The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
N EWSLETTER Yale University
May 2015 Issue 42
Public Lecture Courses at the Paul Mellon Centre A new series of lectures, open to the public and held in our refurbished premises at 15-16 Bedford Square, is to be launched this autumn. Registration for the course opens on 30 June 2015
Joseph Wright of Derby, Vesuvius from Posillipo, c.1788,Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
This autumn, the Paul Mellon Centre will be launching the first of an annual programme of Public Lecture Courses, designed for those who may not have a background in art or art history but who would like to learn more about the history of British art. This year’s inaugural Public Lecture Course, Satire to Spectacle: British Art in the Eighteenth Century will be taught by Mark Hallett, Director of Studies, and Martin Postle, Deputy Director of Studies. Their five lectures will cover key aspects of eighteenth-century British art, with a particular focus on artists such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and Richard Wilson, and on topics such as portraiture, pictorial satire, the Grand Tour, landscape painting and exhibition culture. The lectures will be complemented by weekly readings and discussion sessions.
As an educational charity the Paul Mellon Centre strives to promote and support academic research into the history of British art. The Public Lecture Course, which will be free to attend, offers an exciting opportunity to broaden the Centre’s audiences and to communicate the newest and most original research on British art in an engaging and accessible way. Satire to Spectacle will take place on Thursday evenings between 5th November and 3rd December 2015 in the newly refurbished Centre at Nos. 15 & 16 Bedford Square. For more details on the content and schedule of this course, for which there are limited places, please see our website. If you have any questions, please email Nermin Abdulla at nabdulla@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk Enrolment in the inaugural Public Lecture Course will begin on 30th June 2015.
Director of Studies: Mark Hallett Deputy Director of Studies: Martin Postle Assistant Director for Finance and Administration: Sarah Ruddick Assistant Director for Research: Sarah Victoria Turner Advisory Council: Iwona Blazwick, Alixe Bovey, David Peters Corbett, Penelope Curtis, Anthony Geraghty, Michael Hatt, Nigel Llewellyn, Richard Marks, Andrew Moore, Andrew Saint, Shearer West, Alison Yarrington Company Registered in England 983028 The Paul Mellon Centre
16 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3JA
Registered Charity 313838 Tel: 020 7580 0311
Fax: 020 7636 6730
www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
THE PAuL MELLON CENTRE
ACADEMIC ACTIVITIES
Forthcoming Events
a medium. Papers will offer new perspectives on Reynolds's experimental forms of pictorial composition, narrative and allusion, and look afresh at the dynamic interactions between the artist, his sitters and his models in the studio. As well as focusing on Reynolds's own art in detail, the conference seeks to place his experimental activities within the context of wider artistic, cultural and scientific practices of the eighteenth century. Confirmed Speakers: Mark Aronson, Helen Brett, John Chu, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Matthew C. Hunter, Rica Jones, Andrew Loukes, Martin Myrone, Marcia Pointon, Martin Postle, Sophie Reddington, Lisa Renne and Iris Wien. To book tickets and for more information please visit our website: www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/10
ARTISTS’ MOVING IMAGE PRACTICE IN BRITAIN: FROM 1990 TO TODAY Joshua Reynolds, Mrs Mary Robinson, 1783-1784 © The Wallace Collection
CHALLENGING MATERIAL: JOSHUA REYNOLDS AND ARTISTIC EXPERIMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Friday 15 May 2015 at the Goodison Lecture Theatre, The Wallace Collection, London This one-day conference, which accompanies the exhibition Joshua Reynolds: Experiments in Paint at the Wallace Collection, is designed to investigate and contextualise the artist's famously experimental practice. Building upon the technical findings of the Reynolds Research Project at the Wallace Collection, and also on a range of recent conservation projects on Reynolds's paintings, it will explore his distinctive manipulation of paint as
Thursday 5 – Saturday 7 November 2015 at Whitechapel Gallery, Zilkha Auditorium Whitechapel Gallery in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Film London Artists’ moving image practice is activated by the context of the gallery, by temporary architectural environments, the cinema and the internet, and by social and political performance. Over the last few decades, this kind of artistic practice, which has its roots in film, performance and installation art, has become a phenomenon in its own right and has begun developing a deep and rich history. This three-day conference held at the Whitechapel Gallery will explore the ways in which artists in Britain have played a pioneering role in this history. Tickets and further details about the conference will be available via our website soon.
