Januar y 2018 / No. 8 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 (Maternity leave) Archives and Library Assistant Natasha Held (Maternity cover) Assistant Archivist and Records Manager Jenny Hill Cataloguer: Auction Catalogues Mary Peskett Smith
Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar
Digital Manager Tom Scutt
Research Fellow and Filmmaker Jonathan Law
Events Manager Ella Fleming
Advisory Council
Finance Officer Linda Constantine
Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Alixe Bovey, Courtauld Institute of Art Christopher Breward, University of Edinburgh Anthony Geraghty, University of York Richard Marks, Art Historian and Curator Martin Myrone, Tate Britain Lynda Nead, Birkbeck Andrew Saint, English Heritage MaryAnne Stevens, Art Historian and Curator Simon Wallis, The Hepworth Wakefield Shearer West, University of Sheffield
Editor Baillie Card
Board of Governors
Office Manager Suzannah Pearson Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Finance Officer Barbara Ruddick
Editor Emily Lees Fellowships, Grants, and Communications Officer Harriet Fisher Director’s Assistant Bryony Botwright-Rance
Peter Salovey, President of Yale University Ben Polak, Provost of Yale University Amy Meyers, Director of Yale Center for British Art Stephen Murphy, Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Yale University
HR Manager Barbara Waugh
Design
Receptionist Stephen O’Toole
Baillie Card and Harriet Fisher Template by Cultureshock Media
Buildings Officer George Szwejkowski
Contact us
Brian Allen Fellow Jessica Feather
B
Senior Research Fellow Hugh Belsey
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 2018 – No.8
Director’s Note 2 Research Projects and Events Feature: Cumbrian Cosmopolitanisms 4 Research Culture at the Paul Mellon Centre 8 AA XX 100 10 Landscape Now 12 The British Country House 14 Chronicling the RA Summer Exhibition 16 Write on Art 18 Thinking about Exhibitions 19 Fellowships and Grants No Man’s Land 20 The Northbrook Project at the Carnegie Museum of Art 24 Publications British Art Studies 26 New Publications Page 28 Drawing Room Display 29 Collections Giles Waterfield’s Archive and Library 30 Paul Joyce Archive 32 PMC Events Calendar 34 PMC Profile 36 YCBA Events Calendar 37
Front cover: Li Yuan-chia often photographed his interventions (here tomatoes balanced on wooden blocks) in the gardens and grounds around the LYC Museum. Image courtesy of the LYC Foundation and The University of Manchester.
Director’s Note How often do artists and art historians talk to each other? Not often enough, perhaps; and one of the great pleasures of being at the PMC is the opportunity it offers to bring scholarly and artistic practitioners into productive dialogue. The stimulating conversations that can ensue were much in evidence during our recent Public Lecture Course, Britain, South Asia: Entangled Histories, which featured fascinating talks by the artists Said Adrus, David Alesworth, and Sophie Ernst, as well as presentations by curators and art historians. The same was true of our recent conference, Landscape Now, the third in a series of such events organised in collaboration with our colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art and at the Huntington. Two days of intensely stimulating papers and conversation were immeasurably enriched by the contributions of artists such as Anna Falcini, Val Williams, and Corinne Silva. Our journal, British Art Studies, has also just introduced a new audiovisual feature, In the Artist’s Words, which presents images made by an artist and their own words side-by-side. Today, it seems, the interests of the scholarly and the artistic communities are converging in important ways: artists are increasingly working with archival materials, and acting in ways that resemble the practice of historians, geographers, and art historians; meanwhile, scholars are becoming ever more self-aware about the fact that their practice, too, is performative and creative, and ever more confident in
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essaying new forms of work that take place outside the conventional structures and boundaries of the discipline. We at the PMC will continue to explore these kinds of creative conversation. This January, we are working with the artist Jeremy Deller on a series of talks entitled The Look of Music, which will feature leading figures from the world of music, set design, and graphic art. Similarly, our new Public Lecture Course Thinking About Exhibitions: Interpretation, Reconstruction, and Curation will engage not only with the longer history of exhibitions in British art, but also with the ways in which contemporary artists approach the exhibition form. Bringing such artists into our discussions can help us look afresh at the historical material that we, as art historians, more typically engage with; it can also break down the unhelpful prejudices and unhealthy divisions that have often discouraged our different communities from talking to one another. For anyone who gets a thrill from the smell of paint at an art school as well as that of old books in a library, this new form of interdisciplinarity can only be good news. Mark Hallett Director of Studies
Screenshot from Issue 7 of British Art Studies, showing a still from Inga Fraser’s feature “From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky”.
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Cumbrian cosmopolitanisms Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar introduces his research on the archives of the artist Li Yuan-chia, as part of the PMC’s London, Asia project.
The LYC Museum & Art Gallery, located in the village of Banks astride Hadrian’s Wall, showcased the work of more than 300 artists between 1972 and 1983. Its transformation from a dilapidated barn into a hyperactive space for art was the single-minded effort of artist Li Yuanchia (1929–1994), whose initials gave the museum its name. Li acquired the barn from the painter Winifred Nicholson, whose work was showcased in four separate exhibitions at the LYC Museum. Li also showed the work of Winifred’s former husband, Ben Nicholson; daughter, Kate; and grandson, David. Around this familial nucleus was an exhibition programme of prodigious range and eclecticism, it mixed local artists (Andy Christian, Susie Honour) with totemic national figures (Paul Nash, Barbara Hepworth) and contemporary artists, now of international renown (Lygia Clark, Andy Goldsworthy), but then barely known in Britain. Li Yuan-chia produced a large body of hand-tinted photographs in the 1990s. This example is from the John Rylands Library’s collection of the working copies. Li selected and marked the ones he considered finished artworks, which are in the collection of the LYC Foundation. Image courtesy of the LYC Foundation and The University of Manchester.
