British Art News: Newsletter of the British Art Network, August 2021

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