Exploring the Exhibition O c tob er 2016 / No. 4 p aul -mellon -c e nt re.a c .uk
PMC Staff Director of Studies Mark Hallett Deputy Director for Grants and Publications Martin Postle Deputy Director for Finance and Administration Sarah Ruddick Deputy Director for Research Sarah Victoria Turner Librarian Emma Floyd Archivist and Records Manager Charlotte Brunskill Archives and Library Assistant Frankie Drummond Charig Assistant Archivist and Records Manager Jenny Hill Cataloguer: Auction Catalogues Mary Peskett Smith Digital Manager Tom Scutt Events Manager Ella Fleming Office Manager Suzannah Pearson Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Finance Officer Barbara Ruddick Editor Emily Lees Editor Baillie Card Academic Activities Assistant Harriet Fisher Director’s Assistant & Office Manager Bryony Botwright Rance Receptionist Stephen O’Toole Buildings Officer Harry Smith PMC Fellow Hana Leaper Brian Allen Fellow Jessica Feather
Senior Research Fellows, Special Projects Hugh Belsey Elizabeth Einberg Advisory Council Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Alixe Bovey, Courtauld Institute of Art Christopher Breward, University of Edinburgh David Peters Corbett, University of East Anglia Anthony Geraghty, University of York Michael Hatt, University of Warwick Richard Marks, Art Historian and Curator Martin Myrone, Tate Britain Andrew Saint, English Heritage MaryAnne Stevens, Art Historian and Curator Shearer West, University of Sheffield Alison Yarrington, Loughborough University Board of Governors Peter Salovey, President of Yale University Ben Polak, Provost for Yale University Amy Meyers, Director of Yale Center for British Art Stephen Murphy, Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Yale University Design Cultureshock Media Contact us Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA United Kingdom T: 020 7580 0311 F: 020 7636 6730 www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Contents October 2016 – No.4
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Director’s Note The Great Spectacle A History of the Summer Exhibition in 250 chapters Collecting and Display Conference Report: London Asia Fellowships & Grants: The Educational Programme Grant Fellowships & Grants: Symposium – Generation Painting Fellowships & Grants: Sargentology Raising the Profile of the Research Collections “The Inspection of the Curious” Publications Report The First Anniversary of British Art Studies AA Women and Architecture in Context 1917–2017 PMC Events Calendar PMC Profile: Elizabeth Einberg and the Hogarth Catalogue YCBA Events Calendar
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Director’s Note
In a rapidly changing scholarly world, the issue of publishing is becoming an increasingly complex and challenging one. Here at the PMC, we are always thinking about how we best fulfil our mission of publishing the highest quality scholarship on British art and architecture. On the one hand, we are proud to reaffirm our long-standing commitment to producing rigorously edited and beautifully designed books and catalogues raisonnés, published in partnership with our colleagues at Yale University Press. For many years, we have worked especially closely with two great editors at the Press, Gillian Malpass and Sally Salvesen. Following their departure from YUP this summer, I would like to wish both Gillian and Sally our heartfelt thanks for all their wonderful collaborations with us. Similarly, following her retirement this September, we wish our own Guilland Sutherland—who has worked so brilliantly on so many of our publishing projects—the very best in the future. We look forward to maintaining Gillian, Sally, and Guilland’s collective legacy, and to publishing many more stimulating and beautiful books and catalogues in the future (for our newest examples, see pages 24–25). At the same time, the PMC is at the forefront of developments in the area of online scholarly publications. As Tom Scutt reports on page 26, our journal, British Art Studies, which we co-publish with the Yale Center for British Art, has now reached its first anniversary, and has already attracted many thousands of readers—indeed, it has been visited by more than 16,000 individual users over the past year! We are also pleased to have published two well-received online catalogues of individual artist’s works over the past couple of years, and anticipate that these catalogues—devoted to the artists Richard Wilson and Francis Towne—will be followed by many others.