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The programme was indebted to Li’s circuitous cosmopolitanism, his commitment to art as a mode of experimentation, and his simultaneous engagement with the everyday and the transcendent. The initial vehicle for his artistic explorations was “the Point”—the “origin and end of creation”. Originally a spot of colour or mark in monochromatic paintings and reliefs, it eventually took the form of magnetised objects that could be moved around on metallic discs. He called these magnetic works “toys”, inviting active audience participation. Li was also a poet, designer-maker, and curator—of art and social interaction. For him art was social interaction. Born in Kwangsi, China, Li moved to Taiwan in 1949, where he was part of the influential Tan-Fan Group of artists
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experimenting with abstraction. In 1962 he moved to Bologna, where he was associated with the Punto Group of artists. An invitation to show at Paul Keeler and David Medalla’s Signals Gallery brought him to London in 1966. He also had three solo exhibitions at Lisson Gallery between 1967 and 1969. But London’s regard for Li was not wholly reciprocated; a trip to Boothby in 1968, at his friend Nick Sawyer’s invitation, saw him settle there, opening the LYC Museum in 1972. The Museum consumed Li. He built it himself—undertaking all building, plumbing, and electrical work. It hosted four new exhibitions a month, each accompanied by a catalogue that he designed and printed. Apart from galleries, LYC Museum had a children’s room, library, performance space, printing press, communal kitchen, Right: The LYC Museum included an Art Room for children and ran a regular programme of activities. This image is from the LYC Museum event album, year unknown. Image courtesy of the LYC Foundation and The University of Manchester.
Left: Li Yuan-chia standing at the porch of the LYC Museum. The window was designed and made by artist David Nash. Image courtesy of the LYC Foundation and The University of Manchester.
and garden. It was an open space for the multiple possibilities of art. The artist Shelagh Wakely, who exhibited at the LYC Museum in 1979, saw the Museum as “a work of his [Li’s]”. It was an example of social practice before such a thing was named and tamed. And after its closure in 1983, it became the site of Li’s remarkable experimentation with handtinted photographs. The networks and practices that the LYC Museum enabled and enriched have yet to be studied widely. Li’s own friendships and correspondence, for example with the concrete poet and Benedictine monk, dom sylvester houédard, or the pioneering sound artist, Delia Derbyshire, Li’s assistant at LYC Museum (1976–77), also remain largely unexplored.
The LYC Museum is an exemplary site from which to consider the historic entanglements that have the potential to enrich and expand existing histories of British art—a central concern of the Paul Mellon Centre’s collaborative research project, London, Asia. The archives of Li Yuan-chia, dom sylvester houédard, and Delia Derbyshire are housed at the John Rylands Library, Manchester. The John Rylands Library is one of four public collections from which I am curating an exhibition in May 2018 at the Manchester Art Gallery in conversation with the AHRC-funded Black Artists and Modernism project led by the University of Arts London and Middlesex University.
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Research Culture at the Paul Mellon Centre Deputy Director for Research Sarah Turner outlines the Centre’s approach to research and events. The origins of the noun “research” date from the late sixteenth century and an old French word, recerche, which translates as the “act of searching closely”. Research, and all its associated acts, involves that process of searching something out. That something might be, for example, a painting that has been lost from sight for years, an artistic career that has been forgotten, or a new perspective that alters how we look at and think about an aspect of art history. Searching closely often involves combing through archives and libraries, conversations with colleagues, committing our ideas to paper, or contributing them to debate through conferences and events. Research can be revelatory and enlightening, but it can also be frustrating and challenging, especially when dead-ends or barriers are encountered. At the Paul Mellon Centre, we aim to provide a home for research at every stage of investigation. As a research centre, it is a physical place where research is carried out using our collections, as well as somewhere ideas can be tested and shared through our seminars, conferences, and events with the wider community. Our grants and fellowships support research; our print and digital publications, as well as the recordings of our events that we publish on our website, are the ways in which we share this work with the wider world. We hope the Centre creates – both physically and virtually – an open research culture where debate, collaboration, and communication are actively supported and encouraged. There is still much to search out in relation to the history of British art. The events programme for the Spring Term hopefully offers a sense of the Centre’s developing research culture and networks, and of exciting new work in our field: a series titled The Look of Music co-organised with the artist Jeremy Deller; a trio of talks connected to our British Country House project, and a conference on the cross-cultural relationship between Britain and France are just some of the highlights.
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The Look of Music
Andy Peyman in Tehran, 1990s Photograph courtesy of Jeremy Deller
What does music look like? What are the interrelations between the sounds of rock and pop and the aesthetics and images they produce? In this series of four specially-commissioned talks, the artist Jeremy Deller has invited designers, musicians, and writers to explore the look of music through presentations, discussion, and conversation. Talks will take place in different venues in central London and will start at 6.30pm.
10th January 2018 Jeremy Deller 18th January 2018 Jon Savage 24th January 2018 Es Devlin
A series of talks organised by Jeremy Deller with the Paul Mellon Centre January 2018
31st January 2018 Neil Tennant, Mark Farrow & Scott King Tickets are £5 but must be booked in advance at www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk For more information see our Events Calendar on pg. 34 January 2018 — No. 8
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AA XX 100
Conference co-organisers Elizabeth Darling (Oxford Brookes University) and Lynne Walker (Institute of Historical Research, University of London) report on AA XX 100: AA Women and Architecture in Context, 1917-2017, which took place in November at the AA School of Architecture and the PMC. This international conference took place as part of the AA XX 100 project that celebrates the centenary of women’s admission to the AA School of Architecture. To date it has produced an oral history project, exhibition, book, and many other related events. The aim of the conference, developed in collaboration with the PMC, was to bring together historians, students, architects, and other practitioners to evaluate histories of women in architecture in the twentieth century, problematise contemporary architectural issues and practice, and look to the future. The conference opened with a keynote discussion between Samantha Hardingham (the AA’s Acting Director) and Sadie
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Morgan. The discussion of Morgan’s career and role as a member of the National Infrastructure Committee introduced at the outset core themes of women’s agency and collaboration that would be highlighted and explored in subsequent sessions. Serendipitously, Morgan’s practice, dRMM, had that week won the RIBA Stirling Prize for its Hastings Pier regeneration, which was seen to expand what architecture could be and to redefine the role of the architect. This mapped onto another dominant theme running across the conference—that of challenging conventional modes of professional practice. Thus histories of the recent past demonstrated the continuous presence
de Rijke Marsh Morgan Architects (dRMM), Hastings Pier Regeneration, 2016. Photographer: Francesco Montaguti. Image courtesy dRMM.
