Paul Mellon Centre — Annual Report 2021–2022

PMC Staff List

Director of Studies

(to 3 October 2021)

Director (from 4 October 2021)

Mark Hallett

Deputy Director for Research (to 3 October 2021)

Deputy Director

(from 4 October 2021)

Sarah Victoria Turner

Deputy Director for Finance and Administration (to 3 October 2021)

Chief Financial Officer (from 4 October 2021)

Sarah Ruddick

Deputy Director for Grants and Publications

(to 3 October 2021)

Senior Research Fellow (from 4 October 2021)

Martin Postle

Head of Research and Learning (from 1 January 2022)

Sria Chatterjee

British Art Network Convenor

Martin Myrone

Learning Programme Manager

Nermin Abdulla

Digital Producer, parental leave cover (until 22 November 2021)

Lucy Andia

Events Manager, parental leave cover

Shauna Blanchfield

PMC Networks Coordinator and Director’s Assistant

Bryony Botwright-Rance

Archivist, Records & Data Protection Manager

Charlotte Brunskill

Editor

(to 30 September 2021)

Senior Editor (from 1 October 2021)

Baillie Card

Events Assistant

Danielle Convey

Paul Oppé Archive Project Cataloguer (until 30 September 2021)

Anthony Day

Fellowships, Grants and Communications Manager

Harriet Fisher

Events Manager

Ella Fleming

Librarian

Emma Floyd

British Art Network Administrator (to 31 December 2021)

BAN Administrator and Deputy Director’s Assistant (from 1 January 2022)

Danielle Goulé

Assistant Archivist and Records Manager (until 3 November 2021)

Jenny Hill

Operations Coordinator

Stephanie Jorgensen

Assistant Librarian

Lucy Kelsall

Editor (to 30 September 2021)

Senior Editor (from 1 October 2021)

Emily Lees

Operations Manager

Suzannah Pearson

Receptionist (from 20 June 2022)

Karen Pilz

Editorial Assistant

Tom Powell

Digital Producer

Alice Read

Picture Researcher

Maisoon Rehani

Assistant Archivist (from 19 April 2022)

Morwenna Roche

Finance and Administration Officer

Barbara Ruddick

Operations Manager, parental leave cover (until 31 December 2021)

Alessandro Schianchi

Digital Manager

Tom Scutt

Archives and Library Cataloguer (until 30 June 2022)

Mary Peskett Smith

Finance Officer

Marianette Violeta

HR Manager

Barbara Waugh

Watson & Sons, Various diatoms, c.1880s, slide imaged using differential interference contrast, reproduced in British Art Studies, Issue 21: November 2021 – Redefining the British Decorative Arts. Image courtesy of Howard Lynk, www.victorianmicroscopeslides.com (all rights reserved)

Introduction

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

Having weathered the storm of the global pandemic of 2020–21, this year saw the Centre and its staff beginning the process of returning to Bedford Square, and cutting back on the forms of home working that had become so familiar during successive lockdowns. Even so, it was clear that attitudes to work had profoundly changed over the course of the pandemic, and that there was a new demand on the part of colleagues for more flexible employment arrangements. Consequently, the Centre – like so many other institutions in this period – introduced a new set of working practices that enabled many full-time staff members to work up to two days a week from home. This hybrid arrangement proved both practical and popular, and was quickly accepted as the norm.

Once we had seen our premises at Bedford Square coming back to life, and having ensured that all our core activities were fully up and running, my senior colleagues and I spent much of the year undertaking a thoroughgoing strategic review of the Centre’s structures, policies and personnel. This seemed appropriate for three reasons: it allowed us to reflect on how we might best go forward in the ‘new normal’ circumstances of the post-pandemic era; it enabled us to look carefully at the full raft of our policies and procedures, including those in the crucial areas of equality, diversity and inclusion; and it also gave us a period of self-reflection after nearly a decade’s worth of rapid growth, during which our ambitions, activities and staff numbers had expanded in a dramatic way.

This led, first of all, to a reorganisation of the Centre’s senior management structure in the autumn of 2021. My own title of Director of Studies was simplified to that of Director; Sarah Victoria Turner took on the newly created role of Deputy Director; Sarah Ruddick became Chief Financial Officer; and a new role of Head of Research and Learning was created and subsequently filled by Dr Sria Chatterjee, who arrived at the Centre in January 2022.

In the spring of 2022, this new senior leadership team embarked on an extensive series of organised conversations with groups of colleagues

British Art Network Emerging Curators Group visit to Lucian Freud: Real Lives at Tate Liverpool. Image courtesy of British Art Network © Tate (Jake Ryan)

from every area of the Centre, which canvassed opinion on their challenges, priorities and aspirations. Through this process, and through a series of follow-up conversations and consultations, we were able to develop a new set of Centre-wide strategic priorities for 2022–25, which we summarised under three headings: Connecting, Sustaining and Creating. We were also able to make great progress in developing a series of new and improved policies and procedures, including a new equality, diversity and inclusion policy and action plan. Finally, we were able to agree upon a series of changes to our team structures and reporting lines, and a set of new appointments in our Learning, Digital, HR, Finance, Operations and Library and Archive teams.

This intensive period of institutional reflection, review and reorganisation helped give the Centre, as it emerged from the last vestiges of the Covid-19 pandemic, a welcome sense of solidity and confidence.

We ended the year proud not only of our progress in renewing ourselves as an organisation, but also of the range of activities and achievements chronicled in this report. Especially notable in this regard was the publication of our digitised photographic archive in November 2023, which represented the culmination of a major research project led by the Centre’s Digital Manager, Tom Scutt. This resource makes available, for free, digital reproductions of our archive of approximately 100,000 reference photographs of British paintings, decorative paintings, sculptures, drawings and prints. It also features a series of specially commissioned essays that suggest the archive’s interest and relevance for contemporary users, together with a sequence of films that approach the archive from different points of view, including those of an artist, a conservator and a curator.

Another major development for the Centre was the successful launch in the spring of 2022 of our New Narratives programme of awards, which are designed to help diversify the field of British art studies, and to provide transformative levels of support for graduate students and early career scholars. The grants include an MA/MPhil Studentship, a Doctoral Scholarship and an Early Career Fellowship, and we were delighted to make awards to three wonderful scholars: Peter Miller, Nicholas Brown and Jareh Das. We look forward

to watching the progress of this highly talented trio of inaugural awardees, and to making sure that this ten-year, £2m programme continues to flourish. Finally, we were delighted to collaborate with our colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art in organising an especially high-profile series of Paul Mellon Lectures. The series was devoted to the topic of ‘The Museum and Gallery Today’, and was delivered by a stellar group of museum directors. In these turbulent times, it was both bracing and inspiring to hear their reflections on the institutions they run and on the challenges and opportunities of a new, post-pandemic curatorial era.

Mark Hallett Director

Academic Activities

The Paul Mellon Centre’s academic events programme offers a platform for communicating new research on British art. Each event, whether a large conference or smaller seminar, aims to create a space for dialogue, debate and, crucially, for coming together to share knowledge and interests. During the winter of 2021–2, the global pandemic continued to prevent large-scale in-person gatherings, but drawing upon our experience of producing online events, the Centre continued to provide a busy events programme to an increasingly international audience. Throughout October, we offered talks, panel discussions and artist presentations as part of the multi-part event Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1945 to Now, co-organised with Elena Crippa (Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, Tate Britain) and Rosie Ram (Visiting Lecturer in Curating Contemporary Art, Royal College of Art). Cumulatively, the speakers mapped the crucial role that collage has played in some of the most daring developments in post-war and contemporary British art.

A highlight of this year’s activities were the Mellon Lectures. Again offered as live online events and co-organised with the Yale Center for British Art, these were given by five museum and gallery directors: Gabriele Finaldi (National Gallery, London), Kaywin Feldman (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), Thelma Goldman (Studio Museum, Harlem), Iwona Blazwick (Whitechapel Gallery, London), Maria Balshaw (Tate) and Maria Mok (Hong Kong Museum of Art). All spoke engagingly to the topic of ‘The Museum and Gallery Today’, offering insight into the challenges and possibilities of caring for collections and creating exhibitions today. These events attracted large online audiences and created a palpable sense of occasion.

Collaboration is at the heart of the Centre’s academic activities programme. In 2021–22, a good number of events were co-organised with external partners, bringing new forms of knowledge and expertise as well as new audiences to our work. Collaborative events included Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c.1775–1850 (in partnership with the British Library); Maud Sulter: The Centre of the Frame (organised with the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge); Concerning Photography (a co-produced online conference and workshop

Strange Universe: Explorations of the Modern in Postwar Britain 1945–1965, a symposium organised in collaboration with the Barbican Art Gallery in June 2022

with the Photographers’ Gallery); and The Show is On: Laura Knight’s Career and Contexts (the first of a two-part collaboration with the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes). This was followed by an event to coincide with the exhibition of Ingrid Pollard’s work at MK Gallery. The Centre also partnered with British Art Show 9 to produce events in each of the four host cities – Aberdeen, Wolverhampton, Manchester and Plymouth. The Barbican’s Postwar Modern exhibition was another springboard for a series of seminars and an international conference. These are just some details from the busy programme in 2021–22, which also included many other talks, lectures and discussions, capturing the richness and breadth of new research on both historic and contemporary British art.

Academic Activities

July 2021–June 2022

Autumn Research Lunch Series 2021

1 October Tim Barringer (Paul Mellon Professor, Yale University) and Anna Arabindan-Kesson (Assistant Professor of Black Diaspora Art, Princeton University) in conversation, ‘Working with Art: Labour, Empire and Materiality in British Art’

15 October Maddie Boden (Ashmolean Museum), ‘Victorian Exodus: Visualising the Old Testament in the Dalziels’ Bible Gallery’

26 November Katherine Gazzard (Royal Museums Greenwich), ‘“In Presence of Shadows of Dead Captains”: The National Gallery of Naval Art and Exhibition Culture in London, 1845–1936’

10 December Shijia Yu (Royal Historical Society), ‘A Visual Recreation for Hands: Homemade Paper Peepshows and the Role of the Haptic in Nineteenth-Century British Print Culture’

5–14 October 2021

Cutting Edge: Collage in Britain, 1945 to Now

A programme of events taking place online, presented jointly by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and Tate Britain.

