BRITISH ART NEWS
Newsletter of the British Art Network August 2021
The British Art Network (BAN) promotes curatorial research, practice and theory in the field of British art. Our members include curators, academics, artist-researchers, conservators, producers and programmers at all stages of their professional lives. All are actively engaged in caring for, developing and presenting British art, whether in museums, galleries, heritage settings or art spaces, in published form or in educational settings, across the UK and beyond.
Cover image: Francis Danby, View of Clifton from Leigh Woods, about 1818/20, oil on panel, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery K851
CONTENTS 1.
Convenor’s Introduction
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BAN Research: Alice Correia on South Asian Modernists in Regional Collections
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BAN Research: Jenny Gaschke, Helen Record and Emma Roodhouse report on the activity of the British Landscapes Research Group
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Interview: David Solkin on Art History, Aesthetic Pleasure and Curating – and changing times for British Art studies
The British Art Network is supported by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with additional public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
CONVENOR’S INTRODUCTION As ever, this new issue of the British Art Network newsletter brings together varied reports and commentaries addressing current and emerging issues in British art curating. Each offers a sense of reflection and retrospect, sometimes marked by apprehension or self-questioning, but all also characterised by a sense of optimism about the relevance of British art research and curating … Alice Correia outlines her important research on South Asian art in the 1950s, highlighting the transformative potential of regional collections in relation to established art historical narratives. Jenny Gaschke, Helen Record and Emma Roodhouse consider the last year of activity in the Landscape group, honestly assessing the multiple practical and emotional challenges of programming and networking, but also providing a renewed sense of importance which might be attached to the genre now. Finally, David Solkin, one of our most eminent art historians, offers reflections on four decades of art historical work and exhibition making, confronting the profound challenges the discipline of British art history faces today yet discovering, as well, reasons to be optimistic about its continuing – perhaps deepening – relevance. There are reasons for being optimistic about the British Art Network as a whole. As of last month, the Membership list now runs at over 1,000 names, an increase of 25% since the end of 2020. This surge in interest is surely down to the energy and range of activities generated by the Network’s bursary holders and invited programmers, which over the last year has taken in everything from taxidermy to Brutalism, mapmaking to performance art, always with an open, expansive sense of what the curatorial might be, and what constitutes British art. And as of this month, our new British Art Network website has gone live, here. This gives more prominence to research activities and includes the beginnings of a Membership Directory which in time should become a major resource for everyone interested in British art and curating. Editorial work on the site continues, but we hope that you will find using the site easy and enjoyable, and that you get a sense of what it can do for the network and members. Over the coming months we will be building up the Directory, so all members who wish to be featured can be included. We will also be developing additional resources, and publishing content from recent programme activity, creating what will surely become a major archive for British art curating. 1
Summer brings for many of us a chance to break temporarily from work, needed this year more than ever. But British Art Network activity has continued and continues through August and September. In addition to research group activities, we have seen opening sessions from the two seminar series supported this year by BAN, Itinerant Imaginaries and Irish Modernisms, and the three online roundtables organised by Prof. Paul Goodwin as part of his programme Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain, which serves as BAN’s annual conference (with recordings and additional filmed content appearing later in the year). In each case the organisers have interrogated established narratives of art, exposing deeper and richer archives than are generally brought to light and expanding definitions of British – and Irish – art. With Genealogies of Black Curating, especially, the intensive focus on ‘the curatorial’ as such, and the surfacing of the largely unacknowledged role of Black and Asian curators in the 1970s, ‘80s and ‘90s, promises to be seminal, for it confronts fundamental questions about British art and curating relevant across the field. The various themes highlighted here – revising and expanding British art histories, renewing our sense of cultural value and especially the value of collections, re-centring marginalised or overlooked narratives and identities, but above all re-focussing on the specificity and importance of British art curating – have been enduring