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As well as these initiatives, we are currently developing plans for other kinds of online publication, beginning with a new year-by-year history of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, which our Allen Fellow, Jessica Feather, writes about on page 8. This will take the form of an unfolding illustrated art-historical chronicle that will deal with each and every RA summer exhibition since 1769 in turn, and that will be published in the run-up to a major exhibition on the subject at the Royal Academy that I am co-curating with my colleague Sarah Turner (for which, see page 4). Our online chronicle will be freely available, and tied to a major digitisation programme—undertaken with colleagues at the Royal Academy—that is designed to make the Academy’s historic summer exhibition catalogues searchable online. We are very excited about the potential of this and other such online projects to bring original art-historical writing and important scholarly resources to the widest possible audiences. We see them as working in tandem with the other kinds of publication we support and produce, and as complementing the world-class scholarship that continues to find expression in our books and catalogues. Mark Hallett Director of Studies
Above: Books in the Paul Mellon Centre Library Opposite: Mark Hallett Both Rory Lindsay Photography
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The Great Spectacle Two art historians at the Mellon Centre—Mark Hallett and Sarah Turner—are curating a major exhibition, to be held in 2018, on the history of the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. Here, they outline their plans for the show
Academicians standing in front of Laura Knight’s oil Lamorna Birch and his Daughters before the 1934 Summer Exhibition at the Royal AcademyFrom left to right: Frederick William Elwell, Harold Knight, Mark Fisher, Sydney Lee, Sir Frank Short, Richard Jack, Sir David Young Cameron and Dame Laura Knight© Royal Academy of Arts, London
The Royal Academy’s summer exhibition is the world’s longest running annual display of contemporary art. Ever since 1769, and at a succession of locations ranging from Pall Mall to Piccadilly, the Academy’s exhibition rooms have been crowded for some two months each year with hundreds of paintings and sculptures produced by many of Britain’s leading artists. Over the last two hundred and fifty years, these spectacular displays of art—dominated by what has become a famously crowded and collagelike arrangement of pictures across the Academy’s walls—have provided thousands of artists with a crucial form of competition, inspiration, and publicity, and captured the interest of millions of visitors. As well as expressing the Academy’s own ambitions and achievements, these exhibitions have played a central role within London’s and the nation’s art world. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, they provided the main forum within which Britain’s artists could showcase their individual practice and compete with their rivals for popular and critical acclaim. Today, even as they continue to feature the works of many distinguished painters and sculptors, they are just as famous for providing hitherto unknown, sometimes amateur practitioners with the opportunity of seeing their creations hanging alongside the works of their more celebrated peers. These exhibitions thus offer a unique prism through which to view the history of the Royal Academy itself, and of modern British painting and sculpture more generally. Our exhibition, which has the working title, The Great Spectacle: The Royal Academy and its Summer Exhibitions, 1769–2017, is intended to tell the story of these displays, and in doing so to provide an innovative, illuminating, and visually stunning means of commemorating the
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Academy’s first 250 years. Taking the form of a sequence of interlinked gallery displays that will recreate or explore a series of important moments in the history of the Academy and its shows, The Great Spectacle will dramatise the excitement, variety, and richness of the summer exhibitions and offer visitors a fascinating, ever-changing journey through British art from the time of Reynolds and Gainsborough to the present. There will be a focus on moments in which the exhibitions made an especially significant impact within the British and European art world, and on pictures that enjoyed particular success or failure within the exhibition space. The displays in each gallery will be chosen to ensure an elegant, chronological rhythm across the exhibition as a whole: successive rooms will move forward in time, bringing the visitor right up to the present. This arrangement will also introduce a distinctively generational dynamic into the exhibition, encouraging visitors to appreciate how the histories of the Academy displays, and of British art, have been shaped by the continual interplay between the ambitions, perspectives, and anxieties of succeeding generations of artists and audiences.
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Above: Galleries of the 2014 Summer Exhibition, © Royal Academy of Arts, London; Photographer: John Bodkin/DawkinsColour Opposite: Poster for the 1975 Summer Exhibition, designed by Peter Blake © Royal Academy of Arts, London
Carefully considered loans will ensure that visitors gain a thrilling sense of how, from their beginnings, the summer exhibitions—even as they have dramatically changed in character over the years—have enveloped the spectator in a spectacular visual experience that is quite unlike any other. Through the use of digital and audio resources, display cases, and a vibrant use of graphic design, visitors will also be provided with the means to learn more about how the summer exhibitions have been created, shaped, and consumed. The Great Spectacle will explore the workings of the juries that determine the contents of each year’s show and the hanging committees that give them such a distinctive visual character. It will recover the rich seam of art criticism—sometimes celebratory, sometimes vituperative—that has been stimulated by the summer displays ever since they began. Finally, it will dramatise the extent to which the Academy displays have always been an important arena of social as well as aesthetic exchange, in which visitors have often been as interested in casting their eyes over the assembled crowds as in looking at the paintings and sculptures scattered across the walls and floors. The exhibition, which is due to open in June 2018, and which will be accompanied by a scholarly catalogue and an online chronicle (for which, see Jessica Feather’s Spotlight feature following this article), will occupy a run of ten gallery rooms at the Royal Academy. Furthermore, visitors to the display will have the opportunity of moving directly from The Great Spectacle into the 2018 Summer Exhibition itself, thereby bringing the story full circle.
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A History of the Summer Exhibition in 250 chapters Jessica Feather, Allen Fellow at the Paul Mellon Centre, reports upon a new online project that complements The Great Spectacle exhibition The team at the Paul Mellon Centre is planning to develop an extensive, multiauthored online chronicle of the RA Summer Exhibition’s history. This will take the form of a series of 250 short, illustrated texts—of around 1,000 words each—that will focus on every individual exhibition in turn, beginning with the first display held in 1769. Featuring a wide range of scholarly and critical voices, and telling a multitude of stories about the exhibition and its histories, the chronicle is to be developed in tandem with an ambitious digitisation programme that will place historic and contemporary summer exhibition catalogues online. This project is designed to offer scholars, students, and exhibition visitors an intellectually ambitious and extremely lively
online resource for research and learning, long after The Great Spectacle exhibition itself closes. The online format will allow for the presentation of sound recordings and film alongside more traditional visual and textual materials, providing a rich, multimedia narrative of the Academy’s summer displays. The online presentation also means that although the essential structure of the publication will take the form of a linear, chronological narrative, there will also be the opportunity to make lateral connections across individual chapters by “tagging” essays and art works with particular key-words and themes. This will be an extremely exciting way for the user to make sophisticated and creative links between the exhibitions of different periods.