Call for Papers EXHIBITING CONTEMPORARY ART IN POST-WAR BRITAIN, 1945-1960 Conference date: 28–30 January 2016 Submission deadline: 09.00am 29 June 2015
A recent wave of new scholarship has highlighted the richness of the exhibition cultures of post-Second World War Britain. Much of this work has focused on individual case studies or particular events. The aim of this conference is to place exhibitions of contemporary art within the wider cultural field of the period 1945-60 and to pose new questions about what researching exhibitions can tell us about British art and culture at this time. Please visit our website to see further details and possible topics for papers. Please submit a proposal (no more than 250 words) for conference papers of 20 minutes to efleming@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Nigel Henderson, Photograph of Alan Davie and three other people in an art gallery, [c 1949–c 1956] © Nigel Henderson Estate
THE PAuL MELLON CENTRE DIGITAL ACTIVITIES
A redesigned Website
The digital has an ever-growing impact on all areas of work at the Centre, and we continue to invest in a robust infrastructure to support our role as a hub for art-historical research in the digital sphere. This emphasis on digital projects will allow us to continue to assert our position as a major research centre for art-historical scholarship and a repository of important visual resources. The Centre has partnered with the London-based company Keepthinking to help us launch a number of new online publishing platforms. Keepthinking are well established as a leading supplier of digital design and software solutions, working exclusively for clients in the The new website overview page cultural sector. Their portfolio includes the Burlington Magazine, Public Catalogue Foundation, British Council, Horniman Museum and National Galleries Scotland. This talented group of designers and software developers is working with us to develop a new website, our flagship online journal British Art Studies, and a series of online scholarly catalogues. A thorough audit of design, content and the structure of our information has resulted in a new website. We feel this will better promote our work to as wide an audience as possible, and will help more effectively to articulate our relationship with Yale university and the Yale Center for British Art. The responsive template design will adjust the dimensions of the content to fit the reader’s viewing device, and bold use of images will provide a more user-friendly experience. The new website will replace our current one in the summer.
British Art Studies, our new Journal The next major digital initiative the Centre has embarked upon is British Art Studies, an online, open-access and peer-reviewed journal. Providing an innovative space for new research and scholarship of the highest quality on all aspects of British art, architecture and visual culture in their most diverse and international contexts, the journal will reflect the dynamic and wide-ranging research cultures of the Paul Mellon Centre and the Yale Center for British Art, as well as the wider field of studies in British art and architecture today. Proposals for inclusion in the first issue of the journal, to be published in November of this year, are currently being considered.
Mark Hallett, Sarah Victoria Turner and Hana Leaper discussing the new online journal, British Art Studies
THE PAuL MELLON CENTRE
EXPANSION
Building Works at 15 & 16 Bedford Square In January work began on the refurbishment of number 16 Bedford Square and the expansion of the Paul Mellon Centre into the adjoining building at number 15. Those of you who have passed through Bedford Square will have noticed the large blue hoarding erected outside the front of both houses. Inside work goes on apace. Our contractor, Sykes & Son Limited, is London’s oldest independent contractor, established in 1759 as a plumbing and glazing company – ten years before Joshua Reynolds assumed the presidency of the Royal Academy and over twenty years before Bedford Square was built. Sykes’s earliest recorded work was the repair and cleaning of windows at St Clement Danes. Since then they have worked at Buckingham Palace, the Royal Courts of Justice and the Victoria and Albert Museum. At the moment, three months into the job, Sykes have been focusing on the basement area of numbers 15 and 16, preparing accommodation for archive and library materials as well as dedicated offices for staff. Lateral connections have also been made between the two buildings, giving an indication of the expanded space available. With the assistance of Sykes and our architects, Wright and Wright, we have been looking closely at the fabric of the interior of our new property at number 15, poulticing plasterwork on overpainted cornices, and considering options for lighting, paint colours and carpets. We are also planning in detail the layout of our new offices, teaching spaces and events spaces, including a new reception area with display cases, a dedicated boardroom and a new catering kitchen. Perhaps the hardest decision was to move the staff kitchen from the basement of number 16 to the ground floor of number 15, in order to make way for a new library store.