features of BAN’s programme and activities, albeit interpreted in different ways since the Network was initiated in 2012. As we head towards the 10th anniversary of the Network, there is the chance to renew those commitments, and sharpen our focus and ambitions. As the various contributors to this Newsletter testify, in different ways, British art understood through and mediated by a curatorial framework – as collected and catalogued artefact, as displayed object, as experienced in a gallery or museum or online – has a distinctness which overlaps with but is not reducible to arthistory, theory or straightforward art-appreciation. How the curatorial framing of British art of all kinds and from all periods is pursued, rethought, and advanced in the context of contemporary life is a central question for BAN. So, too, is the question of what comprises curatorial expertise, how is it to be cultivated and applied? How, if at all, is it to be distinguished from art historical knowledge, artists’ entrepreneurship, or from the pragmatism of arts management and the machinations of cultural bureaucracy? In the immediate future, these are among the challenges to be addressed through the next round of bursaries, for research activity in 2022: these will be advertised in September. If you have questions about the forthcoming bursaries or would like to discuss making an application, please do feel free to contact us directly (full contact details appear at the end of this Newsletter). In the meantime, the Emerging Curators Group have started work on developing content for the next Newsletter, due to be issued in October under collaborative 2
editorship. This promises to be another important step in opening up BAN’s core questions – not just about what British art is, or what curating is, but even more fundamentally who gets to be a curator, and how. Martin Myrone Convenor, British Art Network mmyrone@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
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BAN RESEARCH SOUTH ASIAN MODERNISTS IN REGIONAL COLLECTIONS In February 2020 I visited Birmingham to attend a workshop led by the Post War British Painting in Regional Collections’ research group. Titled “Regionalism, Value and Diversifying Post War British Art”. One of the key questions that the half-day session sought to address was, “what new stories can we tell about our regions and collections?” On the same day, I made a quick visit to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, where I saw Anwar Jalal Shemza’s painting The Wall, 1958, centrally displayed within the gallery dedicated to Modern British art. The two events got me thinking about the presence and representation of Black and South Asian artists in regional collections, and the extent to which exhibitions and publicly accessible collections – civic or otherwise – could be harnessed to tell ‘new’ and ‘diverse’ narratives of Post War British Art. My paper, Absence in Post-War British Painting: South Asian Modernists in Regional Collections, addresses the absence of painters of South Asian origin from dominant narratives of post-war British art, despite their undeniable presence in Britain. Using the exhibition South Asian Modernists 1953-1963, staged at The Whitworth, Manchester, in 2017, and its presentation of FN Souza’s painting, Supper at Emmaus with the Believer and the Sceptic, 1958, held in the collection of The Hepworth Wakefield, as a case study, I argue that this show reframed our knowledge of artistic and curatorial activity in 1950s Britain, while also demonstrating that progressive exhibition making today is not exclusive to London. In my paper I also wanted to highlight the fact that regional collections – in Birmingham, Wakefield, Bradford, and elsewhere have important holdings of work by South Asian artists active in Britain since the 1950s, and that through a particular engagement with those collections, there is the potential to diversify and transform hitherto exclusionary national narratives. Dr Alice Correia is an art historian. Her research examines late twentieth-century British art, with a specific focus on artists of African, Caribbean, and South Asian heritage. She is currently Research Curator at Touchstones Rochdale, and has previously worked at Tate Britain, Government Art Collection and University of Sussex. Here Alice introduces her paper, Absence in Post-War British Painting: South Asian Modernists in Regional Collections published in Midlands Art Papers (Issue 4, 2021) and available here.
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South Asian Modernists 1953–1963, The Whitworth, Manchester 2017. Installation image showing works by (left to right) Akbar Padamsee (Untitled (Disciples in Landscape), 1955, formerly known as Messengers, and Prophet, 1953); Anwar Jalal Shemza (Palace Gate, 1959 and Meeting, 1963), MF Husain (Bullock Cart, 1961) and Tyeb Mehta (Head of a Horse, 1962 and Thrown Bull, 1962). Image: Michael Pollard. Courtesy The Whitworth, University of Manchester and Jhaveri Contemporary.
South Asian Modernists 1953-1963, The Whitworth, Manchester 2017. Installation image showing works by (left to right): FN Souza, The Emperor, 1958; Supper at Emmaus with the Believer and the Sceptic, 1958; and Self Portrait, 1961. Image: Michael Pollard. Courtesy The Whitworth, University of Manchester and Amrita Jhaveri.