AA Women and Architecture
of feminism in architecture. This thread ran from the Open Design Office in the US in the 1970s to the radical architectural production discussed by the keynote panel, which included members from the co-operative practices Matrix and muf, as well as Parlour, the twenty-firstcentury Australian platform that offers a transnational model for change and support for architecture informed by feminist theory. Much discussion focused on future strategies for inclusivity and diversity, especially with respect to race, gender, and class. These strategies included the documentation of women’s practice (for example through the recently commissioned Global Encyclopedia of Women in Architecture, 1960–2015), and
initiatives such as Built by Us that support BAME students into the construction industry or, as in the case of the Swedish group MYCKET, develop participatory modes of design with diverse communities. Conference papers also drew attention to little-known practitioners and discussed the nature of architectural education, while a keynote panel interrogated issues of commemoration, reclamation, and revision in historical practice. The atmosphere was one of collegial and constructive debate, and delegates departed with a sense of progress having been made and of the future looking decidedly positive.
The conference in session. Image courtesy Architectural Association Photo Library.
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Landscape Now Director of Studies Mark Hallett reports on the recent Landscape Now conference, the third collaborative event between the Paul Mellon Centre, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Huntington. The Centre recently hosted the two-day conference Landscape Now, the third of a series of international conferences organised in collaboration with the Yale Centre for British Art and the Huntington. In devising these events, the organisers have sought to choose topics that are not only capacious and significant, but that feel timely - topics that address an issue, a genre or a medium that seems to be attracting new or renewed scholarly interest of an ambitious and imaginative sort. This year’s event followed on from two exceptionally stimulating precedents: Portraiture as Interaction: The Spaces and Interfaces of the British Portrait, which was held in Pasadena in December 2016, and Photography and Britishness, which was held in New Haven in November 2017. Our own conference, which featured a raft of top-quality papers, and a brilliant keynote lecture by Tim Barringer, provoked similarly lively discussion and created a thrilling communal buzz. Well-established and junior scholars from a variety of disciplines shared their freshly minted research on a diverse range of topics that were extraordinarily international in scope, that ranged freely across different media, and that dealt with both historic and contemporary materials and issues. We enjoyed fresh perspectives on the highly charged topic of the Anthropocene; on the landscape imagery of colonial Australia and
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New Zealand; on the work of artists such as Paul Nash, Jem Southam, John Constable, Alex Hartley, Thomas Cole, Frederick Church, Benjamin Latrobe and Thomas Girtin; and on the ways in which landscape imagery has been curated and exhibited. Artists, too, offered rich papers: Val Williams and Corinne Silva discussed their recently established and ongoing photographic project, which engages with the work of the great local historian W.G. Hoskins and the photographer F.L. Attenborough; Anna Falcini skilfully wove examples of her own photographic practice into a presentation on the ways in which the Hoo Peninsula has been presented by filmmakers such as David Lean and Stanley Kubrick; and the textile artist David Alesworth explored those of his works in which he maps different kinds of architectural grids onto, and into, the surfaces of well-worn Paradise Carpets. What was most striking about the conference, at least to my eyes, was the sense of intellectual fluidity and generosity that it generated. Landscape felt like an art-historical category that was being freshly opened up, in which new paradigms are still in the process of being defined. Similarly, participants from very different disciplines – arthistorians, geographers, literary critics, artists and historians – seemed especially open to each other’s ideas and approaches, as did scholars and practitioners of different generations. Landscape, on the evidence of this conference at least, is a dynamic and rapidly evolving area of study; all of the participating institutions look forward to maintaining this intellectual momentum in the years to come. All of the presentations in Landscape Now were filmed and can be viewed in the “Recordings” section of the Centre’s website at: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on/recordings.
[Spreading Oak with Seated Figure] (detail), Unknown (British), 1850s. Image courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Hans2018 P. Kraus Jr.,82007 January — No.
The British Country House Deputy Director for Grants and Publications Martin Postle reports on recent developments in one of the Centre’s flagship research projects.
As we approach the end of 2017, work on our PMC research project, “Collection and Display: The British Country House”, gathers pace. The project, which focuses upon eight Country House “case studies”, is to be launched online in the autumn of 2019. Over the past few months, we have made visits to several houses that feature in the project. In August, we spent several days at Trewithen, Cornwall, investigating manuscripts and documentary material relating to its little-known picture collection. Among the most exciting discoveries was a series of letters written in the 1750s that provide chapter and verse on the circumstances surrounding the commissioning of a late portrait by Thomas Hudson of Cambridge undergraduate, John Heywood. Accompanying us on the visit was the Centre’s Research Fellow and Filmmaker, Jon Law, who took footage of research in action as well as the house itself. Jon also joined us to film the Study Day held in September at Petworth House, West Sussex, where participants and members of the research team combed the building, exploring not only the staterooms and grand staircases but the Old Library where Turner set up his easel, and the fascinating eighteenth-century Print Room. Also in September, we visited Raynham Hall, Norfolk, to photograph the entire painting collection, as well as the
stunning William Kent interiors. As part of the research project at Raynham, the collection will be fully catalogued and aspects of the extensive on-site archives relating to the collection and its display will be investigated. In October, members of the research team participated in a two-day conference held at the Hunterian Museum, Glasgow, and Mount Stuart, on the Isle of Bute, focusing on the collection of the 3rd Earl of Bute. Again, the opportunity was taken by Jon Law to undertake filming for our own project, as we made further inroads into the house’s superlative collections and untapped archives. Later in October, we gathered together at the Centre for a workshop involving scholars engaged in research on the houses that feature in our project, as well as those with a close interest in the subject. As well as those houses mentioned already, we reviewed our other “case studies” including Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire, West Wycombe House, Buckinghamshire, Castle Howard, Yorkshire, and Mells Manor, Somerset. As we all agreed, while there is much to be achieved in terms of the broader aims and outcomes of the project, there is also a great deal of positive energy to be harnessed, in a field of study that affords tremendous scope for fresh research opportunities and initiatives.
