Return of the Paul Mellon Lectures
Januar y 2017 / No. 5 p aul-mellon-c e ntre.a c.uk
Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
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
Senior Research Fellow, Special Projects Hugh Belsey
Events Manager Ella Fleming
Advisory Council
Office Manager Suzannah Pearson Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Finance Officer Barbara Ruddick Editor Emily Lees Editor Baillie Card Fellowships, Grants and Communications Officer Harriet Fisher
Board of Governors
HR Manager Barbara Waugh
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
Receptionist Stephen O’Toole
Design
Director’s Assistant & Office Administrator Bryony Botwright Rance
Buildings Officer Harry Smith PMC Fellow Hana Leaper Brian Allen Fellow Jessica Feather
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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 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
Baillie Card and Harriet Fisher Template by Cultureshock Media Contact us Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA United Kingdom T: 020 7580 0311 www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Contents January 2017 – No.5
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Director’s Note Modernist London Doddington Hall Study Day Publishing Art History Digitally Fellowships & Grants: The Digital Project Grant The Digital Pilgrim Project Depicting Derbyshire The Paul Joyce Archive ‘The Price of War’ Recording, Publishing & Preserving Art, 1939-1945 Publications Report British Art Studies: Expanding The Digital PMC Events Calendar PMC Profile: Hana Leaper YCBA Events Calendar
Front cover: Pauline Boty, With Love to Jean-Paul Belmondo, 1962, oil on canvas, 152 x 122 cm. Private Collection / © The estate of Pauline Boty
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Director’s Note This January, Professor Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, will be giving the twelfth series of Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery. The model for the series was the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures, established in 1949 and named in honour of Paul Mellon’s father, the founder of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Our series of lectures was launched in 1994, when one of twentieth-century Britain’s most distinguished art historians, Francis Haskell (1928-2000), discussed the topic of The Dispersal of the Collections of King Charles I and his Courtiers. Since then, these lectures, which typically take place at the Sainsbury Lecture Theatre at the National Gallery in London, and then at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, CT, have been delivered every second year, drawing substantial and enthusiastic audiences. The roll-call of speakers has been glittering, and the subjects covered have ranged far and wide. Our last series, for instance, was delivered by Penelope Curtis, then Director of Tate Britain, who gave a thrilling sequence of lectures on the fundamental qualities of sculpture. Scholars, artists, curators, critics, and interested members of the general public packed the auditoria in both our British and American venues, eager to
Above: Mark Hallett Rory Lindsay Photography 2
hear the ideas and arguments being presented by an especially innovative and imaginative museum director and writer. This year, I am sure, will be no different. Professor Crow is one of the most original and influential art historians working today, and it is an honour to have him with us during January and early February. His visit also offers a nice symmetry that I am sure would have been appreciated by both the Mellons, father and son: in 2015 Professor Crow delivered the Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in Washington, DC, on the subject of Restoration as Event and Idea: Art in Europe, 1814–1820. His focus this winter will be very different, as he explores the intersections of art, music, and design in Britain from the late 1950s to the early 1970s. His lectures, which he introduces in the following pages, will take in Miles Davis album covers, the Royal College of Art’s ARK magazine, jazz painting, the works of David Hockney, Pauline Boty and Bridget Riley, and the evolving façades of the famous Granny Takes a Trip shop in King’s Road, London. What could be more enticing? I look forward to seeing many PMC Notes readers at what should be a terrific series of lectures. Mark Hallett Director of Studies
Above: Teenagers standing outside the shop Granny Takes a Trip, in King’s Road, London, 1967. Victor de Schwanberg / Alamy Stock Photo January 2017 — No. 5
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Modernist London Professor Thomas Crow gives the Paul Mellon Lectures at The National Gallery, London, this year. The series of five lectures, titled Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Style, Music, and Art in London, 1956-1969, looks at the late-1950s emergence of Modernist style among youthful connoisseurs of American Jazz, and its relation to signature British artists of the 1960s. A taste of the talks is featured here.