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Dr Sophie Hatchwell, co-convenor, Post War Painting in Regional Collections Research Group, adds: The Post War Painting Research Group aims to highlight the ongoing political and aesthetic relevance of regional public collections. We explore the ways in which our understanding of post-war British painting has been shaped by both changes in the art world, and the many social and political shifts and events that occurred after 1945, including the rise of neo-colonialism, and changing attitudes to gender, sexuality and class. From our inaugural year onwards, our events have increasingly focused on narratives of inclusion and exclusion in post-war British art history and regional collections, culminating in our Symposium ‘Absence: Absent from history/absent from the gallery’ (Sept 2020): you can watch the keynotes here. We were delighted to be able to commission Alice’s excellent article to mark this event, and to promote and share some of her significant research in this important field. Alice’s article has been published by Midland Art Papers (Issue 4, 2021), and can be read in full here.
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BAN RESEARCH BRITISH LANDSCAPES Landscape Research Group Co-Leads Jenny Gaschke (Bristol Museum & Art Gallery), Helen Record (Royal Academy of Arts) and Emma Roodhouse (Colchester and Ipswich Museums) reflect on the group’s activities over the last year
Francis Danby, View of Clifton from Leigh Woods, about 1818/20, oil on panel, Bristol Museum & Art Gallery K851
The last year has marked a shift, for professional and private lives. For the Landscape Research Group – and likely for many other research groups – this shift has generated new opportunities but also new challenges... Established in 2017, the Landscape Research Group (LRG) began as a small collective of museum professionals and researchers based largely in regional collections, all with a common passion for British landscape art. The group spent time sharing projects between members in intimate, informal study days, and the subjects were mostly historical, with more traditional approaches to British landscape from the 18th and 19th centuries. Cue the pandemic, and this all changed. Gone were the opportunities for behind-the-scenes visits to members’ organisations, the chances to chat and 7
share research over a cup of coffee. In their place were novel, unexpected and expansive opportunities offered by a transition to the virtual environment. We found that Zoom events enabled us to reach new audiences; to organise focussed, thematic seminars; to hold an increased number and variety of events than ever before. But of course, we have encountered new challenges too. The following are just a few examples of the positive impacts of a Zoom-reliant network, as well as the inherent difficulties. The first tentative forays into the virtual world last summer saw the LRG meeting over Zoom – an online permutation of the in-person coffee-break. A dozen or so faces who were familiar to each other, chatting, updating on exhibitions and research projects. It felt refreshing and opened our eyes to the spontaneous potential of Zoom; no longer did a get-together necessitate the weeks of planning required for group visits to a gallery or museum. This informality and ease of coming together online offered opportunities for novel formats for the group, reflected in our first planned events of the autumn. We held a session, with around 15-20 attendees, where Tate Liverpool curators Darren Pih and Laura Bruni presented their early ideas for a landscape exhibition and invited feedback. This ‘critique circle’ workshop was made possible by members being able to meet at the click of a button. We hope this may become a regular feature of our programme, facilitated by our Zoom literacy. The pandemic also opened new avenues to support emerging artists and creatives. With funds left unused due to cancelled events, we were able to stage an open call for a commission for a creative response to the theme of ‘Landscape in Lockdown’. The two selected proposals, completed in November 2020, were a wonderful mixed-media installation and short film by artist and curator Siobhan McLaughlin – also a member of BAN’s Emerging Curators Group – and a reflective thought-piece by curator Kate Banner on her experiences of curating during lockdown at Worcester Museums. A real highlight of our programme, in December we hosted an informal commission presentation evening, with both Kate and Siobhan sharing their works and opening out into a wider chat among those present – with mulled wine in hand. This relaxed get-together, celebrating art and creativity, and sharing experiences of resilience during isolation, was a product of the pandemic, and allowed the research group to bridge professional and personal relationships. We have another call for commissions this year, see p. 13, below. As we gained Zoom confidence, we turned our attention to the larger-scale, more academic-style seminars that formed the backbone of our programming. Mapping these out at the start of the funding year enabled us to target specific themes that were topical and of specific interest to our members. We were able to bring together specialist speakers from a range of backgrounds and geographical 8
locations, neither of which had been imaginable before the onset of virtual. Our three seminars covered the topics of the power and politics of mapping the landscape; landscape art and wellbeing; and most recently, landscape art and the environmental emergency. Virtual programming enabled us to weave together events featuring individuals beyond our normal circles, hearing from artists, poets, academics and social justice activists, including some from overseas. These online seminars also reached new audiences, opening up the research group. Speakers’ wide-ranging connections allowed us to tap into new interest