5 October, Collage Dreamings and Collage Hauntings

Introduced by Sarah Victoria Turner (Paul Mellon Centre)

David Alan Mellor (Emeritus Professor, University of Sussex) and Thomas Crow (Rosalie Solow Professor of Modern Art, New York University), ‘Ev’ry Which Way: South Kensington Phantasmagorias and Californian Dreamings’

Chaired by Elena Crippa (Tate Britain)

Elizabeth Price (Professor of Film and Photography, Kingston University), Artist film presentation

Chaired by Anna Reid

6 October, Cuts, Copies, Clips and the Curatorial

Introduced by Sarah Victoria Turner (Paul Mellon Centre)

Panel 1

Ben Cranfield (Senior Tutor, Curatorial Theory and History, Royal College of Art), ‘Fragmenting the Contemporary: The Queer Timeliness of Collage and the Curatorial in Post-War Britain’

Craig Buckley (Associate Professor, Department of the History of Art, Yale University), ‘An Architecture of Clipping: Reyner Banham and the Redefinition of Collage’

Chaired by Lynda Nead (Pevsner Professor of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London)

Panel 2

Nicola Simpson (Research Impact Fellow, Norwich University of the Arts), ‘Not This and Not That: Cutting A(way) to a Tantric Buddhist Collage in the Work of Dom Sylvester Houédard’

Andrew Hodgson (University of London Institute, Paris), ‘Xeroxing Surrealism: TRANSFORMAcTION and Collage as Aesthetic Continuity’

Chaired by Dawn Ades (Professor of History of Art, Royal Academy)

7 October, Collage as Method, Manuscript and Moving Image

Introduced by Rosie Ram (Royal College of Art)

Claire Zimmerman (Associate Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), ‘Alison’s Mind: Collage and Architectural Thinking in Postcolonial Britain’

Chaired by Victoria Walsh (Professor of Art History and Curating, Royal College of Art)

Judah Attille (University of the Arts London), Artist film presentation

8 October, Collage Politics and Punk Practices

Introduced by Elena Crippa (Tate Britain)

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain 1945–1965 (Barbican Art Gallery, 2022), installation view. © Tim Whitby / Getty Images

Panel 3

Amy Tobin (Curator of Exhibitions, Events and Research at Kettle’s Yard and Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge), ‘“I Can’t Swim I Have Nightmares”: Linder and Photomontage 1976–2019’

Alice Correia (Research Curator, Touchstones, Rochdale), ‘Chila Kumari Burman: Punk Punjabi Protests’

Chaired by Catherine Grant (Senior Lecturer in the Art and Visual Cultures Departments, Goldsmiths, University of London)

Panel 4

Allison Thompson (Division of Fine Arts, Barbados Community College), ‘Come Together: Collage Aesthetics in the Work of Sonia Boyce’

Chandra Frank (Post-Doctoral Fellow, Taft Research Center, University of Cincinnati), ‘Fragmentations and Glimmers: Archival Experimentations with Collage’

Chaired by Elizabeth Robles (Lecturer in the History of Art Department, University of Bristol)

13 October, Cutting Edge Collage Workshop 1

Introduced by Sarah Victoria Turner (Paul Mellon Centre)

Panel 1

Danae Filioti (PhD Candidate, Art History, University College London), ‘Cutting the Cosmos: Liliane Lijn and Collage, 1960/9’

Karen Di Franco (Chelsea College of Arts, University of the Arts London), ‘Breakthrough Fictioneers: Chance and Collage in Artists’ Publishing (1972–79)’

Chaired by Amy Tobin (Curator of Exhibitions, Events and Research at Kettle’s Yard and Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge)

Panel 2

Daniel Fountain (Lecturer in Art History and Visual Culture, University of Exeter), ‘Queering the Library through Collage: The Cut-Ups of Joe Orton & Kenneth Halliwell, 1959–1962’

Tom Day (Postdoctoral Fellow/Lecturer at the Centre for American Art, Courtauld Institute of Art), ‘Jeff Keen’s Pop Cinema Collage: The Saturation of Media and the Politics of Images’

Chaired by Andrew Wilson (Independent Curator and Art Historian)

14 October, Cutting Edge Collage Workshop 2

Introduced by Sarah Victoria Turner (Paul Mellon Centre)

Panel 3

Isabelle Mooney (PhD Candidate, University of St Andrews), ‘The Fragmented Maps by Nigel Henderson and John McHale’

Rachel Stratton (Art Historian and Curator), ‘Theo Crosby and the Graphic Arts’

Chaired by Ben Cranfield (Senior Tutor, Curatorial Theory and History, Royal College of Art)

Panel 4

Leila Nassereldein (Doctoral Researcher, Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Humphrey Jennings, and the Collated Aesthetic as a Historiographic Practice’

Lisa Maddigan Newby (Independent Researcher), ‘Exhibiting “Ethnographic Collage” in London: From the ICA to the British Museum’

Chaired by Samuel Bibby (Managing Editor, Art History journal)

20 October 2021–11 February 2022

The Museum and Gallery Today: Paul Mellon Lectures

20 October 2021 Gabriele Finaldi (Director, National Gallery, London), ‘A Gallery “for the Use of the Public”: The National Gallery at Two Hundred’

3 November 2021 Kaywin Feldman (Director, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), ‘Building a National Collection in a Changing Nation’

10 November 2021 Thelma Golden (Director and Chief Curator, Studio Museum, Harlem), ‘Creating Space: The Studio Museum, Past and Present’

17 November 2021 Iwona Blazwick (Director, Whitechapel Gallery, London), ‘What Are Collections Good For?’

24 November 2021 Maria Balshaw (Director, Tate), ‘Looking Back to Move Forward: British Art History at Tate’

11 February 2022 Maria Mok (Director, Hong Kong Museum of Art), ‘Remaking the Museum’

2–11 November 2021

Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c.1775–1850

Graphic Landscape was a fourday programme of online webinars, presented jointly by the Paul Mellon Centre and the British Library.

2 November, Print, Politics and Industrialisation

Introduction by Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre) and Felicity Myrone (Lead Curator, Western Prints and Drawings, British Library)

Amy Concannon (Senior Curator, Historic British Art, Tate), ‘“A Captur’d City Blazed”: Printmaking and the Bristol Riots of 1831’

Lizzie Jacklin (Keeper of Art, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums), ‘Mining Landscapes: Thomas Hair’s Views of the Collieries’

Morna O’Neill (Associate Professor of Art History, Art Department, Wake Forest University), ‘John Constable, David Lucas and Steel in English Landscape’

4 November, Print and Property

Introduction by Richard Johns (Senior Lecturer in History of Art, University of York)

John Bonehill (Lecturer, History of Art, University of Glasgow), ‘Picturing Property: The Estate Landscape and the Late Eighteenth-Century Print Market’

Kate Retford (Professor of Art History, Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Views of the Lakes at the Vyne’

James Finch (Assistant Curator, 19th Century British Art, Tate Britain), ‘Amelia Long’s Views from Bromley Hill’

9 November, Revisiting the Canon Introduction by Cora Gilroy-Ware (Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Oxford)

Greg Smith (Independent Art Historian), ‘Engaging with the Voyage Pittoresque de la France: Thomas Girtin’s Picturesque Views in Paris and their Appeal to the “Most Eminent in the Profession”’

Timothy Wilcox (Independent Scholar), ‘John Sell Cotman’s Architectural Antiquities of Normandy; A Catastrophic Miscalculation?’

Gillian Forrester (Independent Art Historian, Curator and Writer), ‘A Glossary for the Anthropocene? Turner’s Liber Studiorum in the Era of Climate Change’

11 November, A Wider View: From Collaboration to Empire

Introduction by Mark Hallett (Paul Mellon Centre) and Felicity Myrone (Lead Curator, Western Prints and Drawings, British Library)

Sarah Moulden (Curator of 19th-Century Collections, National Portrait Gallery), ‘Creative Collaboration: Cotman’s Norfolk Etchings’

Eleanore Neumann (PhD Candidate, University of Virginia), ‘Translating Topography: Women and the Publication of Landscape Illustrations of the Bible (1836)’

Alisa Bunbury (Grimwade Collection Curator, Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne), ‘Taken from Nature: Printed Views of Colonial Australia’

Douglas Fordham (Professor of Art History, University of Virginia), ‘Travel Prints or Illustrated Books?’

19 November 2021

Maud Sulter: The Centre of the Frame, A Panel Discussion

Organised to coincide with the exhibition Maud Sulter: The Centre of the Frame at the Women’s Art Collection, Murray Edwards College, University of Cambridge.

Speakers: Gilane Tawadros, Laura Castagnini, Evan Ifekoya, Marcia Michael and Dionne Sparks

25 November–2 December 2021

Concerning Photography: The Photographers’ Gallery and Photographic Networks in Britain, c.1971 to the Present

A series of online talks, presentations and discussions which showcased new research and practices focusing on the histories of photography in Britain over the past fifty years. This was a collaboration between the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art and The Photographers’ Gallery.

