# The Meat is Well Hung



## HenryBHough (Sep 22, 2016)

I've encountered lots of strange stuff in art museums over the decades but this is the first one I've come across which I have definite plans to miss!

Decomposing women, preserved nipples & putrefaction: Flesh at York Art Gallery reviewed

*Decomposing women, preserved nipples & putrefaction: Flesh at York Art Gallery reviewed*

*For a regional museum with limited resources, York has had a jolly good stab at an ambitious subject*

*For a 21st-century gallery, a Victorian collection can be an embarrassment. Tate Modern got around the problem by offloading its Victoriana on to Tate Britain, but York Art Gallery decided to make the best of it.

As the birthplace of William Etty, York found itself lumbered with a major collection of work by a minor Victorian artist whose reputation nosedived after his death.*

*.....*

*It’s not a show for the squeamish, but at least the meat is well hung. In one gallery, a row of natures mortes features Chardin’s ‘Still Life: Kitchen Table’, with its politely painted salmon steak, alongside a workshop copy of Rembrandt’s rather less polite ‘Slaughtered Ox’, with its shadowy female figure mopping blood from the floor beneath.*


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