The status of Modernism in visual art, as the pursuit of abstract formal and conceptual autonomy, continues to be a matter of endlessly unresolved speculation. But there is a difference between an idea and an identity. If “Modernist” becomes an identifier actually claimed by individuals and explicitly ascribed to them by others, then speculation becomes moot. In the London of the late 1950s, there were such individuals, towards whom one could point and say, “There goes a Modernist”; but these people were not artists in the customary sense of the term. The bearers of that name, the Modernists, belonged to a movement of young fans, devoted on an almost full-time basis to fastidious discrimination in dress and demeanor. The emotional urgency behind their self-presentation came from their choice of music: Bebop, Cool Jazz, and the propulsive Hard Bop that gained wider popularity among black American audiences towards the end of the decade. Chet Baker and Gerry Mulligan, Californian stars of the cool tendency, fostered an imported Ivy League look, adopted by these young Londoners as a riposte to the unkempt jumpers, sandals and real ale associated with fans of purist Trad and New Orleans revival jazz. Photographs of Baker and Mulligan, looking as put-together as two outlandishly talented young heroin addicts could possibly present themselves, spoke to the coded secret of an outwardly ultra-conformist appearance: two literal outlaws refusing outward markers of external marginality. Their black peers were marginal in the larger society in ways that superior abilities could never overcome. Some of them put even greater emphasis on impeccable tailoring, so to defy and negate mainstream assumptions of inferiority. Miles Davis was renowned for
Left: Lewis Morley, Pauline Boty, 1963, modern bromide print from original negative. © Lewis Morley Archive / National Portrait Gallery, London / © The estate of Pauline Boty January 2017 — No. 5
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Modernist London: The Paul Mellon Lectures
this, “cool” both in his clear, measured playing and in the understated elegance he cultivated in his dress, his inward rage contained by playing down rather than acting out. As Mod chronicler Paolo Hewitt puts it: “Miles and his peers are playing the enemy beautifully, walking amongst them while changing the landscape forever. You think he’s a bank manager, in fact Miles is a revolutionary in silk and mohair.” The young Lee Morgan gave Hard Bop the same sartorial distinction. All of this was understood in London and emulated by the selfconscious cults, the original Modernists (Mods) or Stylists, minority devotees of the most advanced jazz as wordlessly eloquent defiance. Any given moment in such style creation can represent only a snapshot
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of a process typified by high aesthetic consciousness and provisional coherence, developing by means of continual self-critique: exactly the core qualities that objects of fine art are expected to exemplify. In that spirit, these lectures will incorporate the work of recognized fine artists, some of the best-known names of the 1960s, who partook of the same ethos of sharp concision, alertness to the lived moment, and sheer style. By according the style cults the same assumptions of intention, intelligence, fine intuition, and self-awareness that one would bestow on any certified fine artist, it is possible to obviate the condescending, clinical tendencies of Cultural Studies. Conversely, fine art can be understood to gain traction from lived experience of a vitality rare within its conventional confines.
Above: Filming on the set of Ready Steady Go, February 1964. Image Š Trinity Mirror / Mirrorpix / Alamy Stock Photo
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Arthur Pond, Six children of Francis and Rhoda Blake Delaval, ca. 1740-42 8
Art in the British Country House
Doddington Hall Study Day Martin Postle provides an update on the PMC Research Project
On 12 October 2016, the Paul Mellon Centre, as part of the research project Art in the British Country House: Collecting and Display, organised a study day at Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire at the invitation of the owners, Claire and James Birch. The day, which was divided into four sessions, focused upon the collecting habits and display strategies of the Delaval family, who occupied Doddington for a hundred years from the mid-1720s to the mid-1820s. The first session assessed the character and calibre of the collection at Doddington prior to the occupancy of the Delavals. Here, attention focused upon works on the ground floor in the Brown Parlour and the Great Hall, where there are notable questions relating not only to attribution and the speculative
Above: Artist unknown, Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire, ? c. 1740s
identification of sitters, but the collection as a whole and its display history. Session two centred upon the early patronage of the Delavals up to 1760, prior to the extensive remodeling of Doddington. During this period Captain Francis Blake Delaval and his wife Rhoda Apreece extensively employed the services of Arthur Pond on a series of family portraits, as well as securing him as an art tutor to their daughter, Rhoda Delaval, whose own work also features in the collection. The third session, devoted to the later patronage of the Delavals, concentrated upon the Long Gallery, following the remodelling of the interiors by Sir John Delaval. Attention here was directed in particular towards the series of full-length portraits commissioned for the Long Gallery by Joshua Reynolds and other
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Art in the British Country House: Doddington Hall Study Day
leading artists of the period. In addition to the paintings themselves, and related attributions, there was a lively discussion around the commissioning of the series of elaborate carved and gilded frames, a number of which remain in situ at Doddington. The final session was concerned with tapestries. In the course of remodelling the interior of Doddington, Sir John Delaval acquired and hung two sets of late seventeenth-century tapestries depicting Scenes from Rural Life and The Trojan Wars, in order to create an antiquarian decorative scheme one of the earliest examples of its kind in England. Over the past few years the Doddington Hall Conservation Charity has supported a project to conserve and research the tapestries in collaboration with the University of Lincoln. The session provided participants with the opportunity to learn about the project, and to raise questions about the installation of the tapestries in the context of the Delaval family’s strategies for collection and display. The questions raised and discussed will form a platform for further research into Doddington Hall, as one of the principal country house ‘cases studies’ in the ongoing research project.