25 November, Day 1: Institutions, Infrastructures and Pedagogies

Panel 1: Institutions, Infrastructures

Anne McNeill (Director, Impressions Gallery), ‘Institutions, Infrastructure and Exhibitions: The Case of Impressions Gallery’

David Bate (University of Westminster), ‘1979: A Snapshot of the UK’

Taous R. Dahmani (Paris 1 PanthéonSorbonne), ‘Creating Autograph ABP’

Andrew Dewdney (Co-director and Co-founder, Centre for the Study of the Networked Image), ‘Forget Photography: The Arts Council and the Disappearance of Independent Photography in Neoliberal Britain’

Annebella Pollen (University of Brighton), ‘Exploring our Weaknesses on the International Stage: British Council Photography and Self-Critique in the 1970s and 1980s’

Chaired by Shoair Mavlian (Director, Photoworks)

Panel 2: Pedagogies

Juliet Hacking (Sotheby’s Institute of Art), ‘Talking Pictures: Teaching Photography as Art in Higher Education’

Anne Lyden (National Galleries of Scotland), ‘The Glasgow Degree’

Chaired by Karen Shepherdson (London College of Communication)

Mahtab Hussain, Artist Keynote

Moderated by Luisa Ulyett (The Photographers’ Gallery)

1 December, Day 2: Material, Process and Magazines, Books

Speakers: Maitreyi Maheshwari, Mo White, Katrina Sluis, Rowan Lear, Peter Ride, Diane Smyth, Derek Bishton, John Wyver, David Brittain, Jacqueline EnnisCole, Penny Slinger and Laura Smith

Panel 3: Material, Process

Mo White (Artist, Writer and Lecturer), ‘The Use of Photography in Artists’ SlideTape Works in the UK Since the 1970s’

Katrina Sluis (School of Art & Design, Australian National University), ‘Glimmering Screens, Institutional Dreams: Curating Post-Photography’

Rowan Lear (University of West London), ‘Honey on the Elbow: Sticky Networks, Invisible Workers and Planetary Processing’

Peter Ride (University of Westminster), ‘Stepping into Space: New Media Practice and Independent Photography Galleries’ Chaired by Maitreyi Maheshwari (FACT)

Panel 4: Magazines, Books

Derek Bishton (Journalist, Published Author, Photographer), ‘Ten.8 Photographic Magazine 1978–1992’

John Wyver (Screen Productions for the Royal Shakespeare Company), ‘Screening Photography: BBC Television’s Presentation of Photography, 1969–1988’

David Brittain (Creative Camera), ‘In-House Publications of The Photographers’ Gallery: 1970–80’

Jacqueline Ennis-Cole (University of Sussex), ‘Photobooks 1980 –Black Women Photographers’

Chaired by Diane Smyth (Arts Journalist)

Penny Slinger, Artist Keynote, ‘Photography and Collage in the Art of Performance’

Moderated by Laura Smith (Whitechapel Gallery)

2 December, Day 3: Exhibitions, Touring and Archival Futures

Panel 5: Exhibitions, Touring

Ruby Rees-Sheridan (Four Corners Gallery), ‘On the Move: The Half Moon Photography Workshop’s Exhibitions Comments Book’ (Paper delivered by Carla Mitchell)

Catlin Langford (Victoria and Albert Museum), ‘Occupying Space: Signals, The Festival of Women Photographers, 1994’

Theo Gordon (Smithsonian American Art Museum), ‘Putting Salford in the Picture: Viewpoint Gallery of Photography and the 1980s’

Laura Castagnini (Curator and Writer), ‘Stolen Glances: Lesbians Take Photographs Curated by Tessa Boffin and Jean Fraser in 1991’

Chaired by James Boaden (University of York)

Panel 6: Archival Futures

Charlene Heath (Ryerson/York University, Toronto), ‘Archival Work: The Survival of Jo Spence’s Polemic’

Fiona Anderson (Newcastle University), ‘To Eternity: Sunil Gupta and Archival Ambivalence in Queer

British Photography’

Chaired by Rahaab Allana (Alkazi Foundation for the Arts)

Antonio Roberts, Artist Keynote

Moderated by Arieh Frosh

28 January 2022

The Show is On: Laura Knight’s Career and Contexts

A one-day conference on the career and legacy of Laura Knight on the occasion of the exhibition Laura Knight: A Panoramic View, organised in collaboration with MK Gallery, Milton Keynes.

Session 1

Janet Axten (Social Historian), ‘“Fast, Smart and Outrageous”: Art School Fashion in Laura Knight’s Painting’

Linda Bassett (PhD Candidate, University of Bristol), ‘The “Sew” Must Go On: The Dressmaker in the Work of Laura Knight’

Ella Nixon (PhD Candidate, Northumbria University), ‘Laura Knight and the Regional Art Gallery’

Chaired by Sarah Victoria Turner (Paul Mellon Centre)

Session 2

Catherine Wallace (Freelance Art Historian), ‘Technique and Experiment: Drawing as the Foundation of Laura Knight’s Success as an Artist’

Lily Ford (Filmmaker and Historian), ‘Aerial Bodies: Laura Knight’s Barrage Balloon Paintings’

Hannah Starkey (Artist), ‘So, I Ask You Laura Knight – How Did This Great Work Come About?’

Chaired by Fay Blanchard (Head of Exhibitions, MK Gallery)

Session 3

Alice Strickland (Curator, National Trust, London), ‘Creating a Legacy – Dame Laura Knight RA (1877–1970)’

Hester Westley (Artists’ Lives Interviewer, National Life Stories, British Library), ‘“Like a Half-Rolled Map”: Tracing the Borders of Female Self-Narration in the Careers of Laura Knight and Subsequent Women Artists’

Damian Le Bas (Writer and Poet), ‘The Broken Tongue’

Chaired by Annette Wickham (Curator of Works on Paper, Royal Academy of Art)

Spring Research Seminar Series 2022

The Spring 2022 seminar series involved talks by authors of books recently published by the Paul Mellon Centre.

16 February Matthew Craske (Oxford Brookes University) and Martin Postle (Paul Mellon Centre), ‘In Darkness and in Light: Rethinking Joseph Wright of Derby’

2 March Henrietta McBurney (Curator and Art Historian) and Joseph Viscomi (Distinguished Professor of English Literature, University of North Carolina), ‘Illustrations and Illuminations’

9 March Petra ten-Doesschate Chu (Professor Emerita of Art History, Seton Hall University), Max Donnelly (Curator of Furniture and Woodwork 1800–1900, Victoria and Albert Museum) and Andrea Wolk Rager (Case Western Reserve University), ‘Aesthetic Encounters’

16 March Cora Gilroy-Ware (Curator, Writer and Researcher) and Sean Willcock (University of Oxford), ‘War & Peace: Rethinking Aesthetics in the Age of Empire’

23 March Adriano Aymonino (University of Buckingham) and Manolo Guerci (University of Kent), ‘Grand Designs and Great Houses’

Spring Research Lunch Series 2022

25 February Ranald Lawrence (Lecturer in Architecture, University of Liverpool), ‘Clean Air, Bright Light: Mackintosh’s School of Art’

4 March David Curtis (Independent Writer, Researcher and Curator), ‘A Fading Memory and an Excel Spreadsheet – Researching Two Important but Overlooked Alternative Arts Venues from the 1960s’

18 March Anne Dulau Beveridge (The Hunterian Museum), Nigel Leask (Professor of English Language and Literature , University of Glasgow) and John Bonehill (University of Glasgow), ‘The Making of “Old Ways New Roads: Travels in Scotland 1720–1832”’

1 April Timothy Brittain-Catlin (University of Cambridge), ‘Making and Remaking the Edwardian House’

6 May 2022

Carbon Slowly Turning: Movement, Energy, Landscape

A collaborative conference on the occasion of the Ingrid Pollard: Carbon Slowly Turning exhibition between MK Gallery and the Paul Mellon Centre.

Session 1: Deep Time; Art, Writing, History

Evan Ifekoya (Artist and Energy Worker), ‘Spiral Time and Sacred Reverberations’

Richard Hylton (Lecturer in Contemporary Art, SOAS, University of London), ‘Overcoming Hostile Environments’

Chaired by Gilane Tawadros (Chief Executive, DACS)

Session 2: Matter and Materials; Chemicals, Process, Publication

Liz Wells (Emeritus Professor in Photographic Culture, University of Plymouth), ‘Hidden Histories and Storying Place’

Ella S. Mills (Associate Lecturer in History of Art, University of Plymouth), ‘Texture & Tone in the Work of Ingrid Pollard’

Chaired by Cora Gilroy-Ware (Associate Professor, History of Art, University of Oxford)

Sheena Calvert (Book Designer) and Ajamu X (Artist), ‘The Book and the Sensuousness of Process’

Session 3

Jackie Kay (Poet) and Ingrid Pollard (Artist) in conversation, ‘A Life in Protest’

25 May–13 July 2022

Liquid Crystal Concrete: The Arts of Postwar Britain 1945–1965 A Series of Summer Research Seminars

This Paul Mellon Centre research seminar series showcased new perspectives on the arts of post-war Britain as an interdisciplinary and transcultural terrain of research. Talks in the series engaged with the issues of empire and worldmaking, with questions of migration, the environment and with the intersections of art, technology and new media.

25 May, British Cybernetic Art: The Origins of Digital Art

Catherine Mason (Independent Art Historian) in conversation with Ernst Edmonds (Artist), ‘British Cybernetic Art: The Origins of Digital Art’

8 June, Marginalised Spaces and Émigré Artists

Sheridan Palmer (Art Historian, Curator, Biographer), ‘The Abbey Art Centre: An “All-but-Forgotten” Artists’ Colony’

Jane Eckett (University of Melbourne), ‘On Modernism’s Margins: William Ohly’s Abbey Art Centre in Postwar England’

22 June, Environmental Surrounds

Matthew Wells (Lecturer in Architectural History, University of Manchester), ‘The Carpet, the Office, an Environment’

Alistair Cartwright (Independent Researcher), ‘The World Turned OutsideIn: Luxury Squats and Liberty Villas, 1946’

29 June, Experimental Modes of Making

Inga Fraser (Curator and Art Historian), ‘Oswell Blakeston: The “Magic Aftermath”’

Rosie Ram (Royal College of Art), ‘The Negative Logic of Parallel of Life and Art’

Two further seminars in this series took place in July 2022

16 June 2022

Strange Universe: Explorations of the Modern in Postwar Britain 1945–1965

A collaboration between Barbican Art Gallery and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, this one-day symposium used the themes and works included in the exhibition

Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945–1965 to explore the ‘strange universe’ of British art in this period.

