EXHIBITING BRITISH ART ABROAD

We invited three BAN Members to reflect on their experience of exhibition projects taking British art abroad – their responses ask us to think about art’s role in generating global links and understanding, and how our sense of British art itself might be changed and expanded in the process.

Mark Bills on exhibiting Gainsborough in Germany, the Netherlands and Russia

British national galleries are far more used to international collaborations than their regional counterparts, something which is just as true for galleries internationally. It appears that regional museums are missing a real opportunity to give visitors the prospect of directly experiencing a bigger picture of the art and art history and to share British art with the world. At Gainsborough’s House, the international dimension has always been part of our wider ambition. Until we closed for redevelopment we took Gainsborough into Europe, but now with new galleries of a much larger scale we can also receive reciprocal exhibitions.

Working with galleries in Holland, Germany, and Russia, we loaned our own Gainsborough paintings and drawings to form the basis of exhibitions, supplemented with loans from European collections and national Gainsborough’s Mr and Mrs Andrews on the side of a bus in collections in Britain. In Hamburg (photo: Mark Bills) 2016, Gainsborough in his own words opened at the Rijksmuseum Twenthe in Enschede, in 2018, Thomas Gainsborough, The Modern Landscape was shown at the Hamburger Kunsthalle and from 20192020 Thomas Gainsborough was the great draw in winter at the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. The response surpassed our expectation, and the huge interest clearly demonstrated the appetite for British art, particularly in Moscow where 158,000 people saw Gainsborough in three months.

There was a positive sense, real or imagined, of Britishness that managed to rise above any of the ill-feeling created by Brexit. Whilst our paintings were in Holland, we filled a room at Gainsborough’s House with Dutch 17th century landscapes, so influential on the young Gainsborough, as part of a reciprocal loan. For any larger scale collaborations, we are having to wait until the £10 million capital project at Gainsborough’s House is completed and opens in late summer this year.

Exterior of the new development at Gainsborough’s House, architect: ZMMA

The opening exhibition was to be French Nineteenth Century Landscapes from the exceptional collection at the Pushkin in Moscow. The war in Ukraine has ended this possibility and we had immediately to look again at what we might exhibit in its place. Not wishing to curb our international aspirations we are instead looking to show an exhibition of Flemish Art 1880-1930 loaned from Antwerp. This will give a British audience the opportunity to see a fascinating period of art as it was manifest across the channel.

It seems to me that there are huge opportunities for fruitful collaboration internationally and that it is possible for regional collections to collaborate on exhibitions that takes British art outwards. It has enormous possibilities for increasing the interest in British art worldwide and widening our understanding and context of its creation.

Mark Bills is Director, Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury.

Jenny Gaschke on the Bristol School in Bourdeaux - Une saison britannique au temps du Brexit

Presenting and promoting British art in continental Europe is neither new or unusual – at least for national museums and organisations like the British Council. Touring exhibitions naturally reflect developing academic thinking around what British art is and communicate this to audiences across the Channel. But what about exhibitions initiated and curated in the EU; what influence, if any, do they have on the narrative of British art?

In November 2021 Muriel Adrian, Lecturer for visual arts of the Englishspeaking world at the University of Toulouse, published her review of the recent exhibition in Bourdeaux: Absolutely bizarre! Les drôles d’histoires de l’École de Bristol (1800-1840). Her article was aptly titled ‘une saison britannique au temps du Brexit’ . As a contributor to this exhibition my experience of seeing British art presented from a French perspective – with the additional twist of being a German curator of British art in the UK – certainly had Brexit-political as well as art historical dimensions. Furthermore, at the time I was Curator of Art at Bristol Museum & Art Gallery and the majority of loans came from Bristol’s collection; it is therefore fair to say that on multiple levels a regional element also played its part in this international project.

My collaboration on Absolutely bizarre! with Sophie Barthélémy and Sandra Buratti-Hassan from Bordeaux, as well as the Louvre’s senior curator Guillaume Faroult, was at least partly a reaction to the 2016 Brexit referendum. Focussing on over 80 works by a group of 19th century Bristol-based artists frequently overlooked by canonical, cosmopolitan stories of British art, the show publicly communicated a longstanding commitment to cross-channel partnership –with Bordeaux and Bristol twinned as cities for over 70 years. And once the exhibition had opened, the newly appointed British ambassador to France, Menna Rawlings, by officially visiting our display together with Bordeaux’s mayor Pierre Hurmic and the Louvre’s director Laurence des Cars, identified non-metropolitan cultural exchange as one of a diminishing number of softpower tools in the British diplomatic box.

Admittedly, Bordeaux is one of France’s main repositories of British art outside Paris. The Musée des Beaux-Arts’ collection includes works by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence and John Martin. Audiences in Bordeaux are to a degree primed to view British art and identify its connections and differences with French painting, yet probably less affected by the hierarchical distinction between London and the regions often made within British art history.

