Aside from being one of the world’s greatest composers of experimental music, John Cage was a man obsessed with mushrooms who supplied New York restaurants with foraged fungi.
Before creating Peter Rabbit, Mrs Puddle-Duck and Timmy Tiptoes, Beatrix Potter’s big passion was looking through microscopes to investigate the germination process of fungal spores and painting mushrooms as accurately as possible.
Today, according to the curator of a new art exhibition, artists are more interested in fungi than ever before.
Francesca Gavin has gathered together works by 35 artists, designers and musicians to explore the world of mushrooms for a show opening in January at Somerset House in London.
She was drawn to the subject because she kept spotting mushrooms in art and wanted to know more.
“I just noticed mushrooms popping up everywhere,” she said. “I just kept seeing them in art over the past 50 years, but even more in the past three years. I then kind of fell into a mushroom wormhole … there is so much enthusiasm for mushrooms and so much innovation.
“Everyone loves a mushroom, it makes people happy. There is something light-hearted to it and perhaps it’s an antidote to a lot of the conceptualism of contemporary art.”
Gavin has unearthed some fascinating stories for the exhibition. For example, Cage’s lifelong interest in mushrooms, which led him to reviving the New York Mycological Society in the 1950s.
To make some extra money he also supplied hotels including the Four Seasons with mushrooms he foraged in upstate New York.
“He’s actually better known in Italy for his love of mushrooms than he is for his music, which I think is amazing,” said Gavin.
For Cage, it was as much about the foraging as it was the mushroom.
“If you think about the peacefulness and space in his work, I think that was very much connected with his love of foraging,” she said.
Going on display will be a rare mushroom book he published with the mycologist Alexander H Smith and illustrator Lois Long, which includes Cage’s poetry and handwritten notes on the the subject.
Cage’s passion and interest in mycology will be a surprise to many, as will Potter’s.
Over the course of a decade, before she found fame as a writer, Potter completed about 300 fungi and lichen paintings in startling detail. “They are just so beautiful,” said Gavin. “She was very young when she was doing them … you can see her children’s books as an extension of making narratives around that connection to nature.”
Potter also studied fungi under a microscope and presented a paper, On the germination of the spores of Agaricineae, to the Linnean Society of London in 1897.
Other mushroom-loving artists in the show include Cy Twombly, represented by prints of a quasi-scientific series he made in 1974 called Natural History Part I, Mushrooms.
Contemporary works in the show include a three-dimensional papier mache and embroidered sculpture by the textile artist Amanda Cobbett; a William Morris-inspired oil painting by Alex Morrison entitled Mushroom Motif (Black and Ochre); and an autumnal woodland scene by Graham Little, Untitled (Wood) 2019.
Work by designers include a biodegradable mushroom burial suit by Jae Rhim Lee, which aims to reduce the environmental cost of the funeral industry, and a mycelium high-heeled shoe by the Belgian shoe designer Kristel Peters.
Gavin said she had learned much since she began research for the show and lots of fascinating mushroom facts would be included. For example the 965-hectare (2,384-acre) mushroom in north Oregon, which is considered the world’s biggest and oldest organism.
One reason mushrooms are in the zeitgeist is our need to reconnect with nature, said Gavin. “We’re living in this moment where life has become so urbanised and technology focused.”
Another reason is simply that mushrooms are so aesthetically pleasing and people love them. “Honestly, I’ve never had a response like this to an exhibition, people are really excited.”
• Mushrooms: The art, design and future of fungi is at Somerset House 31 January-26 April 2020