The 163rd Summer Exhibition, 1931: Sending in Day © Royal Academy of Arts, London
Art in the British Country House
Collecting and Display Martin Postle Since I reported in the previous PMC Notes on our country-house research project, now titled Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display, there have been a number of new developments, not least the refinement of the parameters within which we will be working. We have decided that the project will focus in particular on two closely related issues: the formation, character, and function of country-house art collection, and the conventions, development, and dynamics of pictorial and sculptural display within the country house. In order to address these issues, our project will focus upon a series of carefully selected houses, which will act as case studies. To date we have selected three houses: Castle Howard, Yorkshire; Petworth House, West Sussex; and Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire. In each case study we will aim to work closely with academics, curators, and house owners, to uncover untold stories and explore new avenues for research.
The Brown Parlour, Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire
As an integral part of this project, the Centre is organising a series of conferences designed to showcase new research in this area. The first conference will take place on Friday, 7 October 2016 at the Paul Mellon Centre. To date, the following speakers are confirmed: Adriano Aymonino, Emily Burns, Joan Coutu, Susan Gordon, Peter Kerber, Andrew Loukes, Caroline McCaffrey-Howarth, Nicola Pickering, and Amelia Smith. Please visit our website for the full programme. If you are involved in research projects related to Country-House Studies and would like to submit details of any such projects or research activities, please contact me directly at mpostle@paulmellon-centre.ac.uk.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing
1900–Now
Conference report by Sarah Turner At the end of June, the Paul Mellon Centre hosted art historians, critics, artists, and curators from Asia, Europe, and the United States to explore the ways in which exhibitions have provided challenging and provocative sites through which to think about artistic exchanges and the twoway traffic between Britain and South Asia. With the Bhupen Khakhar exhibition included in the opening suite of shows at the newly expanded Tate Modern and a growing body of research exploring the cultural connections between the art of South Asia and Britain, this is a timely topic. The response we had to the event underlined this further and resulted in us moving it out of the Paul Mellon Centre into spaces that could accommodate nearly 120 delegates. We began on Thursday, 30 June, with a panel of five speakers who had organised, or been involved with, recent exhibitions. These included the art critic Geeta Kapur reflecting on her involvement in the Festival of India and the associated exhibition at the Royal Academy, and, more recently, Century City at Tate Modern in 2001. The other members of this panel were Deepak Ananth, Iwona Blazwick, David Elliott, and Sharmini Pereira. Generously sharing memories and reflections on their personal involvement in making such exhibitions happen, the speakers in the Curatorial Panel also framed their
The public panel discussing Bhupen Khakhar at the Tate Modern
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
responses in relation to the wider concerns of the conference, which included issues of mobility, display and nationality. Over the next two days, a series of research papers and written responses were presented as part of panels on “Crafting Practice”, “Institutional Histories”, “Competing Modernities”, “Exhibition Circuits/Networks of Display”, and “Other Stories”. Discussion panels interrogated the challenges of writing exhibition histories and the methodological issues at stake in using the exhibition as an art historical tool. Full details of all the speakers and their papers, as well as the conference organising committee, can be found online: www.paulmellon-centre.ac.uk/media/_file/events/ showing-telling-seeing-conferenceprogramme-3.pdf. A recording of the event will also be made available on the Paul Mellon Centre’s website.
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On the third day of the conference, delegates visited exhibitions and discussed them in two locations. The first was at Parasol Unit where the artist Rana Begum gave us a tour of her exhibition The Space Between. Then we moved to Tate Modern for a public panel focusing on the work of the Indian artist Bhupen Khakhar, organised by the PMC in collaboration with Tate Modern. This conference was the first event of London, Asia, a collaborative project organised by the Paul Mellon Centre and Asia Art Archive. This project posits London as a crucial yet under-explored site in the construction of art-historical narratives in Asia, and examines its influence through the vehicles of exhibitions, patronage, art writing, and art education. London, Asia will also reflect on the ways in which the growing field of modern and contemporary art history in Asia intersects with existing histories of British art. We are not proposing a comparative framework, but rather encouraging new perspectives on the entanglements, historic and contemporary, between “London” and “Asia”. Future events will soon be announced via the PMC’s website and social media channels.