Above: Detail from Catherine Read, Sarah Hussey Delaval, Lady Pollington, mid 1760s
Left: Attributed to Arthur Pond, Sir Francis Hussey Delavel, c. mid 1740s
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Conference Report
Publishing Art History Digitally Sarah Turner shares insights from a panel discussion held at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, on 14 October 2016.
Our online journal British Art Studies is just over a year old. Since it launched at the end of November 2015 we have published four issues, all of which are all freely available at www.britishartstudies. ac.uk. Over 20,000 unique users, based in countries across the world, have viewed the journal’s content. This response is indicative of the lively interest in digital arts publishing. In October 2016, I was invited, along with Martina Droth, Co-Editor of British Art Studies, to speak on this topic at a roundtable event – “Publishing Art History Digitally: The Present and Future” – organised by the online journal NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide and funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the NYU Center for the Humanities. The event opened with a keynote given by Greg Albers, Digital Publications Manager for Getty Publishing, which had the purposefully provocative title
“Breaking Almost Everything: The Current Practice and Future Potential of Digital Publishing”. Greg argued that the whole history of publishing can be seen through the lens of technology disruption and that these early days of digital publishing are no different. He highlighted the culture of experimentation that is encouraging authors to use new digital tools to create and disseminate their work. But, he cautioned, “to bridge the gap from rulebreaking one-off projects to a sound and lasting publishing methodology, we must expand the conversation and collectively work to better understand and control the tools and materials we are working with, namely code.” This theme of developing collaborations between art historians and technologists in order to bridge those gaps was picked up in the roundtable discussion, where Martina and I discussed how digital
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Conference Report: Publishing Art History Digitally
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projects are disrupting and challenging the conventional workflows of a traditional print journal. Increasingly, we do not necessarily receive “finished” articles, but are working with contributors to develop digital projects. This is a team effort requiring the specialist knowledge of the author/s (many of our articles and features are multi-authored), the expertise of our Digital Manager Tom Scutt, and the guidance of our editorial team and peer
similar publications such as NineteenthCentury Art Worldwide and Journal 18, are redefining what academic journals can be and how they are used and shared. This is an exciting period for experimentation in which art historians can play a central role in creating new relationships between image and text. The whole event is available to view online: https://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/ fineart/events/kress-digital-publishing.
reviewers. Sometimes we require the development of the journal’s platform, which involves additional work with the designers and developers, Keepthinking. The conversation about open-access publishing, digital preservation, and the sharing of knowledge about digital tools was lively and engaging. There are many challenges faced by open-access publishers, but I left the event with the sense that British Art Studies, along with
htm. There will also be follow-up sessions at the College Art Association conference in New York in February 2017. Martina and I will run a session entitled “Editing Journals in a Digital Age” and Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide have organised a workshop on “Getting Started with Publishing Art History Digitally” in which the PMC’s Digital Manager Tom Scutt will offer expert guidance.
Above: Screenshot of “Mapping The Greek Slave” by Martina Droth, an article in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide (Summer 2016). Accessed 14 Dec. 2016 at http://www.19thcartworldwide.org/index.php/summer16/droth-on-mappingthe-greek-slave
Above: Screenshot of “On Border Play in Eighteenth-Century Europe” by Sasha Rossman, which appeared in Journal 18 (November 2016). Accessed 14 Dec. 2016 at http://www. journal18.org/nq/on-border-play-in-eighteenth-centuryeurope-by-sasha-rossman/
Fellowships and Grants
The Digital Project Grant Harriet Fisher The Digital Project Grant was introduced to the Paul Mellon Centre’s Grants and Fellowships programme in Autumn 2015 to help support the increasing number of digital projects that are being undertaken by institutions studying and promoting British art and architecture. Awarded once a year, the grant was designed to encourage and stimulate new modes of research, collaboration, and the dissemination of scholarship. Projects can take the form of an online exhibition, an online catalogue or database of a collection or archive, or a research project using digital technologies. Although there have only been two rounds of Digital Project awards it is clear that scholars, curators, and researchers are using the digital realm to broaden and
diversify their research. The two reports which follow are from institutions who were awarded Digital Project Grants in 2015. Amy Jeffs reports on the Digital Pilgrim Project, an innovative and ambitious project to digitise the collection of Medieval badges held at the British Museum using the latest digital technologies. The project has already created fifteen 3D models of the badges and received a second award given in 2016. Anna Rhodes from Buxton Museum then reports on the Depicting Derbyshire Project, which aims to publish the museum’s collection of eighteenth-century Derbyshire topographical works-on-paper, concluding in an online catalogue. The next round of Digital Project Grants will be awarded in Autumn 2017.