Curator’s Welcome

Jane Alison (Head of Visual Arts, Barbican), Charlotte Flint (Assistant Curator, Barbican Art Gallery) and Hilary Floe (Assistant Curator, Barbican Art Gallery)

Panel 1 speakers

Lynda Nead (Chair) (Pevsner Chair of History of Art, Birkbeck, University of London), Isobel Whitelegg (Director of Postgraduate Research, School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester) and Giulia Smith (Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow, Ruskin School of Art, University of Oxford)

Panel 2 speakers

Gregory Salter (Chair) (Lecturer, University of Birmingham), Maryam Ohadi-Hamadani (Lecturer in History of Art, University of Edinburgh) and Ming Tiampo (Professor, Carleton University)

Panel 3 speakers

Ben Highmore (Chair) (Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex), Deborah Sugg Ryan (University of Portsmouth) and Claire Zimmerman (University of Michigan)

Panel 4 speakers

Hammad Nasar (Senior Research Fellow, Paul Mellon Centre), Jane Alison (Head of Visual Arts, Barbican) and Abbas Zahedi (Associate Artist, Postwar Modern, Barbican)

Print Publications

Throughout the Centre’s history, our print publications have represented a wide range of research topics, interests and approaches in the field of British art studies. This year’s publications are indicative of this breadth, and also give a sense of new directions and concerns. Garden history, Elizabethan and Jacobean architecture, the ‘great houses’ built on the Strand in London between 1550 and 1650, British and Irish engravers, art making and diplomacy in eighteenth-century western India, and Victorian photography, are just a few of the areas discussed in the books we published this year. Each book project is the product of years of deep research. Mark Girouard’s magisterial A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640 draws on a lifetime of experience in the study of architectural history to assess the impact of some 600 master craftsmen, surveyors, designers and patrons. We were delighted to celebrate the publication of this book and Girouard’s 90th birthday at a special event at the Centre in October 2021. Another dictionary project was David Alexander’s A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820 Researched over four decades, this is the first reference work to cover all engravers working on copper in Britain and Ireland between 1714 and 1820. Meanwhile, Volumes 54 and 55 of the Survey of London, edited by Peter Guillery, present a chronicle of the buildings of Whitechapel. A number of our authors published their first monographs with the Centre. Sean Willcock’s book Victorian Visions of War and Peace; Holly Shaffer’s Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910; Paris A. Spies-Gans’s A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830; and Andrea Wolk Rager’s The Radical Vision of Edward BurneJones, were all developed from PhD research topics into compelling monographs. Sometimes our books take us to some surprising places. This is certainly the case with Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries. Illustrations and discussion in this text encompass topiary, excavated caves, archaeological fragments and exotic animals.

John Oldfield, The Harlington Yew, Harlington, c.1820, pencil and watercolour, corporation of the City of London, reproduced in Todd Longstaffe-Gowan’s

Paul

Print Publications

July 2021–June 2022

A Biographical Dictionary of English Architecture, 1540–1640

October 2021

A Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Engravers, 1714–1820

November 2021

English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries

April 2022

Manolo Guerci

London’s ‘Golden Mile’: The Great Houses of the Strand, 1550–1650

October 2021

Sean Willcock

Victorian Visions of War and Peace: Aesthetics, Sovereignty, and Violence in the British Empire, c.1851–1900

November 2021

Holly Shaffer

Grafted Arts: Art Making and Taking in the Struggle for Western India, 1760–1910

May 2022

Mark Girouard

David Alexander

Todd Longstaffe-Gowan

The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones

May 2022

Paris A. Spies-Gans

A Revolution on Canvas: The Rise of Women Artists in Britain and France, 1760–1830

June 2022

Edward Burne-Jones, The Death of Medusa (detail), c.1876–90. Chalk and gouache on paper, 152 x 137 cm. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Inv. 3107, reproduced in Andrea Rager’s The Radical Vision of Edward Burne-Jones, published by the Paul Mellon Centre in May 2022

Survey of London – Volumes 54 and 55: Whitechapel

June 2022

Andrea Wolk Rager

Peter Guillery

British Art Studies

During the period covered by this report, three issues of British Art Studies, the Centre’s peer-reviewed and open-access journal, were published online. The journal was founded in 2015 and is co-published with the Yale Center for British Art.

Issue 20 (July 2021) was an open issue that included a conversation piece feature titled ‘British Art After Brexit’, which brought together short texts from twelve authors responding to a provocation by the editors. The feature explored the impacts of Brexit on the study, making and exhibition of British art, and is part of an ongoing dialogue in the journal and wider field about national frameworks for art history.

The next two issues were both special issues. Issue 21 (November 2021) was titled ‘Redefining the British Decorative Arts’ and was guest-edited by Iris Moon, an assistant curator of European sculpture and decorative arts at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. It contained eleven articles alongside six features – including an interview, a virtual tour and a roundtable discussion – that spotlight the work of artists and curators today in researching, displaying and reinterpreting decorative arts. Issue 22 (April 2022) ‘Thames River Works’ used an ecocritical lens to interrogate the relationship between industry, the Thames and art in the nineteenth century, taking the Thames-side works of James McNeill Whistler as a starting point. It contained seven articles and was guest-edited by Justin McCann, an independent art historian and former Lunder Curator for American Art and Whistler Studies at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine; and Shalini Le Gall, the Chief Curator and Susan Donnell and Harry W. Konkel Curator of European Art at the Portland Museum of Art in Maine.

In February 2022, a redesign of the journal was also started. This will see us implement improvements identified by the user-experience testing carried out on the journal’s website in February 2020, meet web accessibility standards and reduce the website’s carbon footprint and bandwidth demands. Fabrique, a digital design agency based in the Netherlands, will carry out the redesign.

Glass Sweetmeats, created by the Hot Glass Team at the Corning Museum of Glass, reproduced in British Art Studies, Issue 21: November 2021 – Redefining the British Decorative Arts. Digital image courtesy of the Corning Museum of Glass, Corning, NY

British Art Studies

July 2021–June 2022

British Art Studies, Issue 20: July 2021

One Object Special Feature

‘Victorian Anatomical Atlases and Their Many Lives (and Deaths)’, introduction by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

‘Anatomy in Context: Conversations in the Wellcome Collection, London’, filmed by Jonathan Law with Ludmilla Jordanova and William Schupbach

‘Bloodlines: Circulating the Male Body Across Borders in Art and Anatomy 1780–1860’, by Anthea Callen

‘Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Dissection, and Race in Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy’, by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag

‘Mr Joseph Maclise and the Epistemology of the Anatomical Closet’, by Michael Sappol

‘Joseph Maclise, Taylor & Walton, and Publishing on Gower Street in the 1840s’, by William Schupbach

‘“It Should Be on Every Surgeon’s Table”: The Reception and Adoption of Joseph Maclise’s Surgical Anatomy (1851) in the United States’, by Naomi Slipp

Animating the Archive

‘Slade, London, Asia: Contrapuntal Histories between Imperialism and Decolonization 1945–1989 (Part 1)’, by Liz Bruchet and Ming Tiampo

‘Slade, London, Asia: Animating the Archive (Part 1)’, Animating the Archive feature, by Liz Bruchet and Ming Tiampo

Articles

‘“Everything I Learnt About Activism

I Learnt in King’s Lynn”: Gustav Metzger’s Formative Years in King’s Lynn’, by Jonathan P. Watts

‘Lady of Silences: The Enigmatic Photo-Text Work of Zarina Bhimji’, by Allison K. Young

Conversation Piece

‘British Art After Brexit’, convened by the editorial team

British Art Studies, Issue 21: November 2021 – Redefining the British Decorative Arts

Special Issue, edited by Iris Moon

Articles

‘Unhomely: Redefining the British Decorative Arts’, by Iris Moon

‘England Am I? Elizabethan Clothing, Gender, and Crisis in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts’, by Sarah Bochicchio

‘Microorganisms, Microscopes, and Victorian Design Theories’, by Ariane Varela Braga

‘Tarnished Silver: Interpreting the Material Culture of the Atlantic Slave Trade Negotiations of 1715’, by Max Bryant

‘Cherokee Unaker, British Ceramics, and Productions of Whiteness in EighteenthCentury Atlantic Worlds’, by R. Ruthie Dibble and Joseph Mizhakii Zordan

‘Defining a New Femininity? Josiah Wedgwood’s Portrait Medallions of Sarah Siddons and his “Femmes Célèbres”’, by Patricia F. Ferguson

‘Classical Histories, Colonial Objects: The Specimen Table Across Time and Space’, by Freya Gowrley

‘Serving as Ornament: The Representation of African People in Early Modern British Interiors and Gardens’, by Hannah Lee

‘Ruth Ellis’s Suit’, by Lynda Nead

‘Colonial Trash to Island Treasure: The Chaney of St. Croix’, by Jessica Priebe

‘In the Flesh at the Heart of Empire: Life-Likeness in Wax Representations of the 1762 Cherokee Delegation in London’, by Ianna Recco

Features

‘The Chelsea Porcelain Case, British Galleries, The Metropolitan Museum of Art’, convened by Iris Moon

‘Unpacking Wedgwood: An Interview with Roberto Visani’, by Caitlin Meehye Beach

‘Wild Porcelain’, cover collaboration with Michelle Erickson

‘What’s in a Label? Revising Narratives of the Decorative Arts in Museum Displays’, convened by Iris Moon

Another Crossing: Artists Revisit the Mayflower Voyage, by Glenn Adamson

‘In Sparkling Company: Presenting Eighteenth-Century Britain in Western New York State’, by Christopher Maxwell

British Art Studies, Issue 22: April 2022 – Thames River Works

Special Issue, edited by Shalini Le Gall and Justin McCann

Articles

‘“The Surrounding Great Work”: Memory, Erasure, and Curating the Built Environment of the West India Docks, 1802–2022’, by Aleema Gray and Danielle Thom

‘Ships and Souvenirs: Itineraries of the Golden Jubilee’, by Shalini Le Gall

‘Printed Ecologies: William Morris and the Rural Thames’, by Sarah Mead Leonard

‘“The River Seemed Almost Turned to Blood”: The Tooley Street Fire’, by Nancy Rose Marshall

‘Women in Whistler’s Images of Chelsea and the Thames’, by Patricia de Montfort

‘Whistler and Battersea: The Aesthetics of Erasure and Redevelopment’, by Jon Newman

‘“Over London at Night”: Gasworks, Ballooning, and the Visual Gas Field’, by Jennifer Tucker

Read & Co., The Great Fire Near London Bridge Saturday, June 22nd 1861 (detail), 1861, lithograph, reproduced in British Art Studies, Issue 22: April 2022 – Thames River Works. Image courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo (all rights reserved)

Fellowships and Grants

Our funding supports innovative scholarship in British art, art history and visual culture. The total amount given out in grants and fellowships for 2021–22 was £1,006,894, which supported original research and activity engaging with a striking range of topics, methodologies and cultural contexts.

