The raised arms of the caryatid form a mandorla, a shape like an almond. Oddly, this form seems to be a hidden leitmotif of the entire collection. Angela’s eyes — indeed practically all the eyes that Picasso ever painted or drew — have the mandorla shape. It can also be seen in the juicy lemons strewn on the table in Henri Matisse’s Citrons et Saxifrages, in the billowing sails that crowd Fernand Léger’s Contraste de formes, in the visual pun that is Paul Klee’s Fisch-blick. Geometrically, a mandorla consists of two opposing and intersecting arcs. It is, in other words, the common ground at the heart of a Venn diagram. So it could be said to stand for overlapping fates and the crossing of destinies, for the kind of inevitable happenstance that seems to have informed Angela’s life and given rise to the collection. That may seem far-fetched and mystical, but as the epigraph to the exhibition catalogue says, quoting Klee, ‘To collect out of love, and with regard to the spiritual dimension — that is a good thing.’
And there are works in the collection that seem to make a direct address to some kind of transcendence. In Monet’s foggy landscape, Eglise de Vernon, Brouillard, the building seems to be floating on the face of the reflective water, like Noah’s ark. It is not so much a church as the ghost of a church. Picasso’s Paysage de Provence is part of this otherworldly group. What first strikes most people is that it is so unlike a Picasso: the work could quite easily be taken for a Cezanne. But perhaps the most intriguing thing about the painting is the spectral figure who sits in the foreground with his back to a gnarly trunk, like Buddha beneath the Bodhi tree.
Then there is Chagall’s Crucifixion scene, Christ with a Longcase Clock. It is not the religious imagery that makes this a work of beguiling spiritual power. It is the combination of archetypal symbols — the dying God, yes, but also the burning candle, the jaundiced moon, the sleeping or grieving woman — and, above all, the dreamlike anachronism of the Roman cross and the tall Victorian clock: redemption and eternity hewn from the same living material.