Waiting to be 3D-modelled, a fine, fifteenth-century lead alloy pilgrim badge associated with the shrine of St Thomas Becket, Canterbury. It represents the saints reliquary bust, which was one of the primary holy objects visited by pilgrims in the cathedral (copyright Trustees of the British Museum)
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
The Digital Pilgrim Project Amy Jeffs, a PhD student at Cambridge University, reports on the progress of the Digital Pilgrim Project, which has been awarded two Digital Project Grants.
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In Autumn 2015, the PMC awarded their first round of Digital Project Grants. With this, the Digital Pilgrim Project was born. Its roots lay in a British Museum effort to begin digitising a collection of over 680 medieval badges, mainly lead alloy pilgrim souvenirs, and grew into a proposal to use the collection as a case study to explore the potential of digital technologies to address large collections of miniature, decorative objects. We are using the complementary mechanisms of 3D imaging and, now with the support of a second award, Graphic Information Systems mapping. The former reflects the ways in which original owners would have handled and viewed their badges; the latter examines their profusion and the archaeological legacy of their status as travelling images, often found at a distance from the holy site at which they were sold to pilgrims. The plentiful, image-laden badges in the British Museum’s collection, many of which were found in the muddy banks of the Thames, are worthy of a renaissance in the manner of their study and enjoyment. In fact, only five are on display in the British Museum today. So, for the first phase of the project we continued to digitise them for Collections Online and supplemented this process with the creation of fifteen 3D models. We are now uploading these in batches to the museum’s Sketchfab page. As with choices on a menu, a manageable number of models, revealed in successive waves, is offering the online traveler an appealing introduction to the collection.
The models are attractive, easy to share online, embed in external websites, and link back to the main collection on the museum’s database. They are accompanied by interactive annotations, a curator-led virtual tour, that encourages reading and looking, enhancing the models’ educational and aesthetic impacts. Lloyd de Beer, the collection’s curator, and I worked together to choose the objects for imaging and to compose the annotations, while Rob Kaleta, PhD candidate in Archaeology at UCL, produced the models. Since July, they have received thousands of views and we have heard from a host of interested parties, including students, authors, researchers, and craftspeople. Analysis of large datasets is one of the most striking ways in which digital technologies are revolutionising the practice of history of art. As we embark on the second phase of the project, we will use numerous British collections to plot badges’ find-spots in relation to their sites of origin. The resultant GIS maps will be shared using data visualisation animations, helping us to form a picture of the spread of medieval saints’ cults. For Digital Pilgrim, these tools are providing micro- and macro-perspectives on an underappreciated source. We hope that the project will offer a practical model for the curation and study of other large collections of miniature art objects. A sample of the badges in the British Museum’s collection, many of which were found on the foreshores of the Thames (copyright Trustees of the British Museum)
Fellowships and Grants
Depicting Anna Rhodes from Buxton Museum and Art Gallery reports on the progress of the Depicting Derbyshire Project which was supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Digital Project Grant in 2015. This project aims to publish in digital form the museum’s collection of eighteenthcentury Derbyshire topographical works-on-paper. There will be an online catalogue which will be searchable by place and artist as well as a browse function navigated by a map. There will also be online exhibitions which will focus on specific artist’s tours of the County and provide an output for research. It is hoped that the website will stimulate new research into the tour of Derbyshire, a county that is often overlooked in picturesque scholarship. This is despite it being the first place in the UK to have been visually represented within the picturesque and sublime framework, through Thomas Smith’s eight engravings Of the most extraordinary Prospects in the Mountainous Parts of Derbyshire and Staffordshire commonly called the Peak and Moorlands (1743). The museum has a small but growing collection of eighteenth-century works on paper including watercolours from John Webber and William Day’s 1789 tour of the County. The collection was bolstered by the Enlightenment! project, a Heritage Lottery funded “Collecting Cultures” project that ran from 2008