The Belisarius Room, Raynham Hall, Norfolk. Image courtesy Paul Mellon Centre.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Chronicling the RA Summer Exhibition Editor Baillie Card writes about new research and digitised materials to be published in June 2018.
As readers of past PMC Notes will know, to coincide with the 250th anniversary of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy (RA), the Paul Mellon Centre will be publishing The RA Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. Appearing in June 2018, this online publication will have a newly designed website and be freely accessible. It will feature short essays for each of the 250 years of the Summer Exhibition, along with a digitised copy of each year’s exhibition catalogue. The essays have been written by some eighty authors, who are scholars, artists, critics, and curators. Most of the entries present scholarly research, but others are personal reminiscences of childhood visits to the Summer Exhibition or of the practicalities of staging the show. While most of the entries are written, some take the form of commissioned films, and all tell a unique story about their given year. Across the exhibition’s impressive chronology, these narratives recover the chatter of art critics and the tensions of artistic rivalry; figures of great renown and ones of failure alike. They explore subjects like censorship, gender politics, patronage, international influences from European history painting to American Abstract Impressionism, and the role of the Summer Exhibition alongside other venues for displaying British art. Each essay will provide a tiny window onto the wealth of material displayed at its corresponding exhibition. Taken together, they evoke the richness and multitude of the exhibition rooms at the different RA buildings, hung floor-to-ceiling with works of art. The digitised and fully searchable catalogues will equally provide a wealth of material, the newfound availability of which will hopefully spur fresh research into the unique histories of the Summer Exhibition.
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William Holman Hunt, The Finding of the Saviour in the Temple (detail), 1860. Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla announces a new art writing prize. In late 2016, the world of art history was shaken by the news that the last exam board offering the art history A-level had decided to drop the subject. This posed many questions about the future of the field, triggering op-ed pieces in newspapers and petitions for the course’s survival. The news also brought about some soul-searching, particularly at the Paul Mellon Centre, whose raison d’être is to support academic research in the field of British art history. It became readily apparent that to fulfil our mission, we also needed to support and encourage the study of the subject at a young age. Not too long after the art history A-level was reinstated, and thus saved, by a different exam board, an opportunity to collaborate with our colleagues at Art UK resulted in the development of the Write on Art prize, which launched in November 2016. Write on Art aims to promote the study of art history amongst pupils at schools and colleges, and to bring members of the public closer to the great art held in the nation’s galleries through a digital platform. The prize consists of two
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categories for Years 10/11 and Years 12/13. For each category, students are asked to select one artwork from the Art UK website and to convince the reader why that particular work is interesting and why it, or other similar artworks, deserve to be explored further. Winners will receive prizes of up to £500 for each category and the opportunity to showcase their writing on the PMC and Art UK websites. Write on Art is fortunate to have a panel of prominent figures in the art world judging the prize. The panel includes Gabriele Finaldi, Director of the National Gallery; Jackie Wullschlager, Chief Art Critic of the Financial Times; Turner Prizewinner Jeremy Deller; cultural historian and broadcaster Janina Ramirez; and David Dibosa, Course Leader for the MA in Curating and Collections at Chelsea College of Arts. Find out more about the prize at writeonart.org. The deadline for submissions is 5pm on Monday, 26 February 2018.
William Payne, Private View of the Royal Academy (detail), 1858. Image courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Thinking about Exhibitions Nermin Abdulla introduces the Centre’s Public Lecture Course for Spring 2018. This spring the Paul Mellon Centre will run a course titled Thinking about Exhibitions: Interpretation, Reconstruction, and Curation as part of its Public Lecture Course programme. Led by the Centre’s Director of Studies, Mark Hallett, it will explore some of the exhibitions that he has written about over the course of his career. It will also offer a behind-thescenes look at the research, writing, borrowing, design, and installation processes that have underpinned the exhibitions he himself has been involved in curating, including Hogarth, which took place at Tate Britain in 2007, and two displays that will open next year: The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, at the Royal Academy, and George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field, which will open at the Yale Center for British Art in the autumn, before travelling to the Holburne Museum in Bath in the spring of 2019. Thinking about Exhibitions
will feature artists, curators, and art historians as guest speakers over its five sessions. This term’s course will take a slightly different format from previous years. The first four sessions will follow the traditional Public Lecture Course model, with a lecture followed by a question and answer period. The final session will be a group discussion that will bring together all of the themes discussed in the preceding lectures. Each lecture will be recorded and made available to the public through the Centre’s website. Thinking about Exhibitions will begin on Thursday, 8 March 2018 and will run every Thursday for three weeks. There will be a one-week break for the Easter holiday and the course will begin again on 5 April and conclude on 12 April. Registration for the course will open on Monday, 22 January 2018 at 10am through the Centre’s website.
January January2018 2016——No. No. 85
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No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War The Impressions Gallery in Bradford was awarded a Curatorial Research Grant for their project on women’s photography in the First World War. In this interview, Fellowships, Grants, and Communications Officer Harriet Fisher asks curator Pippa Oldfield about the resulting exhibition.
