Pollack, Man Ray, Rothko, Motherwell, Nevelson, actually feeling something cut
through me, hit an emotional point in myself that I seldom let flow up to the front. I once
found myself nearly in hysterics in a room full of Hockney in a gallery in Providence.
Something about Abstraction, divorce from representationalism, craft, that’s what really
got to me. So why, when I visited England on my trip as the Trans-Atlantic Fan Fund
representative, was the thing that broke me down a piece of Victorian Iron Work?
I had a section of my trip set aside for The Big London Musuems. There was the
British Museum (planned for two days), The Science Museum (I had to see the Babbage
Engine), the Natural History Museum and, far less important than the others, the V&A;
the Victoria & Albert Museum. It’s a museum of Decorative Art and Design, with an
emphasis on the later, it would seem. Maybe it was that I was visiting when the major art
galleries were being updated, but as I saw it, it was a museum of design: the ugly,
functional stepsister of Art. I usually can’t even bring myself to capitalize it.
I had done my bit of the Science Museum, observed both the original
reconstruction and the one that would soon be delivered to my museum, and it was
approaching two o’clock. I walked out and entered the V&A, my iBook and London A-
to-Z in my Further Confusion bookbag. It’s a building of hugeness. There’s no other way
to put it. It’s not quite as massive as the Natural History Museum, but it’s still impressive.
Then again, all those big stone buildings that I came across in London felt like cathedrals
built to convert heretic giants. You walk in and there are pieces, lovely pieces, pieces that
appear everywhere and seem to mean little. There’s a Chihuly glass piece hanging over
an information desk. There are pieces that stand as introductions to coming galleries. The
entire layout is full of pieces of art and craft.
The galleries are lovely, and some even border on overpowering. There are the
Cast Courts, huge galleries full of plaster casts of hundreds of massively significant
works that would never be able to move. There are giant pillars, cathedral doors, effigies,
tombs, caskets and statues. It’s amazing, though it doesn’t feel like magic. There’s a
lovely hall full of Korean decorative arts, a wonderful room of Japanese kimono and
other pieces of clothing, and a hall of musical instruments that moved me, but not more
than any other collection of objects. It was pretty much a really good museum, like the
ones that I hang out in around California, only better. There were some truly amazing
objects, the Gloucester Candlestick, a gesso-on-wood Jesus on an Ass, the Thomas
Becket Casket and the Butler-Bowden Cope. It was all great, but it wasn’t life-changing.
I headed up a set of stairs and down a hallway, going towards what I thought was
going to be the Islamic section when I came to a strange object. It was presented just in
front of the wall, and when you approached it, it was from the side. I wasn’t sure what it
was, had no idea, but when I got to it, something happened.
It was the Hereford Screen.
 The Hereford Screen is not the kind of object that you hear people talk about as
the most significant of the V&A’s collection. There are many other sexier artifacts. I
mean, it’s a screen from the UK, placed in a location where it’s actually kind of hard to
come across. It’s one of the objects with the best stories, though. It was built as a choir
screen, a part of most Cathedrals of the pre-1700 period which separated the congregation
from the clergy. The screen was first shown at the 1862 International Exhibition. It was a
marvel, got massively positive reviews. I mean, it was an 8 ton piece of iron worn with
electroformed copper figures, which was a revolutionary process. They looked like they
were cast bronze, but they were produced at a fraction of the price. The size, thirty or so
feet high, was immense, something that would hit this unsuspecting Californian about
146 years later. The screen was then installed at Hereford Cathedral, ironically enough
located in Hereford. The Screen served nobly for more than 100 years. The general
change in the design and Cathedral interiors, coupled with the general distaste for
Victoriana that the UK faced in many of the decades of the 20th Century. The screen was
dismantled and sold to the Herbert Museum and Art Gallery.
There’s a legendary story around the Computer History Museum about a
computer called Johnniac. Johnniac was a computer from the RAND Corporation in the
1950s, a Von Neumann machine that was given to the L.A. County Museum. They
couldn’t afford to maintain it or display it, so they put it out in a parking lot. Museums
have to make choices. They can’t afford to keep everything, they can’t afford to keep
every object in Showroom condition. It’s just not possible, so choices are made. In the
case of Johnniac, one of the guys who had worked on it saw it, called up The Computer
Museum, and it got sent there. There was no way the Herbert Museum could keep the
Hereford Screen up, and they certainly couldn’t fix it up, so they gave it to the Victoria &
Albert Museum in 1983.
The museum had it, but it wasn’t in great shape. In fact, it was in pieces. A huge
project was put together to get it back into shape so they could make it into a showcase
object. This led to the collection of money so that it could be restored and displayed.
They figured that it could go onto the bridge that over-looked the entrance, which is a
glorious place for it to be seen, in theory (though for much of the foyer, it’s blocked by
that Chihuly piece I mentioned. They did a survey to figure out the true needs and made
maps of how it properly fit together. They blasted it with Aluminium Oxide, got rid of the
bad metal, added structural supports, the remaining pieces of paint were examined and
the piece refinished. The result was an £800,000 restoration project.
And that moment, in 2008, when I came across it, if the goal had been to touch a
heretic, then every shilling had been worth it.
I came around and looked at it full from the front, pushed up against the railing
that over-looked the entrance. I was overwhelmed, but in a much different way than I had
been when I came into the Cast Court. This was something completely different. It was
the closest thing to a religious experience I can ever remember myself having with any
object that had true religious connections. I was standing in front of a massive piece of
iron work with Jesus prominently displayed, with passion flowers all over the place, and I
was feeling something in my chest that I had never experienced when looking at
anything. Honestly, the closest comparison I can come up to is that moment in The
Godfather where Appolonia first sees Michael and is struck with the Thunderbolt. I had
to stop and stare, set my computers down and walk back and forth with long pauses at
each position. I had to feel it at distance. I had to understand the piece from 14 feet, from
10 feet, from 6 feet, from 21 inches, from a position so close, I could smell the air
conditioned air bouncing off of it, and taste the cold of the iron. I spent at least an hour
studying it. The flowers, the rondels, the columns. All that time, I didn’t see a single
person walk by. Not a single guard came to see what this crazy-haired American was
doing or what that bag was leaned up against the rail. It was a beautiful thing, but, more
than that, it was something greater than life. It was an object that seemed eternal.
No matter where I viewed it from, the Hereford Screen seemed like a magnificent
expression of what someone felt for Christ, and while I may not feel so deeply for that
figure myself, I can feel that emotion pulsing through the iron. There are objects that can
store the devotion of their creators, and this was one such object. It had been slowly off-
gassing devotion for nearly 150 years. I can only imagine what the people of 1862 felt
when confronted with it at that International Exhibition. Were they closer to the feelings
of the creator and felt it religiously? Did they feel the masterful iron work and
appreciated as Art? Did they get hit with a feeling they could not adequately describe and
stand, nearly hypnotized, in various positions so that feeling could wash over them at
varying intensities? Was this magic then, or did it have to travel through time, gain a
further story to be able to gobsmack me such as it did? Only the secret keeper at the
center of attention in the Screen would know that for sure.