Lisa Temple Cox, Excavation IV: Probably Roman (2015). © the artist
groups resulting in subscribers joining the group from academic cartographic circles and medical practitioners to environmental activists. The virtual format also allowed those usually unable to travel to in-person events to remain connected; heart-warming feedback from members with child-care responsibilities and difficulties with mobility fuelled our desire to make these events as accessible as possible. For the first time, online marketing platforms such as Eventbrite and the ease of passing on Zoom links meant that we had attendees to events that we had never met before, a true example of the access and expansive potential of virtual. There have also been opportunities to document our seminars through Zoom recordings and publish talks online for the first time. This presented a chance to learn more about how to give the group an online presence and the intricacies of subtitling. 9
Additionally, we have dipped our toes into blended events, as a first step towards re-entering the face-to-face world. In May, we held a virtual visit to Leeds Art Gallery where curator Dr Laura Claveria allowed us privileged access to the exhibits, from the comfort of our homes. This allowed us to imagine a way forward that combines Zoom attendance with physical presence. We will continue to use blended Zoom events to bring exhibitions to a wider audience, and plan to hold an online tour of the Bristol School of Artists exhibition at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux later in the summer. The shift to Zoom has not been without its challenges, however. At the beginning of the year, when memories of in-person gatherings were still fresh, our Zoom meetings were conversational, with each member actively participating and sharing a sense of co-ownership and involvement in the session. However, as we hosted our more formal seminars over the year, cameras were turned off, the discussions became quieter and Q&A sessions were largely between us, the group leads, and those delivering their presentations. A stark distinction emerged between speakers and audience. Perhaps this was an unavoidable symptom of the delineated event format of presentations followed by Q&A. Or it may be a result of the time that has passed between members coming together in person – leading to an unfamiliarity and justified nervousness of speaking in front of larger groups. Or maybe this is just reflective of our attendees absorbing fascinating talks without needing to ask questions. Whatever the cause, this detachment between hosts and attendees has caused us to adapt. We are now prepared for a lack of audience questions and have adjusted the event schedules, becoming more flexible to respond to the level of (dis-)engagement on the day. Unfortunately, as part of this, we feel we have lost an element of personal contact with our group members, something that was so precious at the early stages of the pandemic. The expanded research group has also made it more difficult to determine the target audience of our events; what tone to pitch; what topics to include. In the past it was easy to choose topics that we knew were relevant and of interest to our members who had many areas of research in common and were involved in comparable projects. With a much larger mailing list, the LRG is now a network with a wonderful richness and variety of specialisms and interests. This does however make it difficult to programme events that strike a balance between appealing to a breadth of members, but also being specific enough to offer new insights and depths. If we are now reaching audiences outside the professional arts and museum sector (which can be enriching through cross-disciplinary expertise), how do we make our events inclusive for those without cultural-sector backgrounds but also retain interest for our original museum-based members? This is a question that we are still exploring, and it would be very helpful to hear 10
John Nash RA,The Barn, Wormingford(1954) © The Artist's Estate. © Photo: Royal Academy of Arts, London.
if other research groups have experienced similar dilemmas. In some ways, it seems as if the Landscape Research Group is increasingly a Landscape Research Network, with tendrils that reach into various spheres, but without the central hub that has existed in previous years. Instead, we as coleads sometimes feel we are the core of the research group, hosting events for guest attendees, rather than retaining a corpus of members who feel a co-ownership of the group. If we are successful in our application, next year presents another opportunity to navigate the challenges and potential of online events – with the added possibility of an in-person element. Perhaps a solution to some of the difficulties that we have outlined here is to embrace the flexibility afforded by Zoom and virtual connections, cultivating larger, more varied audiences while also offering opportunities for specific research focuses and informal chats. This may mean moving away from specific art historical concerns and broadening our discussions to how landscape art across time speaks to topical issues in society, such as inclusivity, the climate crisis and wellbeing. The past year has changed many things for the Landscape Research Group and our approach as its leaders. One certainty is that the LRG has continued to provide connections between individuals with a shared passion for exploring the place of landscape art in society today. For us as co-leads, it has given a focus and a motivation beyond the uncertainties of our everyday work. We have been able to grow and reach new audiences, something we can take forward to expand conversations and deepen understandings around the place of British landscape art today. To catch up on the Landscape Research Group’s seminars from the last year, please visit the Colchester & Ipswich Museums’ YouTube channel, here.