to 2013. The collection had previously been catalogued to a basic level but often by people with little or no specialist knowledge. The first part of the project has focused on expanding these records including researching the artists and recording inscriptions and watermarks. Research has also included finding out which eighteenth-century watercolours and sketches of the County exist in other institutions in the UK, in order to build up a better understanding of who visited Derbyshire and what they decided to depict. This has helped with attribution questions that afflicted some of the works in the collection. Once a trial selection of records is online, the project will be inviting other institutions to add their own Derbyshire watercolours and sketches to the website. This is aimed at museums who currently have no searchable records online, starting with the collection at Derby Museums. It is hoped the first batch of records will go online in Spring 2017. If you have any watercolours or sketches showing Derbyshire scenes dating from 1700 to 1820, then please contact anna.rhodes@derbyshire.gov.uk
John Webber, Castleton and the Peak Cavern, 1789, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery 16
Derbyshire
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
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Mary Mitford, View in Dovedale, watercolour, c. 1765-1775, Buxton Museum and Art Gallery
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Paul Joyce, c. 1972. Image courtesy of Gavin Stamp
The Paul Joyce Archive The Centre is delighted to announce the recent acquisition of the Paul Joyce Archive, Jenny Hill writes to introduce its varied and image-rich contents. Paul R. Joyce (1934-2014) was an architectural draughtsman. In the 1970s he worked for the architect Roderick Gradidge (1929-2000) who was a champion of Victorian Gothic and it was during this period that Joyce became interested in George Edmund Street (1824-1881). His initial intention was to write a monograph on Street, but this was never published. Instead, Joyce developed a life-long interest in the architect, becoming the acknowledged expert for over forty years. It is the material from this research project that forms a large part of the archive. The collection includes Joyce’s detailed research on Street himself, his buildings, and the craftsmen and contractors employed to complete the projects. This information is meticulously recorded on a series of index cards. Alongside this core research are reference files containing copies of nineteenth-century plans, twentieth-century black and white photographs, some published material as well as correspondence and plans relating to proposals for the redevelopment of Street’s buildings. The collection also includes the research material Joyce compiled in preparation for a dictionary of Victorian architects. He was to have written the text with Professor J. Mordaunt Crook but the work was never brought to fruition. The material in this part of the collection includes a series of reference files organised alphabetically by architect and three card indexes containing detailed information not only on architects but also on topographers, draughtsman, artists, antiquarians and engravers. This image-rich collection will greatly enhance the resources available on Victorian architects, and in particular, on George Edmund Street. The Centre is planning an event to celebrate the acquisition of the Paul Joyce Archive, to take place in 2017.
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Drawing Room Display
‘The Price of War’ Recording, Publishing and Preserving Art, 1939-1945 Frankie Drummond-Charig introduces the new Drawing Room Display which uses material from the Paul Mellon Centre research collections to look at the effects of World War II on the art world.
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When war broke out in September 1939 what was the effect on the art world? How did the following wartime years of attrition alter the landscape of the field? Did the exhibiting of art change? What was the impact on publishing? And what about the safety of actual art works and the livelihoods of artists themselves? Our new Paul Mellon Centre Drawing Room Display looks at particular items from the Centre’s library, archive and photographic collections that go some way to answering such questions. It brings together seemingly unrelated material that, as well as being of arthistorical value, provides an insight into the climate in which it was created. The display features items created between 1938 and 1949 and explores the exhibition, creation, protection, destruction and restitution of art during wartime. It is not a comprehensive look at this period, but rather an exploration of these themes through individual items. It also demonstrates the intrinsically multifaceted nature of archive and library collections, which although originally designed to focus on one topic, may in future serve to highlight another. The display will be held in the Drawing Room and is available to view for free during the Centre’s opening hours: 10.00am – 5.00pm Monday to Friday, from 16 January to 28 April 2017.
