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 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 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 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 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