Mairi 20 Chisholm, Irene ‘Winkie’ Gartside-Spaight in No Man’s Land (detail), c.1916© National Library of Scotland.
Can you tell us about the early origins of the exhibition?
her excellent access to record women in the auxiliary services at the Western Front, in images that present the British The programming team at Impressions armed forces as efficient, ordered, and Gallery had early discussions about how hierarchical. For her private interest, she we would commemorate and respond also made pictures of the ruined towns to the First World War centenary, and and devastated battlefields, and a few of what we could offer that hadn’t received these are in the exhibition as well. much attention. As a photographic By contrast, Florence Farmborough took charity, part of our mission is ‘to help photographs in an independent capacity, people understand the world through as a Red Cross nurse at the Russian Front. photography’, and we often focus on Amazingly, she managed to hang on to her excluded viewpoints or overlooked plate camera and tripod for most of the histories. For my doctoral research, I’d war, developing glass plates in tents or investigated how women have engaged makeshift darkrooms where she could. Her with photography in situations of conflict images are important not only for having in the Americas, from the Mexican been made by a woman, but for depicting Revolution onwards. It made sense to the Russian Front, which was much less expand that thinking to the British context. photographed than the Western. As far as I’m aware, it’s the first show to Mairi Chisholm was a really striking look at how women photographed the exponent of snapshot photography. She First World War and its legacies. was just 18 when she volunteered as an ambulance driver at the Western Front The exhibition highlights photography by with her friend Elsie Knocker. The two set up their own First Aid post in Pervyse, three women in particular. Why did you Flanders, just yards from the trenches, and pick them? Chisholm recorded her intense life under Contrary to popular belief, there were fire. She recorded the casualties of war, quite a number of women who used but she also had a mischievous sense of photography to depict the effects of war fun and vitality. Some of her most striking and record their experiences of these images show her friends and colleagues women, so I thought long and hard about making the best of incredibly hard which to include in the exhibition. circumstances: playing with pets, rowing a I felt it was essential to feature Olive boat they nicknamed ‘the Punt at Henley’, Edis for her pioneering role as the first or joking around on a makeshift see-saw. woman to be officially commissioned to photograph a war zone. This status gave
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You also invited three contemporary artists to create works inspired by the conflict. Based on their practices, how has war photography evolved? To take just one example: we tend to think of photojournalism as the best way to ‘do’ war photography, when of course that is only one approach. Aftermath photography, which is a relatively recent practice, looks at the long-term effects of war and its traces, rather than dramatic moments of combat action or graphic images of suffering. Chloe Dewe Mathews’ series Shot at Dawn perfectly exemplifies this approach. She researched the tragic
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stories of soldiers who were executed for desertion by firing squad, found a number of locations where men were shot, and photographed these sites at the same time of year and same time of day. Her images are incredibly powerful, precisely because no violence is explicitly shown: your imagination fills in the blanks of the last moments of these men ritually executed by their own side.
Chloe Dewe Matthews, Private Joseph Byers Private Andrew Evans Time unknown / 6.2.1915 Private George E. Collins 07:30 / 15.2.1915 Six Farm, Loker, West-Vlaanderen (detail). Shot at Dawn is commissioned by the Ruskin School of Art at the University of Oxford as part of 14–18 NOW, WW1 Centenary Art Commissions
Why do you think the female perspective in First World War photography has been neglected until now? I think it’s fair to say that war is conventionally assumed to be the concern of men, and that women’s experiences of conflict are seen to be peripheral or somehow less authentic than those of the fighting soldier. People also tend to have a very narrow conception of war photography: that it is very risky and a masculine, even macho, undertaking. Historically, women were generally prohibited from the military (and certainly from combat positions as soldiers), and discouraged from ‘hard news’ photography.
How has the exhibition been received at Impressions Gallery? There have already been thousands of visitors, about a quarter of whom are under 25, and we have received invariably positive responses. The show is also going on tour in 2018 to Bristol Cathedral and The Turnpike in Lancashire, and then to Bishop Auckland Town Hall in 2019. No Man’s Land: Women’s Photography and the First World War was on view at the Impressions Gallery, Bradford, from 7 October to 30 December 2017. www.impressions-gallery.com
This interview has been edited from its original form. To read the full conversation with Pippa, please visit: www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/whats-on. news/nomansland
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Joshua Reynolds, detail of Ann Franks Day (Lady Ann Fenhoulet) (detail), 1760, oil on canvas, 92.71 x 79.69 cm. Collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (Inv. 74.7.23). Painting before conservation treatment, 2016.
Funding for research that will be published as a digital resource has been offered by the Paul Mellon Centre since 2015. With applications considered each Autumn, these grants are intended to support a curator or research scholar undertaking a project that will result in a digital output such as a virtual exhibition, catalogue, or database. In 2016, one grant was awarded to Louise Lippincott, Curator of Fine Arts at the Carnegie Museum of Art (CMOA), Pittsburgh, to investigate, reconstruct, and track the provenance of all the pictures that were or are the property of the Baring family, the Earls of Northbrook. Seven of these paintings have found their way in to the collection of CMOA, with close to 200 additional works having been located in public and private collections worldwide. One notable Northbrook collection item that has found its way to Pittsburgh is Joshua Reynolds’ 1760 portrait of Anne Franks Day (later Lady Fenhoulet, d. 1761). The painting had been badly damaged in one or more fires in the nineteenth century, and has suffered from a number of coarse restorative interventions. Marc Aronson, Chief Conservator at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA), consulted on the painting’s restoration, and using a mezzotint after the painting by James McArdell, the CMOA conservation staff have worked on the painting to recapture some of Reynold’s original conception. The resulting research has found tangible form in a semi-permanent display in the CMOA’s fine art galleries, and will later be enriched by an online resource published to serve as a comprehensive and lasting record of the project team’s process, methodologies, and outcomes. In the public gallery, the collections data is presented through interactive tablets that
The Northbrook Project at the Carnegie Museum of Art
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Joshua Reynolds, detail of Ann Franks Day (Lady Ann Fenhoulet) (detail), 1760, oil on canvas, 92.71 x 79.69 cm. Collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (Inv. 74.7.23). Painting after conservation treatment, 2017.