In line with the Paul Mellon Centre’s commitment to ensuring that the histories of British art are enriched and made more relevant to a broader range of people, we have continued to revise our guidance and have expanded our funding, including increasing the duration and amount of our Senior Fellowships.

A new set of awards, designed to increase the diversity of perspectives among researchers and students within the field of British art history, was introduced in early 2022. This ‘New Narratives’ programme of funding includes an MA/MPhil Studentship (£32,000 over one year), a Doctoral Scholarship (£32,000 each year for three years) and an Early Career Fellowship (£32,000 each year for two years). The Doctoral Scholarship and MA/MPhil Studentship are the first awards offered by the Centre to specifically support the university fees and living expenses of individuals undertaking further education. The first grantees were announced in May 2022, and comprised Peter Miller, who will undertake an MPhil at the University of Cambridge with a project titled Aubrey Williams, Ronald Moody and Transnational Caribbean Ecology; Nicholas Brown, who will undertake a doctoral project at the University of the Arts London titled The Significance of Magazine Publishing for Black British Art; and Jareh Das, whose Early Career Fellowship project is titled Tracing Post-Colonial Perspectives in Nigerian and British Pottery

Peter, Nicholas and Jareh join the twenty-eight other individuals who were awarded fellowships in the Spring 2022 round, to research topics ranging from Holbein to the homoerotic networks of the Grand Tour, from Anglo-Saxon manuscripts to Brian Sewell and the art history of the 1990s. More than forty individuals have also benefited from Research Support Grants, distributed in our Autumn 2021 and Spring 2022 rounds, and we have provided substantial support for institutions across the UK with Collaborative Project Grants, Curatorial Research Grants, Digital Project Grants and Event Grants.

Frank Bowling, Mummybelli, 2019, installation shot, Frank Bowling and Sculpture (Stephen Lawrence Gallery, 2022). Courtesy the artist, photo: Peter Mallett

Fellowships and Grants

July 2021–June 2022

Autumn 2021

At the October 2021 meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:

Collaborative Project Grants

National Galleries of Scotland and University of Edinburgh were awarded £32,000 towards collaborative research for the John Michael Wright and the Art of Invention project

Portsmouth City Council and Silver Society, Royal Navy, were awarded £15,450 towards collaborative research for the Portsmouth’s Civic Silver Collection project

University of Salford and Royal Institute of British Architects, Liverpool, were awarded £32,000 towards collaborative research for The Modern Backdrop: The Impact of Architectural Modernity on Memory, Identity and Lives in Salford, 1960–1973 project

Curatorial Research Grants

Birmingham Museums Trust was awarded £30,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project Victorian Art, Design and Empire

Fitzwilliam Museum was awarded £20,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project Enslavement and Empire, c.1670–1870

Royal Museums Greenwich was awarded £30,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project Van de Velde 350: The Dawn of British Marine Painting

The Hepworth Wakefield was awarded £20,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project

A Collection for Wakefield: Cataloguing, Research and Presentation of Two Major Bequests to the Wakefield Permanent Art Collections

The Stephen Lawrence Gallery was awarded £10,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project Frank Bowling and Sculpture

Turner’s House Trust was awarded £27,000 to help support a research curator to work on the project

J. M. W. Turner’s Sandycombe Years Exhibition Series

Digital Project Grants

The Courtauld Institute of Art was awarded £39,500 towards creating a publicly accessible, free-to-use online database of digitised material from the Institute’s archive of British wall paintings through The National Wall Paintings Survey: Phase 1 project

University of East Anglia was awarded £40,000 towards creating an interactive, open-access resource built around a collection of ‘fictile ivories’ through The UEA Fictile Ivories: Casts, Networks, Replicas project

Event Support Grant

Fieldnotes was awarded £1,000 towards the ARCHI-POETICS: Urban Architecture writing workshops

Northumbria University was awarded £2,600 towards the Art Publishing, Periodicals and Printed Things conference

The William Morris Society was awarded £1,000 towards The Kelmscott Press and its Legacies symposium

University of Dundee was awarded £500 towards the Art History and Violence against Women conference

Publication Grant

Caitlin Beach was awarded £1,500 towards publishing Sculpture at the Ends of Slavery

Eva Bentcheva was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The Dancing Hands: The Life and Works of Prafulla Mohanti

Jacqueline Bishop and Intellect Books were awarded £8,000 towards publishing Patchwork: Essays & Interviews on Contemporary Caribbean Visual Culture

Gary Boyd and Lund Humphries were awarded £7,000 towards publishing Architecture and the Face of Coal: Mining and Modern Britain

Charlotte de Mille and Edinburgh University Press were awarded £4,910 towards publishing Bergson in Britain: Modern Art and Philosophy

Helen Draper and Lund Humphries were awarded £8,000 towards publishing Mary Beale

Alicia Foster and Pallant House Gallery were awarded £8,000 towards publishing Gwen John: Art and Life in Two Cities

Charlotte Gauthier and Paul Holberton Publishing were awarded £10,000 towards publishing 900 Years of St Bartholomew the Great Conor Lucey was awarded £1,040 towards publishing House and Home in Georgian Ireland: Spaces and Cultures of Domestic Life

Michael McMillan was awarded £3,000 towards publishing The Front Room: Migrant Aesthetics in the Home (revised edition)

Iris Moon was awarded £10,000 towards publishing Melancholy Wedgwood

Zachary Stewart and Harvey Miller were awarded £3,000 towards publishing Tribute to T. A. Heslop: From Miniature to Monumental: Studies in the Material Culture of Medieval Britain

Callan Waldron-Hall and Bluecoat were awarded £9,710 towards publishing Bluecoat Off-Centre: Out of the Archive

Research Support Grants

Sara Ayres was awarded £700 for research on Investigating and Publishing a Manuscript Account of Prince Otto von Hessen-Kassel’s Princely Tour in England and Scotland in 1611

Sarah Churchill was awarded £1,750 for research on Photography, ‘The New Brutalism’, and the Invention of Postwar Social Housing

Thomas Cooper was awarded £930 for research on May Morris in Oxfordshire

Emily Cox was awarded £1,750 for research on The ‘Tendril’ and the ‘Root’: Rethinking the Fin-de-Siècle’s Artistic Landscape

Lauren Craig was awarded £1,750 for research on Itinerant Abstractions: The Work of Prafulla Mohanti Rendering Experience: A Curatorial Exploration of ‘Passion: Discourses on Blackwomen’s Creativity’ (1990)

Taous Rose Dahmani was awarded £1,750 for research on ‘Direct Action Photography’: A Typography of the Photographic Representation of Struggles and the Struggle for Photographic Representations (London, 1968–1989)

Catherine Doucette was awarded £1,750 for research on The Decorative Arts of Colonial Jamaica

Ruth Ezra was awarded £1,750 for research on Leaves of Glass: Mica between Art and Science in Early Modern England

Katherine Fein was awarded £1,750 for research on Tusk and Skin: The Intimate Ecologies of Ivory Miniatures

Luke Fiederer was awarded £1,750 for research on To Waterloo on the Windrush: How Lambeth’s Caribbean Community Redefined Architectural Britishness

Eliza Goodpasture was awarded £1,800 for research on Kindred Spirits: Friendship and Ambition Among Women Artists, 1870–1920

Rachel Hutcheson was awarded £1,750 for research on Color Photography, 1890–1920: Technology, Gender, Colonialism

Arjuna Keshvani-Ham was awarded £400 for research on Harry Fainlight: The Beatniks and the British Art Scene, 1957–1967

Alexandra Macdonald was awarded £1,750 for research on The Social Life of Time i n the Anglo-Atlantic World, 1660–1830

Fionn Montell-Boyd was awarded £290 for research on Speculative Projections: The Political Economy of Silver and the Emergence of Photography in Britain, 1780–1841

Kimberly Morse Jones was awarded £1,750 for research on An Anthology of British Press Art Criticism from the Long Nineteenth Century

Stephen Parnell was awarded £1,750 for research on The Makings of Critical Regionalism: Ken Frampton at ‘Architectural Design’

Triveni Srikaran was awarded £1,750 for research on Women Art Workers of the Arts and Crafts Movement in Britain, c.1880–1925

Francesca Strobino was awarded £1,750 for research on Mapping the Private and Scientific Network of W. H. F. Talbot’s Photomechanical Experiments

Elliott Sturtevant was awarded £1,750 for research on ‘London’s Most Modern Office Building’: Bush House, International Trade, and the Supremacy of English-Speaking Peoples in the Aftermath of WWI

Andrew Wyld Research Support Grants

Michael Feinberg was awarded £2,000 for research on Caribbean Landscapes and Agencies beyond the Human in British Print Culture surrounding the Haitian Revolution

Hannah Lyons was awarded £2,000 for research on Caroline Watson (1760/1–1814), Frances, Marchioness of Bute (1773–1832) and the Bute Collection of Prints

Spring 2022

At the March 2022 meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:

Senior Fellowships

Alexander Marr (University of Cambridge) was awarded £60,000 for the project Holbein’s Wit: Pictorial Ingenuity in Renaissance Art

Heather Pulliam (University of Edinburgh) was awarded £60,000 for the project Living Frame: Art, Body and Environment in Britain and Ireland, c.700–1000