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Featured in the display will be: Elizabeth Rivers, This man: a sequence of wood-engravings, (The Guyon House Press, 1939). Library Reference: 094 RIV 24
Publications & Events header
Publications & Events
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Publications Report Autumn/Winter 2016
Modern Painters, Old Masters The Art of Imitation from the Pre-Raphaelites to the First World War Elizabeth Prettejohn
With the rise of museums in the 19th century, as well as the proliferation of widely available published reproductions, the art of the past became visible and accessible in Victorian England as never before. Inspired by the work of Sandro Botticelli, Jan van Eyck, Diego Velazquez, and others, British artists elevated contemporary art to new heights through a creative process that emphasized imitation and emulation. Elizabeth Prettejohn analyzes the ways in which the Old Masters were interpreted by critics, curators, and scholars, and argues that Victorian artists were, paradoxically, at their most original when they imitated the Old Masters most faithfully. Covering the arc of Victorian art from the Pre-Raphaelites through to the early modernists, this volume traces how artists such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Burne-Jones, and William Orpen engaged with the art of the past and produced some of the greatest art of the later 19th century. Publication date: May 2017 ISBN: 9780300222753 Dimensions: 254 x 190mm Pages: 288 Illustrations: 130 color + 30 b/w illus. Price: ÂŁ45.00
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Gardens of Court and Country English Design 1630-1730
The Art of Brutalism Rescuing Hope from Catastrophe in 1950s Britain
David Jacques
Ben Highmore Gardens of Court and Country provides the first comprehensive overview of the development of the English formal garden from 1630 to 1730. Often overshadowed by the English landscape garden that became fashionable later in the 18th century, English formal gardens of the 17th century displayed important design innovations that reflected a broad rethinking of how gardens functioned within society. With insights into how the Protestant nobility planned and used their formal gardens, the domestication of the lawn, and the transformation of gardens into large rustic parks, David Jacques explores how forecourts, flower gardens, bowling greens, cascades, and more were created and reimagined over time. This handsome volume includes 300 illustrations that bring lost and forgotten gardens back to life. Publication date: April 2017 ISBN: 9780300222012 Dimensions: 286 x 241mm Pages: 352 Illustrations: 150 colour + 150 b/w illus. Price: £45.00
While most famously associated with numerous mid-century architects, Brutalism was a style of visual art that was also adopted by painters, sculptors, printmakers, and photographers. Taking into account Brutalist work by artists such as Richard Hamilton and Eduardo Paolozzi, as well as lesser-known practitioners like Nigel Henderson and Magda Cordell, this volume focuses on the period between 1952 and 1962 when artists refused a programmatic set of aesthetics and began experimenting with images that had no set focal point, using non-traditional materials, and producing objects characterized by wit and energy along with anxiety, trauma, and melancholia. This original study shows how Brutalism enabled British artists of the mid-20th century to respond ethically and aesthetically to the challenges posed by the rise of consumer culture and technological progress. Publication date: June 2017 ISBN: 9780300222746 Dimensions: 254 x 190mm Pages: 276 Illustrations: 40 colour + 110 b/w illus. Price: £35.00
David Jacques
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ardens of Court and Country provides the first comprehensive overview of the development of the English
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the 18th century, English formal gardens of the 17th century displayed important design innovations that reflected a broad rethinking of how gardens functioned within society. With insights into how the Protestant nobility planned and used their formal gardens, the domestication of the lawn and the transformation of gardens into large rustic parks, David Jacques explores the ways forecourts, flower gardens, bowling greens, cascades and more were created and reimagined over time. This handsome volume includes 300 illustrations – including plans, engravings and paintings – that bring lost and forgotten gardens back to life.
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Above: Still from a digital reconstruction published in “Rehanging Reynolds at the British Institution� by Catherine Roach, an article in British Art Studies (Issue 4). Designed by Duck Duck Zeus. Access at: http://www.britishartstudies. ac.uk/issues/issue-index/issue-4/rehanging-reynolds
British Art Studies
Expanding The Digital Baillie Card and Martina Droth write about the development of our interactive digital tools and platforms at the PMC’s online journal British Art Studies.
In the year since its launch, our online journal British Art Studies has evolved as part of an ongoing dialogue about how the journal is used, what our authors and users want from it, and how we can continue to anticipate and shape the future of online scholarly publishing. Issue 4 offers a wide range of content that, in line with past issues, has been designed specifically for our interactive digital platform. One of the most substantial of these is the downloadable PDF function, which creates files that mirror as much as possible the online versions of the articles. These will be useful in situations where internet access is patchy or non-existent; for the use of copies as teaching resources; or for hand annotation and preservation in personal and institutional libraries. Throughout the issue we have also made use of the new “IIIF” standard for images, offering a zoom function and magnification for all images available to this standard. We can now pull in the best quality, most authoritative images directly from participating repositories to facilitate the close study of artworks online.
In a new experiment for BAS, we have collaborated with scholar Catherine Roach to create a virtual reconstruction of an exhibition held in 1823 at the British Institution, using a PowerPoint presentation, a floor plan, and an unillustrated exhibition catalogue. Roach’s article demonstrates the feedback loop between scholarly analysis and the development of new kinds of visualizations—each informs the other. Finally, this issue presents a data study, developed by Matthew Lincoln and Abram Fox, which contains detailed visualisations that shed new light onto the landscape of auctions and exhibitions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These responsive charts offer a rich and intuitive way to navigate a data set from the Getty Provenance Index that might otherwise appear unwieldy. Each of these new features will be available to authors and readers in all BAS issues to come, and we encourage you to visit www.britishartstudies.ac.uk to enjoy and explore them for yourselves.
