Sainsbury centre

I had my first art fix this morning since the relaxing of the lockdown and visited the Sainsbury centre in norwich and i was very disappointed, we are regular visitors to this museum and enjoy looking at the Lisa Sainsbury collection of studio pottery which until now has been on permanent display but a big chunk of the collection has now been stored, the Coper cabinet is still there along with a rather sparse Lucie rie cabinet and there is another case with some very ordinary leach type wares which never belonged to the collection, all the other cabinets now seem to be full of ancient objects of various kinds apart from one near the cafe which now holds a porcelain novelty teapot depicting Margaret Thatcher ,two pieces of creamware, a chinese figure and what looks like a football supporters mug. I know studio ceramics aren't most visitors or museum curators favourite items but i think this collection should have been left on display.

They did collect ancient/tribal artefacts before studio pottery and so it might just be a periodic change around.

I have never been but have promised myself that I would and, if I had made the trip up from London today, I can assure you that I would have been even more disappointed.

https://www.20thcenturyforum.com/t22902-hans-coper#176400

I'm sure they have some Hans - are these them on loan?

I think the problem is that this collection has been on display in its own area with a few modern sculptures for a long while and most visitors only come to see the bacon paintings etc , even on fairly busy days the ceramics area is relatively empty and i think this might be an attempt to attract visitors to that end of the gallery, It still has the best collection of Coper pieces around with many cycladic pieces ,the food in the restaurant is pretty good.

Well whenever I go to the V&A ceramic galleries I normally have the room to myself. if someone is in a room you just wait and they will move on, don't want to get overcrowded! They are all downstairs looking at the shoes and in the giftshop

They also had a substantial amount of the Tony Birks collection as well.
Its a great pity that they have hidden the Rie and Coper away, as that was part of the pride of Lisa Sainsbury's in particular. Well illustrated in the Cyril Frankel book Modern Pots.
Its a University Campus Museum though. The Sainsbury's also had a strong ethnographic collection as well. That is very trendy now, what with the clamour for the return of objects 'looted' from Empire. Is much of that on show?

hi philpot, The Coper collection is still on show as is a lot of the lucie rie it's the rest of the collection that seems to have gone, there is a cabinet with rather ordinary leach type wares in place of the Birks cabinet. I believe they are installing a selection of martin smith wares.

I visited the Constructivist exhibition at the Sainsbury centre yesterday ,a good exhibition with many little known works from their own collection although i felt that the two Collingwood pieces and the Barnes Graham didn't really qualify as constructivist objects .The exhibition focuses on the British contribution to this art form so don't expect any Naum Garbo etc, I think if you are interested in this type of art  the exhibition is worth seeing and is free, Grayson Perry is also showing although there is a charge for this, as always the collection of Hans Coper is worthy of  a visit on it's own .