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Dr Jenny Gaschke is Curator of Art pre-1900 at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery. Jenny’s specialisms are European landscape painting 1600–1900 and the Bristol School. She has published catalogues, monographs and articles on a wide range of subjects such as art and travel, Edward Lear in Egypt and the Bristol School’s attitude to nature.
Helen Record is Assistant Curator of Collections at the Royal Academy. Her interest in landscape lies predominantly in 20th-century painting and printmaking, in particular the Great Bardfield artists and John Nash and his contemporaries. She is also fascinated by the potential of landscape art to address issues in contemporary society such as wellbeing, social cohesion and the environmental crisis.
Emma Roodhouse is Art Collections & Learning Curator at Colchester and Ipswich Museums Service and freelance researcher. She is currently working on a research project into Constable’s early Suffolk years and the artists, patrons and supporters he associated with in the area, supported by a research grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.
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CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS LANDSCAPE RESEARCH GROUP The British Art Network’s Landscape Research Group would like to invite a response to the subject of landscape art and the environmental emergency, following on from our recent webinar on the subject. As the UK is due to host the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference, also known as COP26, in Glasgow later this year, the issue of environmental changes becomes ever more urgent. The submission could be a written response of up to 2000 words (in the form of an article, thought-piece, poem or other creative response), an image-based work, a short film or audio piece up to 5 minutes in length. Potential themes or starting points could include: • • • • • •
The living landscape and art What impact can art have on the climate crisis Collecting and conserving the landscape through art Engaging with historic landscape collections and the environment Art activism and the climate crisis Post-lockdown landscape
Please send a 150 word or 1-minute video/audio proposal and short biography to emma.roodhouse@colchester.gov.uk by 15th August 2021. We have a total budget of £800 to put towards fees for this commission. We may commission more than one response, based on the following staggered fee structure: • • •
Artist response (video, audio, image based): £600 - £80 Essay-based response (freelancer or not in employment): £400 Essay-based response (submitted by someone with full-time salary):
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INTERVIEW DAVID SOLKIN ON ART HISTORY, AESTHETIC PLEASURE AND CURATING – AND CHANGING TIMES FOR BRITISH ART STUDIES Professor David Solkin is a leading authority on the history of British art. He joined The Courtauld Institute of Art in 1986, where he was Walter H. Annenberg Professor of the History of Art and Dean and Deputy Director, retiring in 2016. His extensive publications include: Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven & London, Yale University Press 1993); Painting out of the Ordinary: Modernity and the Art of Everyday Life in Early NineteenthCentury Britain (New Haven & London, Yale University Press 2008); and Art in Britain 1660-1815 (New Haven & London, Yale/Pelican History of Art series, 2015), which is being reprinted in 2021. His curatorial work has included the major exhibitions Richard Wilson: The Landscape of Reaction (Tate Gallery, 1982-3), Art on the Line: The Royal Academy Exhibitions at Somerset House 1780-1836 (Courtauld Institute Gallery, 2001-2). Turner and the Masters (Tate Britain, 2009-10), and Gainsborough’s Family Album (National Portrait Gallery, 2018-19). Here in conversation with BAN Convenor Martin Myrone he reflects on the relationship between academic art history and curating, and the changing nature of British art studies over the last four decades. Your working life was based in university settings, firstly at the University of British Columbia and then from 1986 at the Courtauld. But your career has been regularly punctuated by curatorial work on exhibitions. As an academic art historian, what role have these exhibition projects played for you? What do you see as the ideal relationship between academic art history and curatorial practice? The first answer to this question that springs to mind is that working on exhibitions has added an invaluable dimension of pleasure to my professional life. Conceiving an original project for a display, collaborating with curators and other museum-based professionals, writing in an accessible manner for a mixed lay and specialist audience, seeing an abstract concept assume concrete form, and then gleaning unexpected lessons from the results – these are just some components of the experience that have brought me joy, albeit in some instances (especially Art on the Line) more than others (Richard Wilson would have made more sense as a book). Amongst many other things, the Wilson show 14
Richard Wilson, The Thames near Marble Hill, Twickenham, c.1762. Tate
