Gaudier-Brzeska has a powerful presence in the Kettle’s Yard House. A bird caught violently swallowing a fish, angular and empty eyed, greets a visitor walking into the living room; wrestlers, contorted and impossibly symmetrical, battle above a sofa. The effect is intentional: Jim Ede, the museum’s founder, amassed a large collection of the artist’s work and then made it his “life’s mission” – to quote Barassi – to promote it.

The curator of the gallery began by stating hoarsely and dryly this relationship between the two men and how the collection came to exist. In the intimate domestic setting of Ede’s house, however, his quiet manner of speech came to have a compelling and poetic resonance. By masterfully juxtaposing Gaudier’s youthful energy and passion with his fragility and early death Barassi was captivating and moving. Anecdotes about how Gaudier reflected on the dynamism of animal life by watching birds in Hyde Park, or, lacking money, found crumbling blocks of stone in graveyards to sculpt with gave the pieces on display context and meaning.

Descriptions of these works and their creation were similarly vivid. We learnt how Gaudier made both by carving into stone and casting bronze in handmade moulds; he also drew, painted and sketched. The same subject could take on several forms; a representation of a dancer could be lithe and rippling or crouching, near abstracted. The simplest formal tools often gave the most powerful sense of life: triangles and circles, or their three dimensional equivalents, were bound in one material mass to evoke emotion. Looking again at the casts arranged at the front of the space, Gaudier’s work seemed to be more alive and conscious, genuinely invigorated by the raw animal tensions he was perhaps attempting to convey. Barassi’s description of Gaudier’s legacy as one of diversity and energy seemed accurate.

Towards the end, however, the speaker lost momentum; in stopping to question the audience about what they wanted to hear and rapidly offering interpretations of one work of art after another the pace and intensity which had characterised his words disappeared. Nevertheless, the silent, mature audience listened attentively throughout and it seemed that for many attending the bi-weekly talks was a regular and anticipated pleasure. The forty minutes offered an escape from ‘student Cambridge’ and an insight into two very different worlds: one expected, the other less so.