Jayashree Chakravarty, exhibition view of Personal Space (2003). Courtesy of Geeta Kapur and Jayashree Chakravarty. From Another Life: The Digitised Personal Archive of Geeta Kapur and Vivan Sundaram at Asia Art Archive
Fellowship and Grants
The Educational Programme Grant Mary Peskett Smith There are only two awards within our grants programme which we offer twice a year, in both Spring and Autumn. One is the very popular Research Support Grant, for sums of up to £2,000 to help individuals with specific research costs such as travel and accommodation. The other award offered twice-yearly, the Educational Programme Grant, attracts increasing numbers of applications every round. The Educational Programme Grant is an award offered to institutions—typically universities, museums and galleries—to support the costs of scholarly conferences, workshops and seminars. Institutions may apply for up to £3,000, although often they apply for lesser amounts, to cover such expenses as subsidised places for students, catering
costs or the printing of conference material. Downing College was the recipient of an award in October 2015 for a symposium entitled Generation Painting: Abstraction and British Art, 1955–65, which took place in March 2016. The University of York was successful in their application for an Educational Programme Grant in March 2016 and their two-day conference on Sargentology: New Perspectives on the Works of John Singer Sargent was held in April this year. The following reports from Rachel Rose Smith, Curator of the Heong Gallery at Downing College and Emily Moore, PhD Candidate at the University of York, highlight the importance of these awards in terms of encouraging wider research networks and supporting new scholarship.
Roger Hilton, January 1962 (tall white) installed at the ‘Generation Painting 1955–65: British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness’ exhibition at the Heong Gallery
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Symposium
Generation Painting
Rachel Rose Smith, Curator of the Heong Gallery at Downing College, reports on the Generation Painting symposium which took place in March and was sponsored by a Paul Mellon Centre Educational Programme Grant
Generation Painting: Abstraction and British Art, 1955–65 was a one-day symposium hosted by the Heong Gallery at Downing College and the Department of History of Art, both of the University of Cambridge. Plans began during a conversation with Sam Rose about the exchanges, continuations, and developments between British art in the postwar 1950s and the “swinging ’60s”. An open call for papers asked for this transition to be probed through the shifting uses and meanings of “abstraction”, as inspired by the Heong Gallery’s first exhibition, Generation Painting 1955–65: British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness (6 February–22 May 2016). Thanks to an Educational Programme Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, over one hundred student, academic, and public attendees were able to come together. The day began with transatlantic histories, starting with a long absorbing look, led by Martin Hammer, at a single portrait by David Hockney in which he “flirts” with modes of abstract art making. Moran Sheleg then suggested how a collaboration between Ad Reinhardt and Bridget Riley sheds light on perceptual abstract painting, and Jo Applin discussed responses to Richard Smith’s “Specific Objects”. The second session featured Beth Williamson on William Johnstone’s practice and a pair of papers by Simon Pierse and Maryam Ohadi-hamadani on “Commonwealth” abstraction and London’s
Richard Smith, Alpine, 1963, installed at the ‘Generation Painting 1955–65: British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness’ exhibition at Heong Gallery
New Vision Centre Gallery. The third session focused on making, featuring Lee Hallman on Frank Auerbach’s so-called “thick” painting, Sam Cornish on the painterliness of lesser-known “New Shape Sculpture” artists and Catherine Spencer on Prunella Clough’s “citational” painting. Chris Stephens (Tate Britain) set his keynote address in the critical contest between Patrick Heron and Lawrence Alloway, who, though “surprisingly close in age, background and areas of interest”, approached abstraction from diverging ideological positions.
Exhibition view of ‘Generation Painting 1955–65: British Art from the Collection of Sir Alan Bowness’ at the Heong Gallery
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The conference programme cover which features: John Singer Sargent, Rushing Brook c. 1904–1911, Metropolitan Museum of Art and is courtesy of Open Access for Scholarly Content
In 1910 Walter Sickert penned “Sargentolatry”, an article that used the language of religious devotion to address the adulation of the British art press toward John Singer Sargent, its affect on other artists, and how this complacency was bad for both critics and artists. Subsequently the article was occasionally misidentified as “Sargentology”, which served to remove the term’s dogmatic tinge and to shift focus to the study of Sargent as a distinct entity. Sargentology: New Perspectives on the Works of John Singer Sargent was a twoday interdisciplinary conference designed to foreground the newest and most interesting research taking place within Sargent scholarship.
Held at the King’s Manor, the University of York, this conference attracted an international audience with many of the over forty delegates travelling from continental Europe and the United States. The speakers consisted of university lecturers, art gallery professionals, postgraduate students, authors, early career researchers, and independent scholars, whose paper topics ranged from classical influences to conservation considerations, from colour and compositional studies to social history, and from musical allusions to contemporary literature. This wide scope and interdisciplinarity allowed for deep readings of images, as many of the same images were referenced in multiple papers, offering rich ground for discussion between scholars. Fresh approaches were explored and oftenneglected elements of Sargent’s oeuvre were brought back to the foreground. Due to the positive delegate response, we are working to keep this group of Sargent scholars connected and are hoping to expand the network. Those interested in joining should email sargentology@gmail.com and can visit www.sargentology.com for more details about the conference proceedings.