Digital Manager Tom Scutt reports on the latest work funded by a Paul Mellon Centre Digital Project Grant at The Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh.
chronicle the stories of each of those seven paintings, revealing a rich narrative of social, economic, and political transactions. The broader collection is presented in the form of an interactive terminal that encourages visitors to ask “How did the artwork in this gallery get here?”. Visitors are able to track each artwork’s movement across time and space, and the formation and dissolution of the entire Northbrook collection over time. Markers that represent each work fly back and forth across the world as time progresses. Through the visualisations, patterns clearly emerge: the shift of centres for the art market is visible as objects move from continental Europe to London and then across the Atlantic to new collections in North America. This display is a springboard to further study, innovation, and collaboration in the digital humanities, and is part of ‘Art Tracks’, a larger initiative led by the museum. This project has sought to turn provenance information into structured data by building a suite of open source software tools. These tools transform traditional written provenance records into searchable data, with an emphasis on existing data standards and a strong focus on building tools that are useful (and usable) across multiple institutions. In collaboration with the YCBA and the Freer|Sackler Gallery, CMOA has worked to outline a model with which to standardise and share the provenance of collection objects using Linked Data. The visualisations that the research team have produced for the Northbrook display offer a tantalising glimpse at the potential possibilities that being able to systematically work with large inter-connected data sets may offer for future research. Documentation of the team’s research can be found at museumprovenance.org.
January 2018 — No. 8
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British Art Studies, Issue 7 Editor Baillie Card introduces two special features in the latest issue of our journal.
Our open access journal British Art Studies (BAS) had its two-year anniversary in November, maked by the publication of Issue 7. The journal’s contents to date include over eighty features and articles, which cover subjects in painting, sculpture, architecture, print culture, installation, ceramics, and photography. The journal website has now received nearly 50,000 unique visitors, a figure that has grown continually since its launch. Issue 7, which can be accessed for free online (along with the entire backlist), includes three articles and four features. It introduces a new feature format, which we have called “In the Artist’s Words”, developed and realised by the art historian and curator Inga Fraser with her short film about Paul Nash, titled “From a Sheet of Paper to the Sky”. The film combines images from Nash’s artistic output with an audio track of Inga reading Nash’s own words on design, fine art, and patterns as found in nature. Through this juxtaposition, it argues that Nash saw many interconnections between these three forms of imagery. The feature continues the BAS mission to encourage and explore non-traditional ways of presenting scholarly arguments, and we hope other authors will propose their own In the Artist’s Words features for future issues.
Issue 7 also contains the exciting Look First feature on the Famous Women dinner service, coordinated by Hana Leaper. This set of fifty plates was commissioned by the art historian Kenneth Clark, and his wife Jane Clark, from the Bloomsbury artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. Executed between 1932 and 1934, the painted plates each represent a different famous woman: there are twelve each depicting Queens, Dancers and Actresses, Women of Letters, and Beauties, respectively (a further two depict the artists themselves). Publishing online has allowed us to illustrate this feature profusely with high-resolution colour reproductions of the plates, their likely source images, and comparative objects from the Bloomsbury world. The project will have a final component, to be published in Spring 2018: a filmed conversation between Hana Leaper, the renowned American artist Judy Chicago, and The Women’s Art League. Their talk will examine the intersections between feminism, hospitality, and domesticity, particularly in relation to Famous Women, Judy Chicago’s installation The Dinner Party, and recent contemporary art. Please stay tuned and read it online at britishartstudies.ac.uk.
Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, Famous Women (six details), 1932-4, ceramic. Copyright the Estate of Vanessa Bell, courtesy of Henrietta Garnett, and the Estate of Duncan Grant. All rights reserved, DACS 2017. Digital image courtesy of Piano Nobile (Robert Travers Works of Art Limited).
January 2018 — No. 8
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
New Publications Page Editor Emily Lees writes about the Centre’s new publications page, which lists print and digital publications together in a single portal.
We are very excited to announce the launch of our brand new publications page on the PMC website. This fantastic interface gives us the ability to showcase our books, journal issues, and online publications together in one stylish new presentation. The new page provides an opportunity to appreciate for the first time the full range of projects published by the Centre and the breadth of research and scholarship that we support. We can now promote all of our titles much more effectively and can create links between them and our events and teaching programme. We have already unveiled our new autumn publications, presented a selection of books that complemented our “Entangled Histories” Public Lecture Course, and highlighted our support of the research for the Pevsner Architectural Guides. We look forward to curating many more feature sections that will tie our publications into all aspects of the Centre’s activities and allow us to promote them in new and creative ways. A search function also allows visitors to the website the ability to filter publications, whether print or digital, by key words. Please take a moment to visit the new page, explore our full list and keep an eye on our recent and forthcoming publications. You can find it at: www.paulmellon-centre.ac.uk/publications/browse.
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Drawing Room Display Emily Lees discusses her archival exhibition on the history of PMC publishing, which will run from 19 January to 25 May.
The Centre’s next Drawing Room Display will focus on the history of our book publishing programme. Ever since the early 1970s, the PMC has collaborated with Yale University Press to publish a wide range of books on British art and architecture of all periods. Our display will highlight the variety and richness of the books that have emerged from this partnership. These publications have included important works of reference: dictionaries, diaries, collected letters, and catalogues raisonnés; contributions to significant book series, including the “Studies in British Art” series produced in association with the Yale Center for British Art; and prize-winning monographs that have become classics in their field. The display will chart the history of our publishing programme through a selection of highlights from the list. We will look at some of the books that have had a profound effect on scholarship or that hold special significance for colleagues, authors, and friends of the Centre. We hope to illuminate the breadth of PMC publishing over the last five decades and look ahead to our plans for the future.