Above, knocking through between numbers 15 and 16 Bedford Square Below, Collections staff inspect their future workspace
However, the good news is that the much loved kitchen table is coming with us, and we look forward to enjoying a cuppa and a slice of cake with friends and colleagues around it in the near future. At the moment, although this is surely tempting fate, the works are proceeding according to schedule and we hope to be back in the old home – and the new one – by the end of the summer.
THE PAuL MELLON CENTRE
COLLECTIONS
Caring for the Collections Projects undertaken during the temporary Closure Whilst the Centre has been temporarily closed to the public and our collections material is in off-site storage, Collections staff have had the opportunity to give undivided attention to developing and continuing a number of projects. Many archivists and librarians lament that they would like to complete more cataloguing than they often have the chance to do, on a day-to-day basis. The expansion project has enabled Collections staff to dedicate much more time to our cataloguing projects, which include cataloguing the Frank Simpson Archive, the John Hayes Archive and the William Roberts Archive. The Librarian has been using this closure period to catalogue publications for the library collection, further reducing the already small backlog. The collections of sale catalogues that belonged to Arthur Tooth and Sons and Ellis Waterhouse are also being individually logged onto the library catalogue. The Peter and Renate Nahum donation of publications, received in December 2012, is currently held in off-site storage in South London. Before the temporary closure, careful timetabling and preparation were required in order for the Librarian and Archives & Library Assistant to work at the store, during the opening hours of the Public Study Room (PSR). However, whilst we are closed, public assistance duties do not restrict off-site working. Therefore, more visits to log and process this donation have occurred in the last few months. The Librarian and Archives & Library Assistant have now logged about 1600 books, pamphlets and journals. There are an estimated 500 more items to be logged and conserved, before all have been integrated into the Centre’s library collection. Work on the oral history project, set up by the Archivist and Records Manager a few years ago, also continues. The Archivist & Records Manager is liaising with more possible candidates and the freelance oral history expert, Liz Bruchet, for the next project. Once complete, the recordings and transcripts will be checked, catalogued and added to our institutional archive. There are also a number of archive items that the Archivist & Records Manager and Archives & Library Assistant have assessed during the period of the expansion project that have been sent to specialists for conservation, whilst the archive collections are not being consulted. The Collections staff have also recently been in discussions with the digital manager about the new website. We are presently reviewing our current website for Collections and rewriting content, as well as adding to it and changing the layout of these webpages. The Collections webpages will include information on the new facilities available to readers and guidance on accessing the Collections materials, as this will have changed slightly once we re-open.