Matthew Reeve (Queen’s University) was awarded £60,000 for the project The Casa Manetti in Florence: Homoerotic Networks, the Grand Tour, and the Origins of Queer Aesthetics in Britain c.1735–1785

Mid-Career Fellowships

Justin Carville (Institute of Art, Design & Technology, Dun Laoghaire) was awarded £15,000 for the project The Ungovernable Eye: Photographies of Race and Ethnography in Ireland

Alice Correia was awarded £15,000 for the project British South Asian Women Artists since the 1980s

John Curley (Wake Forest University) was awarded £15,000 for the project Critical Distance: Black American Artists in Europe, 1958–1968

Stephen Parnell (Newcastle University) was awarded £15,000 for the project Catalogs, Clubs and Cosmorama

Otto Saumarez Smith (University of Warwick) was awarded £15,000 for the project Landscapes of Hope and Crisis: A History of Modern Urban Britain

Tania Sengupta (The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London) was awarded £15,000 for the project Colonial Margins: Spatial Cultures of Provincial Governance in NineteenthCentury Eastern India

Laura Slater (University of Cambridge) was awarded £15,000 for the project Philippa of Hainault: Queenship, Music and Manuscripts

Catherine Spencer (University of St Andrews) was awarded £15,000 for the project Abstract Subjects: Art in Britain Between the Border and the Trace

Postdoctoral Fellowships

Anne Caldwell was awarded £10,000 for the project Alien Tourists/National Painters: Jewishness, Zionism, and Palestine in the Art of the Whitechapel Boys and Bezalel Artists

Matthew Holman was awarded £10,000 for the project Communing with Communities: The Whitechapel Gallery’s Radical Education Programmes, 1979–1989

Alicia Hughes was awarded £10,000 for the project The Paper Museum in the Long Eighteenth Century

Anna Jamieson was awarded £10,000 for the project The Gaze of the Sane: Asylum Tourism in England, 1770–1845

Juliet Learmouth was awarded £10,000 for the project Elite Women and the London Town House, 1700 to 1760

Sophie Lynford was awarded £10,000 for the project Landscapes of Liberation: Michel Jean Cazabon and Post-Emancipation Trinidad (*This award was declined)

Rebecca Senior was awarded £10,000 for the project Allegories of Violence: Monuments, Empire and Visual Culture in Britain, 1760–1840

Marte Stinis was awarded £10,000 for the project Music and Painting in Victorian Aestheticism

Lindsay Wells was awarded £10,000 for the project Evergreen Empire: The Horticultural Politics of British Painting, 1848–1910

Courtney Wilder was awarded £10,000 for the project Printed Dress Textiles and the Visual Economy in Europe, 1815–1851

Junior Fellowships

Christopher Barrett-Lennard (Princeton University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project The Artist as Somatic Technician: Len Lye’s Cinema, 1926–44

Dominic Bate (Brown University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project Pythagorean Visions: Picturing Harmony in British Art, 1719–1753

Deepthi Bathala (University of Michigan) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project Famine crops, Botanical Provinces, and Tropical Plantations: Architecture of the Botanic Gardens in Early Colonial India

Avantika Kumar (Harvard University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project Between Book and Body: Representations of the Word Incarnate in Late AngloSaxon Manuscripts

Renata Nagy (Yale University) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project Bookish Art: Natural Historical Learning Across Media in Seventeenth-Century Northwestern Europe

Megan Shaw (University of Auckland) was awarded £7,500 to conduct research in the United Kingdom for the project A Female Favourite: Katherine Villiers, Duchess of Buckingham, 1603–1649

Archives & Library Fellowship

Chloe Julius was awarded £10,000 f or research on the project Brian Sewell and British Art History in the 1990s

Rome Fellowship

Christopher Baker (National Galleries of Scotland) was awarded £17,000 (£7,000 to individual, £10,000 to British School at Rome) to spend time at the British School at Rome to research Henry Fuseli in Rome: Defining a New, Heroic Style for British Art

Event Support Grants

Afterall was awarded £1,500 to support the Transnational Solidarities through ‘Artists for Democracy’, London 1974–77 symposium

De Montfort University was awarded £500 to support The State of Cultural Diversity in British Photography: Artistic Literacy, Educational Access and Institutional Policies conference

Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum was awarded £2,000 to support the Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries conference

Nottingham Contemporary was awarded £2,000 to support The Adventure Playground: The Architecture of Contemporary Play event series

Pallant House Gallery was awarded £2,500 to support the Representing Blackness in British Modernism, 1900–1950 symposium

School of Advanced Study, University of London was awarded £2,000 to support The Medieval Diagram as Subject workshop

The Hepworth Wakefield was awarded £2,000 to support the Hepworth’s Progeny: Generations of Women in Sculpture in Britain – Lives, Works, Careers and Social Change, 1960–2021 symposium

The Higgins Bedford Art Gallery & Museum was awarded £500 to support the Body and Soul Study Day

Thelma Hulbert Gallery was awarded £2,000 to support the Ingrid Pollard –Research Commission in Devon (working title) lecture series

Research Support Grants

Claire Banks was awarded £2,000 for research on Company Drawings of Natural History

Jessica Boyall was awarded £1,237 for research on Black, British and Feminist: The History and Legacy of Ceddo, Sankofa and the Black Audio Film Collective

Helen Bremm was awarded £720 for research on Leonora Carrington’s Feminist Occult Egg Tempera Revival

Albert Brenchat-Aguilar was awarded £2,000 for research on As Hardly Found in the Art of Tropical Architecture

Tania Cleaves was awarded £1,175 for research on Sun, Sex and the Senses: Nudist Photography in Britain, c.1930–1960

Charlotte Davis was awarded £1,611 for research on Carving Out New Professional Specialisms: SeventeenthCentury Sculptors in England

Adam Eaker was awarded £2,000 for research on Autonomy and Inscription: William Wood’s ‘Joanna de Silva’

Stephen Feeke was awarded £1,500 for research on Barbara Hepworth and the Public Realm: ‘Single Form’ and ‘Meridian’

Molly-Claire Gillett was awarded £1,515 for research on Mabel Morrison: Patron and Collector of Lace

Peter Humfrey was awarded £840 for research on The Hoares of Stourhead as Collectors of Paintings (c.1740–1838)

Joshua Jenkins was awarded £1,550 for research on Joseph Gillott and the Rise of the Collector-Dealer

Hannah Kaspar was awarded £1,800 for research on Robert Adam, John Paterson, and the Edinburgh Architectural Practice

Murdo Macdonald was awarded £1,223 for research on C. T. R. Wilson’s Cloud Chamber Photographs

Sophia Merkin was awarded £2,000 for research on Historic Objects and Contemporary Display: The Past, Present, and Future Lives of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Polynesian Barkcloths

Lucie Prohin was awarded £2,000 for research on British Workers’ Dwellings Exhibited: Retracing the Circulation of Architectural Forms in Europe (1851–1913)

James Stewart was awarded £750 for research on Queering the Country House: The 9th Earl of Devon at Powderham Castle

Clare Taylor was awarded £1,991 for research on Phase 2 of Gilt Leather Rooms: Decorating with Leather Hangings in Britain

Rowan Thompson was awarded £1,342 for research on Naval Pageantry, Heritage, and Commemoration in Interwar Britain

Timothy Wilcox was awarded £1,920 for research on John Robert Cozens and William Beckford

Patrick Zamarian was awarded £1,930 for research on Architectural Education in British India: The RIBA and the Sir J. J. School of Architecture

Claire Zimmerman was awarded £2,000 for research on Alison’s Mind: A Postcolonial Architect Collages Old England

New Narratives 2022

At the May 2022 extraordinary meeting of the Advisory Council, the following grants and fellowships were awarded:

MA/MPhil Studentship

Peter Miller was awarded £32,000 for one year to undertake an MPhil in the History of Art and Architecture with a research focus on Aubrey Williams, Ronald Moody and Transnational Caribbean Ecology at the University of Cambridge

Doctoral Scholarship

Nicholas Brown was awarded £32,000 per year for three years to undertake a doctoral project titled The Significance of Magazine Publishing for Black British Art at the University of the Arts, London

Early Career Fellowship

Jareh Das was awarded £35,000 per year for two years for the project Tracing Post-Colonial Perspectives in Nigerian and British Pottery

Learning Programme

The Centre’s Learning Programme continued to respond creatively to the challenges for international travel and study abroad thrown up by the pandemic. Under the leadership of Sria Chatterjee (Head of Research and Learning) and Nermin Abdulla (Learning Programme Manager), an exciting range of courses, awards and opportunities were offered for students and the public across a range of ages and backgrounds.

Yale in London hosted two summer sessions. The first included the courses ‘British Art and the Maritime World’ and ‘Contemporary British Theatre’; the second featured courses titled ‘Writing about Music in the U.K.’ and ‘The British Country House: Collecting and Display’. Students engaged in a range of study trips and programmed social activities beyond the classroom.

Two Public Lecture Courses were run over the academic year. In autumn 2021, Elizabeth Robles convened ‘Black British Artists and Political Activism’, which was fully online. Over six weeks, speakers presented a compelling set of dialogues about the relationship between art-making and political activism across key political and cultural episodes of the late twentieth century. In spring 2022, Jessica Berenbeim and Lloyd de Beer convened the much-acclaimed series, ‘Britain and the World in the Middle Ages: Image and Reality’. Through five lectures on medieval art (presented in-person and online) the series explored Britain as a place of exchange – of art, ideas, rare materials and people from all over the world.

The Plan, Prepare, Provide programme has proved useful for secondary school teachers to enhance the delivery of art history within their classes. In addition to workshops and an Art Teachers Residential, this year five teachers from the programme were recruited to the Postgraduate Certificate course.

The Write on Art Prize has seen growing interest from secondary school pupils studying a range of different subjects. This year the prize was judged by a stellar line-up of artists, curators and art historians: Sutapa Biswas (artist), Arike Oke (Executive Director of Knowledge and Collections, BFI) and Jo Baring (Director, Ingram Collection). The judges were extremely impressed by the high quality of the shortlisted essays and the care and time that applicants had put into their entries.