Sargentology
New Perspectives on the Works of John Singer Sargent Emily Moore (PhD Candidate, History of Art, University of York) reports on the John Singer Sargent conference that took place in April 2016 and was sponsored by the Paul Mellon Centre’s Educational Programme Grant
John Singer Sargent, Self Portrait, 1906, Uffizi Gallery, Florence
Letter from W&R Chambers Ltd to Daphne Haldin, dated 13 February 1964, from the Daphne Haldin Archive, PMC, London
Raising the Profile of the Research Collections Collections staff have been focusing on ways in which to elevate the online profile of the Research Collections. Frankie Drummond Charig discusses their online visibility and plans to expand this via Wikipedia Making the Research Collections visible to the widest possible audiences is a universal goal of Collections staff, and raising the online profile of the materials we house is a key means of achieving this. The existing library and archive catalogues, accessible on the Centre’s own website, already attract researchers from across the world. Many readers also come to us via the National Archives, Archives Hub, Copac and SUNCAT, to whose union catalogues we submit data. Collections staff are now considering how to draw interest from beyond such platforms. In May, I attended the Art + Feminism wiki-editathon event held at Glasgow School of Art, organised in conjunction with a British Art Studies “Conversation Piece” feature entitled Still Invisible?. The focus of this day was learning to edit Wikipedia so that more profiles of female artists and art historians can be added to this online encyclopedia. On the day, I created a page for Daphne Haldin, whose archive on women artists born before 1850 I have been cataloguing at the Centre. Following the event I was able to employ my newly learned skills to edit the pages that already exist for some of the significant individuals whose archives and library materials are held at the Centre. To this end, the entries for Ellis Waterhouse, Brinsley Ford, Oliver Millar, and Howard Colvin all now include relevant new information.
More recently, I also created a new page for Judy Egerton, whose archive—which is primarily focused on George Stubbs and Joseph Wright of Derby—is also held at the Paul Mellon Centre. By highlighting our collections on Wikipedia, we hope to attract audiences who are perhaps less well acquainted with the Paul Mellon Centre and the field generally. We hope that interested individuals will link from the Wikipedia entries to the more detailed information available on our website. In the future, we plan to extend this work to include editing other relevant Wikipedia subject pages, such as those on the Grand Tour, the English country house and the art dealers M. Knoedler & Co. In a similar vein, plans are also in place to digitise more archive material, and make it visible on the main PMC website as well as through our online archive catalogue.
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“The Inspection of the Curious”
The Country-House Guidebook, c. 1750–1990 Jessica Feather, Allen Fellow, writes about our current Drawing Room Display, which looks at guidebooks and publications created for Blenheim Palace, Burghley, and Knole country houses
Opposite: Detail of front cover of Blenheim Palace by David Green, 1999, first published in 1950 Below left: Frontispiece of Blenheim Palace by David Green Below right: Front cover of Guide to Burghley House Stamford
In 1816, Mary Anne Hibbert was secretly relieved not to be shown around Kedleston by its owner, but instead to be presented with a “book containing an account of all we were to see, the subjects of the pictures and names of the painters: a good plan as it saves many questions and probably gives more accurate information”.1 The “curious” visitors to country houses in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were invariably armed with a guidebook; and it is a practice which still continues today. But what is a country-house guidebook? How have they been used by their readers, and how might we, as art historians and curators, deploy them as source material in
considering the country house? These, and other questions are integral to the Centre’s latest Drawing Room Display, which is based on a selection of the Library’s considerable collection of guidebooks, both from the late eighteenth century up to the present day. Defining the country-house guidebook as a monographic treatment of a particular house, with specific physical, textual, and other characteristics, the display explores the history, contexts, and characteristics of the genre, which developed in the mid1750s on the heels of more generalised travel literature. The guidebook’s development was closely related to a burgeoning interest in architecture and in
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“The Inspection of the Curious”: The Country-House Guidebook, c. 1750–1990
Frontispiece of A Guide to Burghley by Thomas Blore
picture collections, and the display includes both a facsimile version of Colen Campbell’s sumptuous folio-size survey of architectural views of national architecture, Vitruvius Britannicus (1715–25) as well as key examples of the country-house picture catalogue, such as George Scharf’s A Descriptive and Historical Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures at Woburn Abbey (London, 1877). “The Inspection of the Curious” is focused around three large-scale stately homes (Blenheim Palace, Burghley, and Knole), all of which were the subject of numerous different guidebooks and of new editions of these publications. The examples selected aim to demonstrate not just the development of the genre, but the narratives they provided of individual
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houses. The display includes William Mavor’s New Description of Blenheim (London, 1800; first published 1789), with its beautiful hand-tinted engraved map of the gardens and estate, as well as Thomas Blore’s Guide to Burghley House (Stamford, 1815), a new acquisition for the collection; two examples of relatively high-end, more costly guidebooks. By contrast, the inclusion of both Victorian and later twentieth-century guidebooks, published in extensive printruns, demonstrates the rise of the tourism industry in this later period. The display has been sed to coincide with the Centre’s October conference, Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display.