Recent blog posts available at blog.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Collections staff continue to assist with relevant expansion project decisions about the new Collections space such as potential copying facilities for readers and the layout of the Collections work room. We have also been writing weekly posts for the Centre’s blog, during the temporary closure. The blog has been a platform for us to provide some insight into our work and share enthusiasm about our collections with our readers, whilst we are not able to engage with and assist them in a practical way, in the PSR. If you would like to find out more about any of our on-going Collections projects briefly discussed here, please visit online: http://blog.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/
THE PAuL MELLON CENTRE
FELLOWSHIPS AND GRANTS
Fellowship and Grant Awards At the March 2015 meeting of the Centre’s Advisory Council the following Fellowships and Grants were awarded: SENIOR FELLOWSHIPS
JuNIOR FELLOWSHIPS
Ian Campbell, university of Edinburgh, to prepare his book Renaissances in Scottish Architecture, c.1370-1745
Andrea Bacciolo, universität Wien, to conduct research in the united Kingdom for his doctoral thesis The Barberini and the British Isles. Art and Diplomacy between Rome and London (1623-1679)
Stephen Daniels, university of Nottingham, to prepare his book ‘Map-work’: John Britton and the Reform of Topography in 19th-century Britain ROME FELLOWSHIP
Erin McKellar, Boston university, to conduct research in the united Kingdom for her doctoral thesis Tomorrow on Display: American and British Housing Exhibitions, 1940-1955
Caspar Pearson, university of Essex, for research in Rome on The renaissance of the Renaissance? Architecture and Urbanism between Italy and England
Laurel Peterson, Yale university, to conduct research in the united Kingdom for her doctoral thesis The Decorated Interior: Artistic Production in the British Country House, 1688-1745
MID-CAREER FELLOWSHIPS
Allison Young, Institute of Fine Arts, New York, to conduct research in the united Kingdom for her doctoral thesis ‘Torn and Most Whole’: Zarina Bhimji and the ‘Culture Wars’ in Britain, 1970-2002
Alice Correia, university of Salford, to prepare her book Articulating Contemporary British Asian Art Histories Manolo Guerci, university of Kent, to prepare his book Great Houses of the Strand: The Ruling Elite at Home in Tudor and Jacobean London Matthew Reeve, Queen’s university, Ontario, to prepare his book Gothic Architecture, Aesthetics and Sexuality in the Circle of Horace Walpole c.1740-90 James Rothwell, The National Trust, to prepare his book Politics, Diplomacy and 18th-century European Court Culture: The Ickworth Silver, 1690-1775 POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIPS William Bainbridge, Durham university, to prepare his book Peaks & Pencils: The Dolomite Mountains in Victorian Illustrated Books Caroline Fuchs, Bavarian State Painting Collection, to prepare her book Colour Values: Autochrome Colour Photography in Britain Victoria Horne, university of Edinburgh, to prepare articles and a book ‘Our project is not to add to art history, but to change it.’ The establishment of the UK Association of Art Historians, 1974-90 and ‘BLOCK Magazine and the “New” Approaches in British Art History’ and Publishing Dissent: Radical Periodicals and British Art History, 1979-89 Allison Ksiazkiewicz, university of Cambridge, to prepare her book Archetypes of Nature: Visualizing Geological Landscape during the British Enlightenment Laura Slater, university of York, to prepare her book Art and Political Thought in Medieval England Sean Willcock, Queen Mary, university of London, to prepare his book The Aesthetics of Conflict: Art, Photography and Geopolitics in the Victorian Period
RESEARCH SuPPORT GRANTS Susan Bean for research on Modeling Cosmos and Colony: India's Clay Sculpture in the 19th Century Georgina Cole for research on Representations of Blindness in 18th-century British Art Christopher Cowell for research on The Cantonments of India: A Hidden Theater of British Rule, 1746-1924 Anne Goodchild for research on The Early and Mid-Career Work of Victor Pasmore (c.1929-1969) Ada Grochowska for research on Woodcarving in AngloDutch Relationships in the Second Half of the 17th century Sonal Khullar for research on Fertile Grounds: Art, Primitivism, and Postcoloniality in 20th-century India and Great Britain JoAnne Mancini for research on Anglo-Spanish Conflict and the Transformation of Art and Architecture Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani for research on Reforming the Canon of British Modernism: Commonwealth Artists in London, 1956-1970 Helen Pierce for research on The Art of the Interregnum Catherine Sloan for research on Radical Post-War Pedagogies in British Art: Basic Design Alice Strickland for research on Women Artists of the First World War: Anna Airy, Flora Lion, Lucy Kemp-Welch, Victoria Monkhouse and Olive Edis Astrid Swenson for research on The Restoration of Crusader Architecture in the British Mediterranean