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PMC Events Calendar All events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated
January 2017 9 January, 18.30-19.30 Paul Mellon Lecture *Modernist Faces: Hard Bop and Clean Reception Thomas Crow The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing Theatre
16 January, 18.30-19.30 Paul Mellon Lecture *Jazz Painting? Modernist Hockney? Thomas Crow The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing Theatre
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23 January, 18.30-19.30 Paul Mellon Lecture *Painting Sensations: Pauline Boty/Bridget Riley Thomas Crow The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing Theatre
30 January, 18.30-19.30 Paul Mellon Lecture *Hippy Hippy Shake: Sculpture through the Counterculture Thomas Crow The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing Theatre
25 January 2017, 12.30-14.00 Paul Mellon Lecture Research Lunch This research lunch will feature research presented by PhD students and early-career researchers connected to the topic of the Mellon Lectures
February 2017 6 February, 18.30–19.30 Paul Mellon Lecture *The Great Lost Look c. 1969: Beyond Cultural Studies Thomas Crow The National Gallery, Sainsbury Wing Theatre
Right: Detail of Thomas Sandby RA, 1721–1798, Set of Six London Views, ca. 1758, Pen and black ink and gray wash, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Fund
8 February 18.00-19.30 Research Seminar The Regency Castle John Goodall
9 to 10 February Conference Making Women’s Art Matter: New Approaches to the Careers and Legacies of Women Artists Dulwich Picture Gallery and Paul Mellon Centre
17 February, 12.30-14,00 Research Lunch The Great British Gatehouse: Ready, Get Set, Build! Rodolpho Rodrguez
22 February, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar The Art of Brutalism in 1950s London Ben Highmore
March 2017
17 March, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch Italy Revisited: Nino Costa (18261903) and the Etruscan School of Art Arnika Schmidt
22 March, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar Dialogues across the Channel: British and French Architects on Architectural Experience (17501815) Sigrid de Jong
31 March, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch Samuel Wale’s book illustrations: Designing Historical Panoramas in Georgian London Isabella Baudino
*Paul Mellon Lectures at the National Gallery, London £7.50 per lecture £6 concessions To purchase tickets please visit: www.nationalgallery.org
1 March, 15.00-17.00 Student Event This event focuses on how the PMC can assist students with dissertations and research projects.
8 March, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar Pevsner and the Oxford Colleges Simon Bradley
10 March, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch Concealment and Deception: The Art of the Camoufleurs of Leamington Spa, 1939-1945 Jeff Watkin and Chloe Johnson
Left: Detail of Colin Moss, Camouflaged Factory Buildings, 1939-1941, credit of LSAG&M, courtesy of the Artist’s estate
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Exhibitingas South Asiainin Britain, 1900–Now AShowing, detail of Telling, Kirkham Seeing: Abbey Gatehouse, featured The Great British Gatehouse Research Lunch Photographer: Rodolpho Rodrgues
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PMC Profile
Hana Leaper Baillie Card talks to Hana Leaper, a Paul Mellon Centre Fellow and Deputy Editor of British Art Studies, about her research on Vanessa Bell, the status of women artists, and middlebrow aesthetics. concluding that the dearth of serious work on Bell prohibited further joint investigation. This glaring gap in scholarship became an opportunity for a PhD on a subject that continues to inspire and fascinate me. Bell’s work is diverse, fresh, and engaging and her character has such integrity; her materials have been a joy to work with. In February, Dulwich Picture Gallery is opening the first major monographic exhibition of works by Vanessa Bell. Why has there not yet been such a show?
Hana, much of your research has been on the artist Vanessa Bell. What drew you to studying her? I became interested in Bell during my Masters in Cultural Theory, when Griselda Pollock set us a task to present case studies on two under-represented women artists. I continued to work on the reciprocal aesthetics between Bell and her sister, the writer Virginia Woolf, before
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Bell’s work has largely been overshadowed by her life and connections to a network of prolific cultural luminaries. Details of her personal life have been disproportionately fixated on by both public and scholarly presses for example, she had three relationships throughout her long life, but because they were all with Bloomsbury group members, this tends to receive undue attention and become the focus of any discussion about her. This attention to biographical detail at the expense of penetrating analysis of artists’ work is, unfortunately, typical of arthistorical narratives pertaining to women practitioners. The Bell exhibition has carefully circumnavigated these traps by presenting works solely by Bell. This focus
on the subject as an individual artist, rather than one of a group, allows viewers to assess and analyse Bell’s works on their own merits. Importantly, there are no images in the show of Bell by other artists, as they tend to distract from her artistic potency by presenting an alluringly beautiful image of her as a sedate model seen through the eyes of her illustrious peers.