Under the academic leadership of Guillaume Faroult, the exhibition in Bordeaux certainly treated the ‘Bristol school’ not as a derivative of the art produced by painters like Turner, Constable and others in London and the South East, but as their equal. The French critical reception proved this approach right: Le Monde included the display in its listing of the top exhibitions to see in the summer of 2021.

Gallery talk at Absolutely bizarre!, Musée des Beaux Arts, Bourdeaux. Photo: TS-mairie de bordeaux

From the beginning, Bordeaux’s curatorial team hoped the exhibition would also impact on the perception of the Bristol School back in the UK. Typically for the COVID-19 era, this happened through online engagement rather than travel: Bristol’s annual Festival of Ideas (https://www.bristolideas.co.uk/) and the British Art Network’s Landscape Research Group hosted live conversations and tours of the display with Sandra Buratti-Hassan. Both highlighted to British audiences the French repositioning of the Bristol School within the wider context of 19th century art, in genre, portrait, landscape and even history painting.

Most Bristol School artists enjoyed national success in their lifetime, but until recently these artists were seen as a regional responsibility. Ironically it has taken a French perspective on British art to achieve the (alleged) Brexit agenda of levelling up the (artistic) regions, and an EU-initiated show to rewrite the narrative.

Jenny Gaschke is Senior Curator, Paintings & Drawings at Victoria and Albert Museum, and was formerly Fine Art Curator at Bristol Museum and Art Gallery

Sophia Yadong Hao - Curating the Untimely: Reflections on CURRENT|不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland

Between 2015 and 2021, CURRENT|不合时宜: Contemporary Art from Scotland was a four-phase contemporary art exhibition and event programme, which showcased for the first time in China the distinctiveness of contemporary art made in Scotland.

Foregrounding the grass-roots spirit of contemporary art made in Scotland and specifically its social and political dimension, CURRENT opened a conversation on the experience of 'the contemporary' in two very different locales and provided a distinctive take on the recent histories, current conditions and importantly the experimental and collaborative ethos that underpins contemporary art practices in Scotland.

Delivering six solo and group exhibitions, three Artists and Writers’ Residencies, two screening programmes and international forums in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Wuhan, CURRENT featured over 40 artists’ works. Included in the programme were internationally esteemed artists and Turner Prize nominees Bruce McLean, Rosalind Nashashibi, Hardeep Pandhal, Ross Sinclair, Lucy Skaer, Corin Sworn, Poster Club (an artists’ collective initiated by artists including Ciara Phillips and Nicolas Party) alongside early and mid-career artists.

Initiated in 2014 with Wang Nanming, then Head of Programme at the Shanghai Himalayas Art Museum, CURRENT was curated and realised by the team I led at Cooper Gallery (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee). Over seven years in collaboration with leading contemporary art organisations in four Chinese cities and organised in partnership with the British Council, CURRENT was a strategic investigation of the critical and pragmatic issues at stake in ‘touring’ contemporary art. The unprecedented challenges brought upon the programme by the pandemic of 2020 also tested the remarkable resilience and solidarity developed and sustained through the projects genuinely collaborative way of working between individuals and organisations

>>FFWD: Artist’s Moving Image from Scotland, exhibition installation, CURRENT Phase Two, Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum, 2016. Works featured (L to R): Lyndsay Mann, An Order of the Outside (2016), Tom Varley, Violence. Silence. (2013), Adam Lewis Jacob, Can’t See the trees for the wood (2015) and Corin Sworn, Faktura (2008). Photo: Shanghai Minsheng Art Museum.

Navigating, negotiating and traversing transnational space immediately raised a question of method. Not solely of logistics, but more substantially it was a matter of ethics, of how to critically engage with the structures; economic, legal and state based, that underscore any transnational cultural project.

Bruce McLean, I Want My Crown, 2013, film installation with audience interaction, CURRENT Phase Three, Shanghai Himalayas Museum, 2017. Photo: Wang Lin.

To provide a productive model for cultural collaborations between China and Scotland, it was decided at an early stage that CURRENT had to be a long-term undertaking if it was to be capable of building and sustaining networks and opportunities for artists, curators and organisations. In retrospect the longevity of CURRENT also enabled the development of an extended audience, which meaningfully expanded the impact of the project.

CURRENT drew its conceptual coordinates from Roland Barthes’ succinct aphorism which stated that “The contemporary is the untimely”. Indeed the Chinese title of the programme is ‘untimely’, which expanded into an intense debate amongst audiences and curators in China immediately after the opening of the first phase of the programme.

Understanding Barthes’ unsettling statement to indicate that this moment, ‘the contemporary’, is fundamentally out of sync with the plurality of pasts and futures that form its horizons, CURRENT took issue with the fictions, politics and gestures that desire to characterise and thus place limits on how ‘the contemporary’ is made visible and more importantly legible. Programme link: https://www.dundee.ac.uk/cooper-gallery/internationalprojects

Sophia Yadong Hao is Director & Principal Curator of Cooper Gallery, DJCAD, University of Dundee and a member of the British Art Network Steering Group