The Paul Mellon Centre 1970–2020: A Brief History

Welcome to this special issue of PMC Notes, which has been redesigned to mark the fact that 2020 is the Paul Mellon Centre’s fiftieth anniversary. I have used the opportunity provided by our refreshed newsletter, and this special year, to offer a brief account of the Centre’s history.

This takes the shape of an illustrated, year-by-year chronicle in which I focus on some of the people, events, and projects that have shaped the Centre’s development. In doing so, I hope to shed light on all of the main strands of our activity over the past fifty years: our role in supporting scholarly publications on British art and architecture; our dissemination of grants and fellowships; our academic events programme; our research collections, which today offer a rich combination of library and archival resources; our teaching, which has long included annual Yale-in-London courses, and now encompasses a graduate summer school; and, finally, our in-house research projects, which have generated a series of exhibitions, catalogues raisonnés, and online publications.

The following pages are also designed to suggest the ways in which the Centre has engaged with the wider field of British art studies over the last five decades. Over this period, this has been transformed from a small, rather closed area of art-historical specialisation, to one that is populated by thousands of scholars and researchers, who deploy a wide variety of approaches and address a multiplicity of topics. Furthermore, British art studies, like other areas in the humanities, has been transformed by the arrival of digital technologies, and by the changing demographics of higher education and the cultural professions. The Centre’s own history and activities have been intimately bound up with these wider developments.

As will quickly become apparent, the story offered here is a highly impressionistic one — a series of snapshots, rather than a comprehensive review, and one that can be dipped into, rather than read from cover to cover. But it does hope to address the most important aspects of the Centre’s evolution from the modestly scaled research institute it was in 1970 into the larger and more wide-ranging entity it is today.

In telling this story, I have benefited enormously from the earlier, far more encyclopaedic history of the Centre written by my predecessor, Brian Allen, which covered the years 1970 to 2010, and to which I would like to pay tribute. If any reader, having browsed through my own summary of the PMC’s development, should be tempted to find out more about its first four decades, his is the book to which they should turn.

I am also delighted that this account includes a series of entries and recollections by a number of scholars and colleagues who have been closely involved in the Centre’s history. I thank them all for their willingness to reflect and reminisce.

Mark Hallett Director of Studies