taught me to appreciate the differences between academic art history and curatorial practice: that if I wished to use the exhibition as a means of enlightening and entertaining its visitors, it was the works of art and their arrangement, and not the catalogue or the texts on the walls, that should be charged with all the heavy lifting. I still take great pride in the fact that the principal galleries in Art on the Line had no text panels - not even so much as a single label (though a free audioguide was available) – and that the central points of Turner and the Masters could be gleaned from looking at the pictures alone. For me these two shows and Gainsborough’s Family Album embodied the ideal relationship between the academy and the museum, inasmuch as they were conceived first and foremost as effective (and appealing) exhibitions, based on quite simple ideas that were easy to communicate; most of the scholarly research came second, and was undertaken with the demands of the exhibition format (including the catalogue and its readerships) in mind. The best exhibitions, it has always seemed to me, should advance our understanding of their subjects and at the same time seek to empower visitors, no matter how well-informed, to draw their own conclusions from the experience. A characteristic of several of these shows has been their ‘experiential’ emphasis, with Art on the Line immersing visitors in a restaging of historic Academy exhibitions, and Turner and the Masters confronting viewers very immediately with works by Turner and Old Masters juxtaposed in pairs. While these shows have been guided by definite art-historical theses, would it be fair to suggest that as experiences the exhibitions have involved an element of unpredictability? Can exhibitions provide ways of understanding historic art, that books or lectures can’t? The answer to each of these questions is an emphatic yes. For me the most exciting outcomes of the two exhibitions you mention have been provided by the unexpected insights that struck me and my colleagues after the works had been installed. Until Art on the Line became a reality, no one had truly understood how the Great Room of Somerset House had functioned as the main arena for the Royal Academy’s annual displays. It was only once we had placed the pictures on the walls – and especially on the temporary walls that were constructed, as originally, at an angle between ‘the line’ and the coving – that we were able to appreciate how well the space worked for the viewer, and how exhibiting 15
P.A. Martini after J.H. Ramberg, Exhibition of Royal Academy, 1787, Etching, Yale Center for British Art, B1977.14.12779
artists had exploited the particular opportunities offered to them by the space. This was only one of many surprises that the show produced. In the case of Turner and the Masters, the expectations created by the juxtaposition of images in books or on screens were more often than not modified, in certain cases quite radically, when one encountered the actual objects displayed next to one another. It was only when I saw the show, and had a chance to think through its implications, that I realised Turner’s engagements with the artists of the past whose styles he strove to emulate was less in the nature of a competition, and more a labour of love. So yes, absolutely, exhibitions are capable of illuminating parts of art history that neither books nor lectures can reach. You have been associated with the so-called ‘New Art History’ of the 1970s and 1980s, with its overt political and critical dimensions, and you have readily identified as a social historian of art. Such commitments have sometimes been posited as antithetical to, or at the very least distracting from, aesthetic enjoyment– most infamously in the rabid responses of the right-wing press to the Richard Wilson show in 1982. With the task of exhibition-making in mind, how would you characterise the role of aesthetic pleasure in relation to the social history of art? Has your thinking on that front changed? As anyone appreciates who knows me well, I take enormous pleasure from works of art, which I have been collecting avidly for many years. Have I ever taken any less delight from the Richard Wilsons that I own (and those that I do not) because I have subjected his work to an ideology critique? Not one whit. Nor would I wish to deny aesthetic enjoyment to the visitors to any of the exhibitions that I have curated. But I feel that exhibitions must do more than offer spectacles of visual delight: that the best exhibitions should also provide food for thinking critically about the works on view, both as individual objects and as the building blocks of a story about wider issues – my preference being for those of a broadly sociohistorical nature (economic matters, or questions of class or gender, for instance). Different visitors will engage with that story to varying degrees, and some not at all, as they choose; but I feel it is the 16