THE PAuL MELLON CENTRE REGIONAL MUSEUMS Zoe Thomas for research on The Women’s Guild of Arts and the Arts and Crafts Scene in London, c.1880-1930 Emily Turner for research on British Missionary Infrastructure Development in the Canadian North, c.1850-1914
Gainsborough's House grant towards a conference, 29-30 October 2015: The Painting Room: New Research into the Painting Practices of Artists in the 18th Century Hepworth Wakefield grant towards a conference, 6 June 2015: Décor: A Conference
Frederica Van Dam for research on Flemish Migrant Painters in England between 1560 and 1620
Jerwood Gallery grant towards a study day, Autumn 2015: Lowry by the Sea
Nicholas Webb for research on Modelling Medieval Vaults: A Digital Analysis of Wells Cathedral Aisles
university of Lincoln grant towards a conference, April 2016: Duncan Grant Murals in Lincoln Cathedral: Contemporary Responses and Perspectives
Dominic Wilkinson and Andrew Crompton for research on F. X. Velarde: The Modern European Church EDuCATIONAL PROGRAMME GRANTS British Film Institute grant towards a series of lectures and seminars, April 2015: Cinema Born Again British Library grant towards a workshop, 29 October 2015: British Library Prints and Drawings: Image, Evidence, History university of Exeter grant towards a colloquium, 3-4 December 2015: Fancy-Fantasie-Capriccio: Diversions and Distractions in the 18th Century
Museum of London grant towards a conference, 11-12 September 2015: The Look of Austerity National Portrait Gallery grant towards a workshop, 21 April 2015: George Scharf and the Emergence of the Museum Professional in 19th-century Britain university of St Andrews grant towards a workshop, June 2015: Curating Materiality: Feminism and Contemporary Art History in the UK Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, university of Leeds grant towards a symposium, 29 May 2015: Bohemians and Marginal Communities in the 18th Century: George Morland in Context
Regional Museum Visits Over the past few months Martin Postle and Mary Peskett Smith have continued to make visits to regional museums up and down the country in order to meet curators and museum directors and gain an insight at first hand into the challenges that face them, and to discuss ways in which the Paul Mellon Centre’s grants and fellowships programme can help support curatorial research, educational programmes and publications. Among the most
The artist’s studio at the Munnings Art Museum
interesting and unusual visits was one to the site of Alexander Pope’s house in Twickenham, now home to Radnor House School, where we were given a tour of Pope’s subterranean grotto. Built in 1720, the grotto is the only surviving element of Pope’s celebrated villa and garden. Now sadly dilapidated, the grotto is none the less an impressive and atmospheric structure, lined with minerals and curious statuary. In 2005 Radnor House School created a Charitable Trust to preserve the grotto and raise its profile. There is much to be done, not least in terms of funding, but it was encouraging to see that this iconic creation may at last be finding a new lease of life. In March we paid a visit to the Munnings Art Museum, the former home of that much maligned artist and former President of the Royal Academy. under the leadership of the first full-time Director, Jenny Hand, the museum is clearly going places. In the first instance, the collection, which contains in total over 600 works by Munnings, has been rehung chronologically throughout the house, revealing the artist’s development from his early training as a lithographer to his position as the pre-eminent society equine painter. Munnings’s impressive garden studio is being refurbished, complete with an array of palettes, easels and pigments. Investigation is also being undertaken into the museum’s extensive archive that includes, among other fascinating items, material relating to Lady Munnings’s Pekinese, Black Knight, including the dog’s bank account. The dog itself is displayed on the first floor in a glass case, together with its pink telephone. Well worth a visit!