From left to right: Cutting from the Illustrated London News concerning the Paul Mellon Foundation, April 29, 1967. AR: PMC8; Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times, 1971, LR: 7 HOGA(W).P; Publicity brochure announcing the first Studies in British Art publications, 1967, AR: PMC35/2/1/10a.
January 2018 — No. 8
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Giles Waterfield’s Archive and Library Archivist and Records Manager Charlotte Brunskill announces a new acquisition for the Centre’s collections.
The Centre is delighted to announce the recent acquisition of the Giles Waterfield Archive and Library. Giles Adrian Waterfield (1949-2016) was a man of many talents and interests. At different points in his career—and often simultaneously—he made his living as a director, curator, teacher, lecturer, adviser, and author. Appointed Director of the Dulwich Picture Gallery at the age of thirty, he spent the next seventeen years there transforming it from a rather neglected and down-at-heel institution into the vibrant and relevant museum it is today. Never one to conform, he left the Gallery before its much-hailed refurbishment was complete and instead found fulfilment in a variety of roles and ventures. From 1996 until his unexpected death of a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven, he was an expert adviser or trustee to a huge number of leading arts and heritage institutions. He was also, at various times, an associate lecturer at the Courtauld Institute of Art; Joint Director of the Attingham Trust; the lead curator on numerous exhibitions; and a successful author of both art-historical texts and fiction. His first novel, The Long Afternoon, won the McKitterick prize in 2001. Waterfield’s archive reflects all of these interests. It includes material relating to almost every aspect of his life—from childhood up to his death—and contains, for example, research notes and correspondence relating to the exhibition Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants’ Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery (2003–4) and the publication The People’s Galleries: Art Museums and Exhibitions in Victorian Britain, 1800–1914 (Yale University Press, 2015). It also conveys his long-standing interest in country houses and includes a small amount of material related to his uncle, Humphrey Waterfield, who created gardens at Hill Pasture, Essex, and Le Clos du Peyronnet, Menton. His library collection demonstrates the range of his research interests. It is rich in books on British art and architectural history, museum history, collecting, the artist’s studio, and the country house. Approximately 100 of these titles have been selected to fill gaps in the Centre’s Library
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holdings. A discrete group of books on servants and their life below stairs, an aspect of the history of the country house that the Centre has not collected before, has also been acquired. Waterfield built up a substantial collection of twentieth-century country house guidebooks in the course of his research, and the Centre has acquired about 300 of these, notably those on Scottish and Irish houses. The Waterfield Archive and Library will enhance existing strengths in the Centre’s holdings. The archival materials reveal much about the network of scholars, curators, publishers, and museums that shape modern discourses on art historical practice, while the library acquisitions substantially augment the Centre’s holdings on the architecture and daily life of the country house. We are very grateful to Horatia Harrod for generously donating the Archive and Library to the Centre. Only recently acquired, the Archive and Library Collection has not yet been catalogued, although basic entries for the books are available on the Library catalogue. Please contact Collections staff if you have any questions or would like to consult material.
Giles Waterfield. Image courtesy of the Giles Waterfield Archive, Paul Mellon Centre.
January 2018 — No. 8
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Paul Joyce Archive Archivist Georgina Lever describes the wealth of materials relating to architect George Edmund Street in the Paul Joyce Archive at the PMC. Having recently finished cataloguing the Oliver Millar Archive, I was excited to start work on another project: cataloguing the archive of Paul Joyce (1934–2014). A skilled architectural draughtsman and historian, Joyce gained a reputation as the “go to” expert on the work of the Victorian architect George Edmund Street (1824–1881). The archive contains a wealth of research material—from Joyce’s forensic notes on the features and fittings of Street’s churches, parsonages, and schools, to files of photographic images of buildings, cuttings from Victorian newspapers, and correspondence with scholars and writers including Nikolaus Pevsner and John Betjeman. The material mainly concerns Street’s original designs, but Joyce also monitored and documented any proposed alterations and redevelopments of the buildings. In the course of his research Joyce assembled an attractive collection of original drawings for eleven Street buildings, dating from 1855 to 1878. How he acquired them is a mystery, but they reflect Joyce’s keen eye towards the conservation and protection of Victorian design. Totalling over 100 original items, 40 drawings have been digitised and can be seen in the online catalogue. Many of these large-scale drawings (the biggest measures 985mm x 670 mm) are as precise and vivid as they were on the day they were drawn. They include features from the windows and bell turret of St Tysilio, Llandysilio, Wales, and distinctive polychrome brickwork. The Paul Joyce Archive is the second architectural archive acquired by the Centre (it joins the Dennis Sharp Archive, acquired in 2013) and reflects our ambition to acquire more material of this nature. The Paul Joyce Archive has been fully catalogued and is now live on the Collections section of our website. An online gallery also showcases further material from the archive: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/ collections/archive-collections/paul-joyce.
Left: George Edmund Street, Buttresses and Lower Part of Tower, All Saints, Boyne Hill, Berkshire (detail), September 1864 (PRJ/4/1/2) Above: George Edmund Street, Bell Turret, St Tysilio, Llandysilio, Wales (detail), 26 September 1867 (PRJ/4/8/22)
January 2018 — No. 8
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Events
Winter/Spring Calendar All events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated.