1. Diary of Mary Anne Hibbert, 1816, Gloucestershire Record Office, D1799/F320
Publications & Events
Publications Report Autumn/Winter 2016
William Hogarth A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings Elizabeth Einberg
William Hogarth (1697–1764) was among the first British-born artists to rise to international recognition and acclaim and to this day he is considered one of the country's most celebrated and innovative masters. His output encompassed paintings, prints, and serial forms of pictorial satire. This comprehensive catalogue of his paintings brings together over twenty years of scholarly research and expertise on the artist, and serves to highlight the remarkable diversity of his accomplishments in this medium. Portraits, history paintings, theater pictures, and genre pieces are lavishly reproduced alongside detailed entries on each painting, including much previously unpublished material relating to his oeuvre. This deeply informed publication affirms Hogarth's legacy and testifies to the artist's enduring reputation. Publication date: 4 Nov 2016 ISBN: 9780300221749 Dimensions: 299 × 248mm Pages: 440 Illustrations: 390 colour + 120 b/w Price: £95.00
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Hardwick Hall A Great Castle of Romance
Art and Optics in the Hereford Map An English Mappa Mundi, c. 1300
David Adshead, David Taylor, Nicholas Cooper, Ben Cowell, Oliver Garnett, Paula Henderson, Simon Jervis, Christopher Rowell, Anthony Wells-Cole, Matthew Hirst
Marcia Kupfer
Originally constructed in the late 16th century for the notorious Bess of Hardwick, Countess of Shrewsbury, Hardwick Hall is now among the National Trust's greatest architectural landmarks, with much of its original interior and ornamentation still intact. This splendid publication is the definitive source of scholarship on the remarkably well-preserved exemplar of late-Elizabethan style. Composed of extensive research and newly commissioned photography, this beautifully illustrated book traces the history of the house and its inhabitants through the centuries, showcasing a remarkable collection of portraiture, tapestries, furniture, and gardens, and providing readers with a genuine sense of the house's environment. Publication date: 15 Nov 2016 ISBN: 9780300218909 Dimensions: 292 × 248mm Pages: 384 Illustrations: 320 colour + 20 b/w illus. Price: £75.00
A single, monumental mappa mundi (world map), made around 1300 for Hereford Cathedral, survives intact from the Middle Ages. As Marcia Kupfer reveals in her arresting new study, this celebrated testament to medieval learning has long been profoundly misunderstood. Features of the colored and gilded map that baffle modern expectations are typically dismissed as the product of careless execution. Kupfer argues that they should rightly be seen as part of the map's encoded commentary on the nature of vision itself. Optical conceits and perspectival games formed part of the map's language of vision, were central to its commission, and shaped its display, formal design, and allegorical fabric. These discoveries compel a sweeping revision of the artwork's intellectual and art-historical genealogy, as well as its function and aesthetic significance, shedding new light on the impact of scientific discourses in late medieval art. Publication date: 6 Sep 2016 ISBN: 9780300220339 Dimensions: 280 × 216mm Pages: 240 Illustrations: 50 colour + 50 b/w illus. Price: £60
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The First Anniversary of
BRITISH ART STUDIES Tom Scutt, Digital Manager, looks ahead to Issues 4 and 5 of the Paul Mellon Centre’s innovative online journal British Art Studies.
Albumen print of Francis Skidmore’s metalwork gates for George Gilbert Scott’s Choir Screen, 1862. Image courtesy of the V&A Museum, London (E.422-2006)
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The First Anniversary of British Art Studies
The coming months will see the first anniversary of the Centre’s online journal British Art Studies, with our fourth issue scheduled for publication in November. In addition to the articles selected from an open call, and building on the collaborative nature of the project, we will be producing two features in relation to the Photography and Britishness conference that is due to be held at the YCBA on 4 and 5 November. Professor John Tagg and photographer Martin Parr will coordinate efforts to supplement the presentations given in the conference in New Haven with additional international contributions, which will be published through the means of British Art Studies. The journal will also make the conference papers available to those who are be unable to attend in person, and also act a point for departure for further conversation and debate. We are beginning to see that the nature and complexity of the submissions we receive becoming more innovative, with proposals making more sophisticated use of the digital environment. Issues 4 and 5 of the journal will see the publication of our first articles with a ‘digital humanities’ component. For instance, for issue 4, Matthew Lincoln and Abram Fox have prepared an article that uses data from the Getty Research Institute’s Provenance Index to examine the temporal dimensions of the art market in nineteenth-century London. Later, in issue 5, Justin Underhill will use tools to create an acoustic reconstruction of Gilbert Scott’s Hereford Screen in situ at the Hereford Cathedral. The open-access nature of the journal extends its reach and impact far beyond anything we could have expected, both in terms of reader numbers and its international readership. Accessibility is something that we continue to consider in relation to other areas of our resources.
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Albumen print of Francis Skidmore’s spandrel screen for George Gilbert Scott’s Choir Screen, 1862. Image courtesy of the V&A Museum, London (E.430:4-2006)
For example, my colleagues Charlotte Brunskill and Jenny Hill continue to investigate ways to open up our Archive Collections by making digital facsimiles of select material available to researchers. They have recently identified two notebooks from the Oliver Millar Archive as items that would benefit from greater exposure and accessibility. The two volumes selected operate as indexes to the twenty four notebooks Millar maintained from 1945–2006 documenting his tours of public and private collections. They provide access to the information by artist and collection name. We will be publishing online facsimiles of these indexes—as a turn-the-pages feature—shortly. We hope that these efforts will enable the Centre to become an even more vibrant hub of art-historical research, and to promote its activities, collections and publications to an international scholarly community.