curator’s responsibility to offer her or his audience the opportunity to connect the artworks to the times and places that shaped them, and that they in turn helped to shape. From the outset of my career I have always believed that our minds are capacious and flexible enough to accommodate aesthetic pleasure and intellectual critique to the detriment of neither. Perhaps another way of putting this is that as individual subjects we are all of us full of contradictions. I would certainly not pretend otherwise about myself. A great deal has changed in the field of British art studies since your Richard Wilson show and book in 1982, in terms of the nature of the discipline, narratives of British art and history – and the wider political climate. Arguably, a great deal has changed even in the short time since your major art historical survey Art in Britain 16601815 was published in 2015. As a survey, underpinned by an authoritative sense of the historical narrative, Art in Britain inevitably erects a canon, one quite strongly focussed on familiar artists – from Lely to Turner – and with the exclusions or omissions that involves. How would you defend or explain such canon-making – and would your response have been different in 1982, or even 2015? Richard Wilson is a canonical artist, as is Gainsborough, Turner (not to mention ‘the Masters’), and Henry Fuseli, whose drawings of women are the focus of an exhibition that I’m currently organising for the Courtauld Institute Gallery (opening autumn 2022). So in that respect Art in Britain was nothing new for me. Had I been terribly bothered by the canon and its implications I would never have agreed to write a survey text, since I can’t see how the one can be disentangled from the other (though that statement may simply betray my lack of imagination!). My belief has always been that critical interventions into art history tend to have the most impact when they target the major players; the furore caused by my analysis of Wilson – a backlash that has demonstrated remarkable staying power – is just one of many cases in point. Moreover, in every instance (though there may be the odd exception that escapes me right now), the artists I have dealt with have been of demonstrably historical importance, whether in their own right or as representative of significant developments in the visual culture of their own times. For the Pelican volume, I selected works that I felt were best equipped to demonstrate the full richness of the story I wished to tell about the emergence of a native school of British art; that most of these pictures fell into the established canon did give me some pause for thought, but in the end I decided that what 17
mattered far more was choosing the questions that I wished to address. I didn’t need my reviewers to remind me that the position I have taken on this difficult issue leaves me open to being charged with intellectual (and political) inconsistency. C’est la vie. With 40-plus years of experience in British art studies behind you, and having witnessed and effected so much change within the discipline over that time, what would you say are the key challenges and responsibilities for historians and curators of British art right now? I don’t think it is going too far to say that Black Lives Matter has thrown British art studies, and art history (as both an academic and a curatorial practice) in general, into a state of crisis. Even well before the tragic events of 2020, arguments were being made that the origins of the discipline lay in racialised ways of thinking that remain at art history’s very core; and while I am not competent to assess the merits of that case, surely there is no denying the painful realisation that the discipline to which I have devoted my life has excluded or marginalised people of colour to an unforgiveable degree. Paradoxically, the growing awareness of our obligation as scholars to address issues of slavery and race has to some extent worked to the benefit of British art studies by heightening their relevance, thanks to this nation’s prominent role in the history of modern imperialism. But overcoming the deeply-rooted biases of academic discourse and museum collections is the challenge we now face, and that I suspect will take the work of generations to overcome.
J.M.W. Turner, Dido Building Carthage: Or, the Rise of the Carthaginian Empire, exh. 1815. National Gallery of Art, London
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CONTACTING BAN For comments, suggestions and proposals for the British Art Network Newsletter, and for events or news for our mailings, you can email: BritishArtNews@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk For membership and other enquiries, email: BritishArtNetwork@tate.org.uk You can also contact the British Art Network team directly. With the appointment of Danielle Goulé as Administrator, the British Art Network now comprises a dedicated team of three based at Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre: Martin Myrone, Convenor, British Art Network, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art mmyrone@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk Jessica Juckes, Coordinator, British Art Network, Tate jessica.juckes@tate.org.uk Danielle Goulé, British Art Network Administrator, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art dgoule@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk For more information on the British Art Network and all the Research Groups, including their contact details, visit the new BAN website.
The British Art Network is supported by Tate and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, with additional public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
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