January 2018
25-26 January
February 2018
Conference 10 January, 18.30-20.30
Crossing the Channel: French
2 February, 12.30-14.00
The Look of Music: A Series of Talks
Refugee Artists in London (1870-
Research Lunch
Organised by Jeremy Deller with the
1904)
‘Nor is the figure a mere
Paul Mellon Centre
Tate Britain and Paul Mellon
theatrical portrait’: Exhibiting
Last Night a Brass Band Saved
Centre
and Reproducing Theatrical Portraits in London, 1830-1860
My Life Jeremy Deller (Artist)
31 January, 18.30-20.30
Barbican Centre
The Look of Music: A Series of Talks
Tessa Kilgarrif
Organised by Jeremy Deller with the
16 February, 12.30-14.00
18 January, 18.30-20.30
Paul Mellon Centre
Research Seminar
The Look of Music: A Series of Talks
Marriage
Public Art and its Publics in
Organised by Jeremy Deller with the
Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys),
Post-War Britain
Paul Mellon Centre
Mark Farrow (Art Firector, Farrow
Robert James Sutton
Bodies: Iggy Pop & Beyond
Design), and Scott King (University
John Savage (Writer &
of the Arts, London)
21 February
Broadcaster)
Barbican Centre
Research Seminar
Royal Academy
Title to be confirmed Peter Kerber
19 January, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch Re-assessing “liveliness” in Post-Reformation English Visual Culture Christina J Faraday 24 January, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch The Look of Music: A Series of Talks Organised by Jeremy Deller with the Paul Mellon Centre Stage Design Es Devlin London location to be confirmed
Es Devlin, Mirror Maze (detail), 2016. Image courtesy of Es Devlin Studio. 34
Opposite top: Claude Monet, Houses of Parliament, Sunlight Effect, 1903. Image courtesy of Brooklyn Museum, Bequest of Grace Underwood Barton (68.41.1).
28 February, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar The Lives and After-lives of Picture Displays at Castle Howard Christopher Ridgway
March 2018 2 March, 12.15-13.45 Research Lunch Cruikshank’s Alcoholics and The Addict in Austerity Susannah Walker 7 March, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar Patrons and Painters: Portraits by Joshua Reynolds and James Northcote at Trewithen, Cornwall Martin Postle 8 March-12 April, 18.30-20.30 Every Thursday evening except for 29 March Public Lecture Course Thinking About Exhibitions Mark Hallett
April 2018 12 April Conference Charles I: King and Collector Society of Antiquaries of London
Anthony van Dyck, Anthony van Dyck, Queen Henrietta Maria with Sir Jeffrey Hudson (detail), 1633. Image courtesy of National Gallery of Art, Washington.
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PMC Profile
Ella Fleming Harriet Fisher talks to Ella Fleming, Events Manager at the Centre.
How long have you worked at the PMC as Events Manager, and what did you do beforehand? I’ve worked at the Paul Mellon Centre for almost 10 years and have always been involved with the events programme. Before the PMC, I gained my History of Art and Design degree at Winchester School of Art. I then gained experience working at The Brick Lane Art Gallery and the Tate Press Office. How have the events at the PMC evolved over your time here? The events programme has dramatically grown during my time at the PMC. We have introduced a variety of regular free events to the programme and we
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now collaborate with many other art organisations in the UK and internationally, which has helped us grow and reach a wider audience than ever before. Has there been a ‘stand out’ favourite event of yours over your time working at the PMC? I would say that the Bedford Square Festival is the stand out event for me. We collaborated with fellow art, literary, and educational neighbours residing on Bedford Square and worked together to put on 30 free events across three-and-a-half days. It was a chance for us to try new event formats such as walking tours, theatrical performances, and spoken word events, which attracted a new audience of visitors.
Are there any exciting events in the works for the new year? Due to the success of last year’s Bedford Square Festival, we will be running it again next year from 4-7 July, 2018. We also have an exciting collaboration with the artist Jeremy Deller, who has invited Jon Savage (Writer & Broadcaster), Es Devlin (Stage Designer), Neil Tennant (Pet Shop Boys), Mark Farrow (Art Director, Farrow Design) and Scott King (University of the Arts, London) to explore the theme of “the look of music” over the course of four evening talks in January at venues across London.
YCBA Exhibitions and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA
7 March, 17.30
Exhibitions
Lectures and Talks
15 February - 27 May
14 February, 17.30
behind the Picture
The Paston Treasure: Microcosm
Exhibition Opening Lecture and
Spike Bucklow, Reader in Material
of the Known World
Panel Discussion
Culture, University of Cambridge
The seventeenth-century
The Paston Treasure:
painting The Paston Treasure (ca.
Microcosm of the Known World
3 April, 17.30
1663), an enigmatic masterpiece,
Andrew Moore, former Keeper of
Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture
makes its North American debut
Art, and Senior Curator, Norwich
The Sea, The Sea
this year at the Yale Center
Castle Museum & Art Gallery;
Hilton Als, staff writer and theater
for British Art in an exhibition
Francesca Vanke, Keeper of
critic for the New Yorker and
organized in partnership with the
Art and Curator of Decorative
Associate Professor of Writing at
Norwich Castle Museum & Art
Art, Norwich Castle Museum &
Columbia University
Gallery, UK.
Art Gallery; Nathan Flis, Head
The Paston Treasure: The Lives
of Exhibitions and Publications,
25 April, 17.30
3 April - 12 August
and Assistant Curator of
From the Wunderkammer to the
Celia Paul
Seventeenth-Century Paintings,
Public Museum: Hans Sloane’s
The Center will present an
Yale Center for British Art; Jessica
Empire of Curiosities and the
exhibition of work by the
David, Associate Conservator of
Creation of the British Museum
contemporary British artist Celia
Paintings, Yale Center for British
James Delbourgo, Associate
Paul (b. 1959) in spring 2018,
Art; and Edward Town, Head
Professor, History of Science and
the first in a series of three
of Collections Information and
Atlantic World, Rutgers University
successive exhibitions curated by
Access, and Assistant Curator of
the Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Early Modern Art, Yale Center for
Hilton Als.
British Art
To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programmes, visit britishart.yale.edu.
Unknown artist (Dutch School), The Paston Treasure, ca. 1663, oil on canvas, Norwich Castle Museum & Art Gallery, Norwich, UK. Image courtesy of Norfolk Museums Service.
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