Catherine Spencer’s pioneering work on Magda Cordell. In our second issue we introduced viewing tools to allow readers to explore new facets of the images, and we have continued to develop these important instruments.
From your experience editing British Art Studies, can open-access publishing help to diversify the art historical canon?
Over the next year, I will continue to collaborate with a number of networks, including the Early Career Researcher network that Dr Sophie Hatchwell and I established in 2015. Our programme this year has included lectures and workshops on book and journal publication, copyright law, and digital humanities. Next year we will stage events where ECRs can present their research, and a more sustained event on digital art histories.
Not only does open-access publishing have the capacity to diversify the canon, but to shape new approaches to research, and support both emerging and established scholars. Without the commercial pressures that steer conventional publishers towards familiar names, we are able to take a bold and brave approach. At our first year celebratory seminar, the sculptor Richard Wentworth, a contributor to our first “Conversation Piece” feature “There’s no such thing as British art”, commented on our willingness to try new things despite the fact that they are untested and might fail. The digital format of BAS allows for an openness and audacity that injects new life into the discipline. In our first issue we published three articles by early career researchers. Their essays represent the spectrum of work being undertaken in the discipline today, from Georgina Cole’s focus on the eighteenth-century rivalry between Gainsborough and Reynolds, to Kara Fiedorek’s investigation of the mystical resonances of lantern slides, and Dr
What projects do you have on the horizon?
I will also have the opportunity to stretch my intellectual legs in a Centresupported exploration of middlebrow visual culture. Through a series of events and conversations, we will interrogate the term, its relationship to British art, the inherent qualities of middlebrow works, and the changing modes of circulation and reception that have maintained the middlebrow aesthetic’s appeal to a broad audience from the eighteenth to twentieth centuries.
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Johan Joseph Showing, Telling, Zoffany, Seeing: Queen Exhibiting CharlotteSouth Asia in Britain, 1900–Now (detail), 1771, oil on canvas, Royal Collection Trust, © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2016
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YCBA Programmes and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA Special Exhibitions 2 February - 30 April Enlightened PrincessesL Carolina, Augusta, Charlotte, and the Shaping of the Modern World This exhibition will be the first to explore the instrumental roles played by three German princesses, who married into the British family. Caroline of Ansbach (1683-1737), Augusta of Saxe-Gotha (1719-1772), and Charlotte of MecklenbergStrelitz (1744-1818) all played an important part in the shaping of their nation’s culture.
7 April–6 August Art in Focus: The British Castle-A Symbol in Stone An initiative of the Center’s Student Guide program, this exhibition brings together a selection of paintings that examine anew the history, architectur and literary of the English castle.
25 January, 17:30 Lecture and Book Signing Going Bust: Bankruptcy, Patronage, and Power in John Scarlett Davis’s “interior of the British Institution” Catherine Roach, Assistant Professor, Department of Art History, Virginia Commonwealth University
1 February, 17:30 Exhibition Opening Lecture “Skill’d in each art”: Royal Consorts, Culture, and Politics at the Eighteenth-Century Court Joanna Marschener, Senior Curator at Historic Royal Palaces, London, and exhibition lead curator
8 March, 17:30 Lecture and Performance Harmonious Hanoverians Nicholas McGegan, internationallu renowned baroque music specialist, and Music Director, Philharmonica Baroque Orchastra and Chorale
28 and 29 March; 4, 5, and 12 April, 17:30 Paul Mellon Lectures Searching for the Young Soul Rebels: Style, Music, and Art in London 1956-1969 Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, The Institute of Fine Arts, New York University
7 February, 17:30 Performance Royal Pleasures: An Evening of Eighteenth-Century Court Dance Edith Lalonger and Ricardo Barros, baroque dancers, and Mercurius Company, on period instruments
Select Center Events 24 January, 17:30 Lecture and Book Signing The Remembrance of Slavery in Material Culture James Walvin, Professor of History Emeritus, University of York,UK
1 March, 17:30 Lecture Foundlings and Philanthropy in Eighteenth-Century London John Styes, Research Professor in History, University of Hertfordshire
To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programs, visit britishart.yale.edu.
John Richards RA, Corfe Castle, Dorset, 1764, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection January 2016 — No. 5
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