Vintage photograph of George Gilbert Scott, Choir Screen, 1862, painted wrought and cast iron, brass, copper, timber, mosaics and hardstones, installed in the Hereford Cathedral. Image courtesy of the V&A Museum, London (M.251:1 to 316-1984)
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CALL FOR PAPERS
AA Women and Architecture in Context 1917–2017
A collaborative conference organised by the Architectural Association School of Architecture and the Paul Mellon Centre.
Above: Elisabeth Scott, Scott, Chesterton & Shepherd, Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, canopied entrance, 1932, Stratford-upon-Avon Source: RIBA Photographs Collection Opposite: Zaha Hadid Architects: London Aquatics Centre, 2011, © Hufton+Crow
AA XX 100 is the project to commemorate the centenary of women’s admission to the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London in 1917. To date it has comprised a raft of complementary enterprises including an annual lecture series and an ongoing programme to conduct filmed interviews with AA alumnae. The project culminates in autumn 2017 with an exhibition (October– December 2017), a book (Breaking the Mould: AA Women in Architecture 1917– 2017) and an international conference (AA Women and Architecture in Context 1917–2017) run in partnership with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. We now announce the Call for Papers for the conference, which will take place between 2nd and 4th November 2017 at the AA and the Paul Mellon Centre in Bedford Square, London, W.C.1. We invite academics, architects and other practitioners to submit proposals for 20-minute papers in response to the themes listed on our website. Submissions are encouraged from researchers at all stages of their careers, and papers should be understood as not confined purely to the AA as a subject matter but equally to the wider context of women and architecture across the centenary period. Please visit our website (www.paulmellon-centre.ac.uk) for further details and how to submit a proposal.
October 2016 — No. 4
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PMC Events Calendar All events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated
September 2016 5 September 2016 to 6 January 2017 Exhibition “The Inspection of the Curious”: The Country-House Guidebook, c. 1750–1990 Drawing Room
October 2016 5 October 2016, 18.00–20.00 Research Seminar Paul Nash's Hauntings David Mellor
7 October 2016, 09.00–18.45 Conference Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display
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Thursdays from 13 October to 1 December 2016, 18.30–20.30 Public Lecture Course The Country House: Art, Politics, and Taste
14 October 2016, 12.30–14.00 Research Lunch Drawn, Quartered, Stoned and Framed: Anatomical Bodies “Curiously engraven from the Life” in Late SeventeenthCentury London Sophie Morris
19 October 2016, 18.00–20.00 Research Seminar The Digital Pilgrim Project: Medieval Badges, Digital Tools, New Questions Lloyd de Beer, Amy Jeffs, and Robert Kaleta
Above: Jacques Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Alps, 1801, oil on canvas, Credit: Château de Versailles, France/Bridgeman Images Opposite: Paul Nash, portrait of an officer at Cowley Dump / portrait of a woman (double exposure), 1940, black and white negative © Tate, London 2015
21 October 2016, 12.30–14.00 Research Lunch Breaking down the South London Art Group's A Woman's Place (1974) Amy Tobin
November 2016 11 November 2016, 12.30–14.00 Research Lunch Private View: “A Particularly Soft English Hardback” Lisa Tickner
16 November 2016, 18.00–20.00 Research Seminar Screening of John Golding: A Path to the Absolute Followed by discussion with Emma Biggs, Matthew Collings,
Christopher Green, and Bruno Wollheim
25 November 2016, 12.30–14.00 Research Lunch “Did Babel e’er rise faster?”: The Changing Image of Brighton, 1820–50 Amy Concannon
30 November 2016, 18.00–20.00 Research Seminar Collecting the Future, Imaging the Past: Humphrey Jennings and Pandaemonium (1938–50) Jennifer Tucker
December 2016 7 December 2016, 18.00–20.00 Research Seminar The Empress Eugenie in Exile: Collecting and Display at Farnborough Hill, Hampshire, in the 1880s Anthony Geraghty
9 December 2016, 12.30–14.00 Research Lunch Promoting Pastel: Exhibitions of the Pastel Medium in Late Nineteenth-Century Britain Freya Spoor
January 2017 Mondays from 9 January to 6 February 2017 Paul Mellon Lectures Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Style, Music, and Art in Postwar London Thomas Crow The National Gallery
PMC Profile
Elizabeth Einberg & The Hogarth Catalogue Guilland Sutherland talks to Elizabeth Einberg, author of William Hogarth: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings which is published by the Paul Mellon Centre in November 2016, in collaboration with Yale University Press.
How long did the catalogue take you to write? The first attempt to start up this catalogue by Brian Allen and David Bindman went into abeyance some twenty-five years ago when it was found to be incompatible with their workloads. Brian Allen then offered the project to me on my retirement from the Tate Gallery in 1998, while I was still working on the George Lambert catalogue (published in 2001). I delivered the draft to the readers in February or March 2014, and the last two years have been spent shaping it up for publication in collaboration with Guilland Sutherland, our wonderful editor. I had already catalogued the Tate’s great collection of Hogarths in the 1980s, so this was the continuation of a very long process.
