Introduction

I have great pleasure in submitting the forty-seventh Annual Report of the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

This year saw us reaping the benefits of our newly-expanded premises at 15–16 Bedford Square, which allowed us to run an even richer programme of research events. This included conferences and workshops on such topics as Making Women’s Art Matter: New Approaches to the Careers and Legacies of Women Artists, the work of the painters David Hockney and Paul Nash; and the concept of the middlebrow. We held more than thirty lunchtime and evening research seminars, which included a new series of Fellows’ lunches, in which recipients of the PMC’s support shared their research in an informal and stimulating setting. We also co-organised the second of an annual series of conferences developed in collaboration with the YCBA and the Huntington, which in this instance was devoted to the topic of Photography and Britishness, and was held in New Haven.

In addition, the National Gallery hosted the twelfth series of Paul Mellon Lectures, which were given by Professor Thomas Crow, Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. These lectures, which were delivered in London in January 2017 and then at Yale in March and April, focused on the relationship between modernist music and art in Britain between the 1950s and the 1970s. Receptive and enthusiastic audiences at both venues enjoyed Professor Crow’s fascinating art-historical tour of the intersecting worlds of jazz, “mod” culture and the visual arts in this period – a tour which was accompanied not only by striking images but by a suitably atmospheric and evocative soundtrack.

2016–17 also saw the continuing development of our in-house online journal British Art Studies, which we publish in collaboration with the YCBA. The journal is designed to showcase the most original scholarship in the history of British art and architecture, and to promote innovative interventions in the field of the digital humanities. The results are often spectacular. Our third, special issue on British Sculpture Abroad, 1945–2000, co-edited by Martina Droth and Penelope Curtis, contained no less than twenty-eight essays, together with an introduction co-written by the editors. Our fourth issue, which featured a cover-collaboration with the renowned photographer Martin Parr, featured an essay on the New Brutalist imagery of the 1950s and 1960s that was accompanied by an animated compendium of such works; the issue also hosted the filmed proceedings of the Photography and Britishness conference at the YCBA, together with an article that offered digital reconstructions of nineteenth-century gallery displays. Finally, the fifth issue offered a major feature on the celebrated Hereford Screen at the Victoria & Albert Museum, together with a selection of articles on subjects that ranged from a Georgian drawing academy to the twentieth-century artist and chronicler of everyday urban life, L. S. Lowry.

The year saw the arrival at the Centre of two editors, Baillie Card and Emily Lees, who were appointed to strengthen our publishing expertise. The former has focused in particular on our digital publication projects, and has played a central role in the continuing development of British Art Studies; the latter now manages the Centre’s book publication projects, working in collaboration with our colleagues at Yale University Press, London. We envisage that both editors will also work together on future digital and print publication projects.

This year the Centre committed itself to the publication of a major new digital publication each year, beginning in 2018. This series of publications will begin with a comprehensive digital history of the Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibitions, for which some eighty academics, critics, artists, and curators have been asked to contribute. It will include short texts on every single Summer Exhibition since 1769, and digitised versions of every Summer Exhibition catalogue. This monumental arthistorical resource will be released in June 2018, to accompany a major exhibition at the Academy that I am co-curating with my colleague Sarah Turner and that is entitled The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition. The following year will see the release of a similarly ambitious online publication that explores the ways in which works of art have been collected and displayed in the British country house, while 2020 is earmarked for an innovative and wide-ranging publication that investigates how London has provided a crucial site for Asian art and artists in the modern period. All these online publication schemes emerge out of inhouse research projects that have been enthusiastically supported by our Board of Governors at Yale, and that seek to encourage and disseminate the best kinds of art-historical scholarship in a manner that is fitting for our times. Finally, it is worth noting that, working with colleagues from arts organisations in the locality, we co-organised and partly-hosted a new arts festival designed to appeal to a broad public audience. The Bedford Square Festival, held across three days in June 2017, sold out immediately, and was a resounding success. Consequently, we plan to hold this festival every year, and thereby introduce an entirely new community of visitors to our Centre and its many resources.

Mark Hallett Director of Studies