Art Teachers Residential at Leeds Art Gallery, organised by Plan, Prepare, Provide and funded by the Paul Mellon Centre.

Photograph: Andy Lord

Learning Programme

July 2021–August 2022

Yale in London

Summer 2022, Session One

6 June–8 July 2022

Number of students: 9

Courses:

BRST 213 Making Waves: British Art and the Maritime World, taught by Katherine Gazzard (UK) BRST 190 Contemporary British Theatre, taught by Marc Robinson (Yale)

Public Lecture Course

Autumn 2021

Course: Black British Artists and Political Activism

Convenor: Elizabeth Robles (University of Bristol)

Dates: 4 November–9 December 2021 (online)

Lectures and Speakers:

1. Introduction, by Elizabeth Robles

2. Abstraction and Anti-Colonialism, by Ego Sowinski

3. ‘I’m in the Black Lesbian Poster’, with Ingrid Pollard and Adele Patrick

4. Artists Against Apartheid, with Gavin Jantjes and Allison K. Young

5. ‘She is not Bullet Proof’, with Marlene Smith and Alice Correia

Summer 2022, Session Two

4 July–12 August 2022

Number of students: 6

Courses:

BRST 214 Writing about Music in the U.K., taught by Adam Reid Sexton (Yale) BRST 158 The British Country House: Collecting and Display, taught by Martin Postle (PMC)

Spring 2022

Course: Britain and the World in the Middle Ages: Image and Reality

Convenors: Jessica Berenbeim (University of Cambridge) and Lloyd de Beer (British Museum)

Dates: 7 April–12 May 2022 (in-person and online)

Lectures:

1. Introduction, by Jessica Berenbeim and Lloyd de Beer

2. Myth, by Alixe Bovey

3. Maps, by Alfred Hiatt

4. Metamorphosis, by Tom Nickson

5. Movement, by Amanda Luyster

6. Museums by Risham Majeed

Plan, Prepare, Provide

The Plan, Prepare, Provide (PPP) programme was developed by the University of Leeds School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies, in partnership with the Association for Art History. It is generously supported by the Paul Mellon Centre. It offers a unique opportunity for secondary school teachers and their schools to improve their delivery of both academic and practical art lessons. It encompasses an annual three-day residential, stand-alone CPD sessions, and a targeted Postgraduate Certificate in ‘Developing Teachers’ Research and Practice’.

This year the programme included two online CPD workshops: ‘The Fine Art of Surfacing’ and ‘Around the World in “Arty Ways”’, and a two-and-ahalf-day in-person ‘Art Teachers Residential’ at the University of Leeds. It also successfully recruited five teachers to the Postgraduate Certificate course.

Write on Art

Judges: Sutapa Biswas (Artist), Arike Oke (Executive Director of Knowledge and Collections, BFI) and Jo Baring (Director, Ingram Collection)

The winners of the 2021/22 cycle were:

Years 12 and 13

First place: Tavishi Gupta on Self Portrait aka The Model by Laura Knight

Second place: George Rowe on Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils by William Blake

Runner-up: Jayden Formston-Jones on ID Crisis by Zanele Muholi

Runner-up: Yueshi Yang on Lady Staunton with her Son George Thomas Staunton and a Chinese Servant by John Hoppner

Runner-up: Hettie Farmer on By His Will, We Teach Birds How to Fly No.1 by Ibrahim

El-Salahi

Shortlisted: Hannah Barnett, Alice Febles, Farrah Gower, Alex Lake and Lena Radzins

Years 10 and 11

First place: Miranda Black on Large Blade Venus by William Turnbull

Second place: Isabel Chan on My Mother Alone in Her Dining Room by Anthony Green

Runner-up: James Rayner on Human Frailty by Salvator Rosa

Runner-up: Amy Pinckney on A Selection of Five Pots by Barry Flanagan

Runner-up: Alexa Nettelton on A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Édouard Manet

Shortlisted: Mehda Dixit, Heike Ghandi, Luella John, Nina Luong and Lara Wong

William Blake, Satan Smiting Job with Sore Boils, c.1826, Tate N03340.

Archives and Library

At the beginning of the year, the pandemic was still having an impact on the Archives and Library (A&L) public service. During the summer of 2021, the Public Study Room (PSR) was open on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Throughout this period, the need for quarantining stock and social distancing in the room slowly reduced.

To address the growing demand for remote access to A&L holdings and the desire to widen engagement opportunities for A&L audiences, public service provision was revised. Policies and procedures were rewritten. From 4 October 2021, the PSR opened to readers from Tuesday to Friday; the existing enquiries service was augmented; and a formal copies service was launched. A&L web pages were revised, and new artist guides – which have proved to be a great success – were published.

The Centre made one joint acquisition during the year: the Nicholas Goodison Archive and Library. This was kindly donated in January 2022 by Goodison’s widow, Judith. Goodison (1934–2021), who was chairman of the London Stock Exchange between 1976 and 1986, had a lifelong interest in the visual and decorative arts, publishing key texts on barometers and Matthew Boulton. The library comprises 250 books on such subjects as barometers, clocks and watches, ormolu, silver- and gold-work, glass, ceramics and furniture. Alongside papers relating to Goodison’s research, the archive also includes material concerning his work for the independent inquiry, ‘Saving Art for the Nation’.

A&L staff hosted the first in-person event held at the Centre following the re-opening of the building; a workshop on the Paul Oppé Archive and Library. This was followed by two further in-person events: tours for Yale NUS staff and students; and for delegates attending the Colnaghi Foundation/ Warburg Institute ‘Unlocking Archives’ course.

A&L material held at the Centre was featured in the BBC television programme Fake or Fortune? Material was consulted by the television production team during their research on a lost work by Benjamin West. Filming took place in the PSR, and the resulting programme was broadcast in August 2021.

A collection of material from the Frank Simpson archive. An online ‘Collections in Focus’ feature, Exploring the Frank Simpson Archive, was launched on the PMC’s website in May 2022

Research Collections Fellowships

Following a delay caused by the pandemic, the first recipient of the research collections fellowship, Joshua Mardell, embarked on research for his project ‘Finding a Historiography for Gavin Stamp’. The second recipient, Dr Hans Hönes, began his research shortly afterwards on a project entitled ‘Fundaments of Knowledge: Art History in Britain c.1940–70’. Both postholders spent extended stretches of time during the period covered by this report consulting A&L materials in the PSR and began work on the various output requirements of their respective fellowships.

Archive and Library Student Placements

The A&L hosted UCL postgraduate student placements in April–May 2022. Two students, Isobel Jarvis and Natasha Tebbs, spent a fortnight at the Centre cataloguing material from the Andrew Moore Library and the Humphrey Waterfield Archive respectively.

Drawing Room Displays

Two Drawing Room Displays were held during 2021–2: Sculpting in Sound: Researching Sculpting Lives, held from 4 October to 14 December 2021, was a display curated by Jo Baring (Director, Ingram Collection) and Sarah Victoria Turner. This featured A&L materials that had been used to develop their podcast Sculpting Lives: Women & Sculpture, launched in March 2020.

Bedford Square: Creating Social Distance, held from 10 March to 9 September 2022 and curated by Martin Myrone, used A&L materials to explore Bedford Square’s architectural and social history and to highlight the way that classic Georgian architecture created forms of social distancing.

Staff

Following a reorganisation of staff responsibilities in October, the Deputy Director took over management of the A&L.

Jenny Hill, the Assistant Archivist, left the Centre in November after ten years in post. A temporary member of staff, Odelia Silver, was brought in between December and May to help with the public service prior to the recruitment of a new Assistant Archivist. Morwenna Roche was appointed to this role in April.

Anthony Day completed the final six-month project of his contract: to plan and organise a workshop on the Oppé collection and to promote the collection via various avenues. He left the Centre at the end of September 2021.

Mary Peskett Smith, A&L Cataloguer, retired after many years at the Centre in June 2022.

A strategic review of resources identified the need for an A&L Assistant. It was determined that a one-year graduate trainee role should be established to focus on the public service. Such roles are in high demand in the sector, providing essential training for anyone considering a career in the information professions. The first postholder, Hannah Jones, was recruited in June 2022.

Library

A total of 673 new books and exhibition catalogues were acquired and accessioned during the year.

As well as newly published materials acquired by purchase and gift throughout the year, the library received one larger donated collection: Andrew Moore kindly gifted fifty books relating to art and photography in Norfolk, including exhibition catalogues from Norwich Castle Museum and Art Gallery.

The Michael Liversidge donation of books on Canadian painting (100 titles), given to the Centre in 2018, was accessioned into the collection and fully catalogued during the year.

Staff also embarked on some larger-scale cataloguing projects. The Librarian continued work on the Giles Waterfield donation, while the Assistant Librarian continued cataloguing pamphlets on British artists in the Brian Sewell library. All the Library’s catalogue records are exported to Library Hub Discover.

The Assistant Librarian continued to develop the Library’s Special Collections by moving all pre-1800 publications to the Library’s rare books section. She also arranged for the boxing of early books from the Paul Oppé and Sir Brinsley Ford donations to ensure that they are protected from environmental damage.

The A&L Cataloguer completed the cataloguing of the Library’s collection of copies of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century exhibiting society catalogues.

The Library’s copy of This Man: A Sequence of Wood Engravings by Elizabeth Rivers (1939) from the Peter and Renate Nahum donation was loaned to the exhibitions A Life in Art and Reuniting the Twenties Group that were held at Towner Eastbourne during the summer and early autumn of 2022.

Staff Library

Following a suggestion arising from the PMC’s Equity, Ethics and Engagement Group, a Staff Library was established in the autumn under the management of the Assistant Librarian. This separate library supports the work of staff at the Centre, and has rapidly grown to nearly a hundred titles. A small selection of works of fiction related to art and artists was added in the spring.

Archive

Eleven archive collections were offered to the Centre from private donors during the year. Following careful assessment against the Centre’s published Archive Collection Policy Statement and, in some cases, an on-site appraisal, two were declined and six remain under consideration. Three archive collections were acquired.