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How many works are there in the catalogue? Compared to other painters of equal fame, Hogarth’s painted oeuvre is small—244 catalogue entries, plus a dozen or so dubious or related works. The overwhelming majority of his paintings tell a story, often even in seemingly straightforward portraits. Many of them are private and personal, while others plunge into intricate political or moral narratives of literary proportions. Unravelling these poses the main problem for the cataloguer, requiring an immense amount of background research.
Elizabeth Einberg in Bedford Square
‘The overwhelming majority of his paintings tell a story, often even in seemingly straightforward portraits’ So cataloguing one work is not a simple matter? Almost every picture bears witness to Hogarth’s struggle—multiple alterations, over-paintings and additions, sometimes as in the case of his famous Self-Portrait (cat. no. 194) of a very radical nature. The canvases themselves are often extended in irregular and unusual ways to accommodate altered or expanded compositions, and he had a tendency to recycle his abandoned canvases, cutting them up and reusing them in different formats. One of the most remarkable examples of this is the portrait of an Unknown Man (no.195) which was reused at least four times, each time turning the canvas at right angles, producing a veritable clover-leaf of heads when X-rayed. And the finished pictures are full of complex themes—explanations began in 1746 with Jean-André Rouquet’s Lettres de Monsieur ***, which decoded Hogarth’s most popular prints for the French market. Many ambiguities remain and will provide food for future interpretations. Why exactly is a piece of meat being thrown out of the window in Noon (no.105)? Why is the girl in Evening (no.106) fiddling with a leather overshoe? What exactly does A Boy with a Kite (no.223) mean?
Have you found any new works? There are one or two pictures that have not been catalogued before. A few more are known to have been lost, but early drawings of some of the lost ones have been found. Publishing them in the catalogue could lead to some exciting discoveries. Has the book come out as you thought it would when you started? The catalogue looks wonderful and to see the full range of his work in colour is astounding. Because of the immense amount of telling detail which Hogarth wove into his pictures they are very difficult to reproduce. I would have perhaps liked more full-page enlargements to clarify details and to show up the delicacy of his brushwork, but that is probably better left to extended studies of individual paintings. The book is a monument to the superb professionalism of Yale University Press.
October 2016 — No. 4
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Detail of Self-Portrait of William Hogarth with Pug, 1745, oil on canvas, 90 × 69.9 cm. Tate, London
What is Hogarth’s place in British art? Hogarth’s paintings have come to epitomise the early Georgian era. They make visible the life of contemporary men and women from all levels of society and endow them with the aspirations, moral dilemmas, fatal passions, faults and failures traditionßally expressed through the trials of classical heroes. These resonate with universal human concerns and as a result there are few painters who are so deeply embedded in the national psyche as Hogarth. His images are still used or adapted—in newspapers, or by artists from David Hockney to Cornelia Parker—to reflect contemporary events and comment on modern life.
YCBA Programmes and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA
Special Exhibitions 1 September–11 December, 2016 Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) Bringing together photography, costume, sculpture, and film, this display introduces audiences to the breadth of Shonibare’s work, while focusing on a single theme: the life, death, and legacy of Admiral Lord Nelson, whom the artist uses as an emblem of Britain’s imperial past.
15 September–4 December, 2016 Spreading Canvas: EighteenthCentury British Marine Painting This is the first major exhibition to survey the tradition of marine painting that was inextricably linked to Britain’s rise to prominence as a maritime and imperial power, and to position the genre at the heart of the burgeoning British art world of the eighteenth century.
Select Center Events 14 September, 2016 17.30 Exhibition Opening Lecture Brave Tars and Glorious Commanders: Painting and Performance in EighteenthCentury Britain Eleanor Hughes, Deputy Director for Art & Program at the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore
5 October, 2016 17.30 Paul Mellon Lecture Thomas Cole’s Journey: Atlantic Crossings and NineteenthCentury Landscape Painting Tim Barringer, Paul Mellon Professor of the History of Art, Yale University
8 October, 2016 10.00–19.30 Graduate Student Symposium A Beautiful Role: Architecture and the Display of Art
Date??, 17.30 Keynote Lecture Conserving Kahn George Knight, Principal Knight Architecture
4 November, 2016 17.30 Keynote Lecture A Forty-Year Photographic Journey Through Great Britain Martin Parr Photographer
25 October, 2016 17.30 Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture A Conversation with Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA) Yinka Shonibare MBE (RA), artist; Kobena Mercer, Professor, History of Art and African American Studies, Yale University
30 November, 2016 17.30 Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture “Knocking around between money sex and boredom”: Walker Evans in Havana and New York John Tagg, Distinguished Professor of Art History, Binghamton University, State University of New York
4 November, 2016 10.00–19.30 and 5 November, 2016 10.00– 17.30 International Conference Photography and Britishness
To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programs, visit britishart.yale.edu.