Special Projects

London, Asia

The London, Asia research project is co-led by the Paul Mellon Centre’s Deputy Director for Research, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar. By convening workshops, talks and conferences along three research strands – exhibitions, institutions and art schools – the London, Asia research project is working towards a more expanded and diverse narrative of British art.

It was established in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, in 2016, and after the successful completion of phase one of the project in June 2019, the project was awarded a further two years of funding by the Board of Governors to support a second phase of activity until June 2021.

September 2019 saw the launch of a special thirteenth issue of British Art Studies, ‘London, Asia, Exhibitions, Histories’, co-edited by Nasar and Turner, as the first publication to emerge from the London, Asia project. It explores the exhibition as a site for researching the entanglements between London and Asia, and deploys British Art Studies as a digital platform for collaboration. It included a set of new commissions from the Asia Art Activism collective, and made rare primary documents available to the research community.

During 2019–20, a major focus of the London, Asia project has been a series of forums organised in collaboration with the Slade School of Fine Art, as part of the ongoing research project exploring modernism as a ‘transversal phenomenon’ by Professor Ming Tiampo (Carleton University, Ottawa), London, Asia’s second research award holder. Engaging educators, curators, archivists and several generations of Slade alumni, these workshops have explored the Slade as a site of transnational encounter. A new strand of the project, exploring the Slade’s institutional and pedagogical networks, is being developed with the National College of Arts, Lahore, for 2020–21.

Vital Fragments: Nigel Henderson and the Art of Collage

The artist Nigel Henderson (1917–1985) pursued a creative career that spanned fine art, photography, exhibition-making and interior design initiatives. This research project, which was led by the Centre’s Director of Studies, Mark Hallett, and Rosie Ram (Royal College of Art), and developed in collaboration with Tate Britain’s Elena Crippa and Zuzana Flašková, examined the collage practice that underpinned Henderson’s thinking.

Henderson’s experimental collages combine printed matter, paint and photography. In his collage work, he assembled fragments of image and text in order to activate them in new ways. He wrote: ‘I want to release an energy of image from trivial data. I feel happiest among discarded things, vituperative fragments cast casually from life, with the fizz of vitality still about them.’ His works bring the visual detritus of modern British life into dialogue with imagery from other places and periods. They reflect on the passing of time, the ruins of war and the crumbling of empires. Henderson’s collages also engage with the historical legacies of collage as a practice, with the rough textures of brutalism and with the bold graphics of pop art. More broadly, they engage with the visual culture of their own time and cast a critical eye across contemporary images intended to stimulate aspiration, consumption and desire.

This research project generated a Spotlight Display at Tate Britain titled Vital Fragments: Nigel Henderson and the Art of Collage (December 2019 to March 2020). It also led to the publication of an accompanying guide to the artist’s collages, which is available to read on the Centre’s web pages. In a pioneering initiative for the Centre, it also resulted in the production of twelve short films devoted to one of Henderson’s most ambitious works, Screen (1949–52 and 1969). These films, which were featured in the Tate Britain display, were created by Hallett, Ram and Jonathan Law, Research Fellow and Filmmaker at the Centre. The research project also incorporated plans for a major international conference and workshop on collage in twentieth-century Britain, which was due to take place at Tate Britain in March 2020. This had to be postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic; however, a follow-up event is planned for 2021.

Art and the Country House

The Paul Mellon Centre research project, Art and the Country House, headed by Dr Martin Postle as project leader and commissioning editor, continued to focus on the collection and display of works of art in the country house in Britain from the sixteenth century to the present day. The eight houses selected as case studies are: Castle Howard, Yorkshire; Doddington Hall, Lincolnshire; Mells Manor, Somerset; Mount Stuart, Isle of Bute; Petworth House, West Sussex; Raynham Hall, Norfolk; Trewithen, Cornwall; and West Wycombe, Buckinghamshire.

Dr Postle continued to commission and edit contributions for the project, including new material relating to Mells Manor. Several visits were made to Mells by the research team, to inspect works of art and archives. Further visits were made to Petworth House, and essays were commissioned from the Earl of Egremont, on his early memories of Petworth, and Alec Cobbe, on his rehanging of the collection in the 1980s and ‘90s. Further photography was taken at a number of houses involved in the project, and Jonathan Law, Research Fellow and Filmmaker at the Paul Mellon Centre, continued to make progress on the films commissioned especially for the project.

From the summer of 2019 the first batch of research material was migrated onto the online platform for the project created by Keepthinking, and managed by Alice Read, Digital Producer at the Paul Mellon Centre. Aside from Dr Postle and Alice Read, the delivery team for the project consisted of the Centre’s Picture Researcher, Maisoon Rehani, together with the PMC’s Editor Emily Lees and Research Assistant Freddie Pegram.

The project is due to be completed and launched online by the Paul Mellon Centre in November 2020.

Photographic Archive

Having scanned the Centre’s Photographic Archive in 2019, work was undertaken to document and catalogue the collection to prepare it for publication. Access to the digital facsimiles has been provided to researchers on request.

Responding to focus group feedback, the collection was transcribed in its entirety to allow for it to be searchable to a more granular level than initially planned. A contractor transcribed annotated data from the mounts into a structured format that could be imported into a database procured and developed during this period. The database was constructed to enable data sharing in formats common to aggregator platforms such as Archives Hub, Yale’s digital collections portal, and the PHAROS consortium’s forthcoming platform. An article published in 2020 by the Centre’s Sarah Victoria Turner and Tom Scutt in the Art Libraries Journal (‘A “collection of broken dreams”? Making the Paul Mellon Centre’s Photo Archive Accessible in 2019 and Beyond’) discusses this process and the plans we have for the PMC’s digital collection platform. Publication was pushed back at the start of the pandemic to allow other projects to take priority, and it will now be released in 2021. This enabled us to establish the rights of photographers and owners of works of art represented in the collection, and to develop a strategy for transposing permissions received for the hard-copy images into their new digital formats.

The PMC’s Charlotte Brunskill and Tom Scutt worked with other members of the PHAROS consortium to develop a workshop considering intellectual property in the international context. Supported by a Samuel H. Kress Foundation grant, the workshop brought together legal and cultural heritage experts and stakeholders from the UK, EU and the US to discuss cross-border copyright challenges and their resolution in the context of a common digital platform for the PHAROS consortium, and was hosted at the PMC on 3–4 March 2020. A report on the proceedings and outcomes, International Copyright Workshop: Providing Online Access to Art Historical Research Photography Collections, has subsequently been published.