Alongside the Goodison Archive, the Kerry Downes Archive was kindly donated to the Centre in July 2021 by Anthony Geraghty. Downes (1930–2019) was a British architectural historian and author who published widely. Downes’s archive contains material relating to his entire career and includes, most notably, extensive correspondence with many of the UK’s leading architectural historians of the post-war period.

The Fry Gallery Archive was kindly donated to the Centre in May 2022 by Jonathan, son of the gallery’s owners, the late Cyril and Shirley Fry. The Fry Gallery (1967–90s) specialised in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British watercolours and drawings. The majority of the archive comprises material related to the day-to-day running of the gallery. It also includes correspondence with many of the prominent figures of the British art scene at the time, including Dudley Snelgrove, Edward Croft-Murray, Leonard G. Duke and Paul Mellon.

Cataloguing of the Frank Simpson Archive was completed in April 2022. The resulting catalogue descriptions were published online on the Centre’s website, Archives Hub, Discovery, and Archives Portal Europe in June 2022. An online ‘Collections in Focus’ feature, Exploring the Frank Simpson Archive, was launched in May 2022.

Institutional Archive

A review of resources determined that additional staff would be required to successfully support an institutional archive going forward. Planning for this, the Archivist, Records & Data Protection Manager (ARDPM) took part in the National Archives’s Digital Peer Mentoring scheme and undertook the ‘Novice to Know-How’ training course organised by the Digital Preservation Coalition. An eighteen-month project was scoped, which also included ensuring the Centre’s digital records are accessible to future generations. The resulting project post was advertised in July 2022. The ARDPM also liaised with IT staff concerning the proposed migration of records to SharePoint.

General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)

The ARDPM continued to work with staff to ensure that both new Centre initiatives and existing everyday working practices were compliant with GDPR. Particular projects included the British Art Network members survey; the New Narratives Fellowship; and establishing a data transfer agreement with Yale. Training was given to all staff. Work concerning PMC audiences established both that a more comprehensive data-driven understanding of profile, engagement and experience was needed, and that liaison with external experts would be necessary to achieve this. The Audience Agency was identified as a potential partner and initial conversations were held with them in May 2022.

Networks

Our networks connect and support researchers and professionals engaging with British art. The Centre has two established networks: the Doctoral Researchers Network (DRN), a supportive group of PhD students, offering academic and professional training; and the Early Career Researchers Network (ECRN), a peer-to-peer network supporting people working to establish careers as researchers in British art. The Centre also supports the British Art Network (BAN) alongside Tate, with additional public funding provided by the National Lottery through Arts Council England. With the continuing impact of Covid-19 and the changing economic climate, these networks have adapted and expanded during 2021–22, and have come to play an increasingly important role in connecting curators, researchers and emerging scholars and building a much-needed sense of community within the sector.

The British Art Network membership grew by more than 30 per cent, reaching 1,350 members by June 2022. In July 2021, the annual conference focused on ‘Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain’, with a programme of roundtables and two commissioned artists’ films, by Rita Keegan and Raju Rage – all freely available on the BAN website (britishartnetwork.org.uk). The first thirty-two articles for a new ‘virtual collection’, entitled ‘The British Art UnCanon’, were published on the BAN website, bringing together images from across the history of British art selected by BAN members. The newsletters sent out to the membership included essays, interviews and reflections on British art curating, and a special issue, guest-edited by the Emerging Curators Group, with films and accessible content.

The allocation of BAN bursary support in autumn 2021 included funding for ten Research Groups, including entirely new groups dedicated to British Digital Art; The Art of Captioning; Disability in British Art; and Art and the Women’s Movement in the UK, 1970–1988. The fifteen members of the new Emerging Curators Group for 2022 included individuals working across the UK either within organisations or independently, engaging with historic and contemporary art, activism and research. In early 2022, BAN opened applications for a revised seminar support scheme, aimed at providing funds for more developmental or experimental one-off events, and an entirely

new Curatorial Forum and residential programme, which will bring together a select group of twelve curators of British art from a range of backgrounds and working contexts at the Yale Center for British Art in October 2022. With an emphasis on collective learning, exploratory thinking, sharing and reflection, the Forum will provide a unique opportunity to explore the history, present experience and future of British art curating; forge new professional connections; and enjoy privileged access to the exceptional collections and resources of the Yale Center for British Art.

More detailed information on BAN’s activities in 2021 can be found in the BAN Annual Report, posted online in March 2022.

During 2021–22, the ECRN was co-convened by Dr Christine Slobogin and Dr Stacey Clapperton. They grew the membership by 35 per cent to 201 researchers. The DRN, which has an active membership of 162 PhD students, was co-convened by Caitlin Doley and Susuana Amoah. Both networks ran lively programmes aimed at enhancing skill sets and career development, which provided a space for testing ideas, sharing experiences and connecting with each other.

Additionally, the Paul Mellon Centre continues to explore new ways of supporting researchers and curators. This year we launched ‘British Art in Motion’, the PMC’s undergraduate filmmaking competition. The competition is designed to generate creative and thought-provoking short films about works of British art or architecture, and to explore the possibilities of film as a medium for engaging and interpreting works of art. Ten students were selected from a pool of applicants to produce a 10-minute film, with financial, academic and technical support offered by the PMC.

This year also saw the launch of the first annual Art Trade Seminar, which invited emerging curators, academics and scholars to apply to attend a three day programme of activities, which included visits to London-based art dealerships, auction houses and galleries, and offered numerous opportunities to engage in discussion with art trade and museum professionals in the context of the market for global art objects. Twelve attendees were selected to attend the seminar from twenty-five applications received.

Networks July 2021–June 2022

Where venues are not specified, events were held online

British Art Network (BAN) Research Group Events

BAN Research Groups focus on specific areas of British art. Their programmes of activity, including workshops, seminars and networking sessions, are developed and led by Network members.

2021

6 July British South-Asian Visual Art Post Cool Britannia: ‘Un-Swamping the River –Painters Turning the Tide on Racism’

9 September Post-War Painting in Regional Collections: ‘Post-War Women Painters’, New Art Gallery, Walsall

23 September British South-Asian Visual Art Post Cool Britannia: ‘The Shape of Immateriality’

8 December British Drawings: ‘Academicism and Drawing’, Royal Academy, London

2022

21 January Northern Irish Art/Courtauld Institute: Symposium: ‘Northern Ireland’s Feminist and Queer Art Histories’, Dr Fionna Barber and Emma Campbell

8 April Queer British Art: ‘STORMY WEATHER – A Day of Debate, Defiance & Celebration’, Manchester Art Gallery

9 May–16 June Black British Art

Reading Group

12 May Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites: ‘Empire and the Everyday Object’, Alison Solomon

25 May The Art of Captioning: ‘Making Access Work’, Elaine Lillian Joseph, Nina Thomas and Natasha Trantom

6 June British Landscapes: Visit to Recreating Constable at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich

15 June Northern Irish Art: ‘A Bigger Picture: Photography Redefining Northern Ireland’

16 June Disability in British Art: ‘Exploring Difference from an Artist’s Perspective’

22 June Race, Empire and the Pre-Raphaelites: ‘Difficult Objects’

29 June The Art of Captioning: ‘Introduction to Caption-Writing and Caption Consultation’, Anita WolskaKaslow and Nina Thomas

Emerging Curators Group

The Emerging Curators Group (ECG) is a supportive forum for the next generation of curators in the UK, enabling peers to come together and share experiences and thinking around curating British art.

2021

21–22 September Taster Sessions: Emerging Curators Group 2022

12–13 October ECG In-person

Two-Day Workshop, Liverpool

2022

28 January ECG Workshop 1

17 March ECG In-person Workshop 2, York City Art Gallery

25 April ECG Workshop 3

9–10 June ECG In-person Workshop 4, Manchester Art Gallery

British Art Network Conference,

1–15 July 2021: Genealogies of Black Curating in Britain

The programme consisted of roundtables, films and discussion focused on the emergence, strategies and agency of Black curatorial practices in Britain over the past forty years, convened for the British Art Network by curator and researcher Paul Goodwin (TrAIN, University of the Arts London) with project curation by Rahila Haque.

1 July ‘Emergence of Black Curatorial Voices’. Panel discussion with Shaheen Merali, Rita Keegan and Hassan Aliyu.

8 July ‘Ambivalent Mainstreaming: Black Curators and Institutions’. Panel discussion with Gilane Tawadros, Nima Poovaya-Smith and Mark Miller.

15 July ‘Collective Futures and the Archival (Re)Turn: Curating in the Expanded Field’. Panel discussion with OOMK, Raju Rage and Ajamu.

BAN Seminars

BAN supports a range of seminars through annual bursaries and collaboration with other organisations.

2021

14 July Irish Modernisms, Global Contexts: Seminar 2: ‘Irish Modernisms Exhibition – Meet the Artists’

4 August Irish Modernisms, Global Contexts: Seminar 3: ‘Latin American Modernisms’, Harper Montgomery and Jorge González

18 August Irish Modernisms, Global Contexts: Seminar 4: ‘Post-Soviet Baltic Modernisms’, Andres Kurg and Mari Laanements

1 September Irish Modernisms, Global Contexts: Seminar 5: ‘East African Modernisms’, Professor Edward Denison and Dawit L. Petros

4 November Itinerant Imaginaries II: Online Seminar: ‘Archival Disorientation’, Nydia A. Swaby, Barby Asante, Ra Malika Imhotep and Nathalie Anguezomo Mba Bikoro

22 November Itinerant Imaginaries II: Film Screening: ‘Archival Disorientation’, Regent Street Cinema, London

11 December ‘S:E:P:A:L:S: An Intersectional Approach to Care and Safety’, Lauren Craig, Jack Ky Tan, Helen Starr, Salma Noor, Megan Broadmeadow, Brandon Covington Sam-Sumana, Nicholas Delap, Ben Hall, Nayu Kim, Kinnari Sayaiya, Amrita Dhallu, Kinnari Saraiya, Janine Francois and Georgina Obaya Evans

Doctoral Researchers Network

2021

26 October Roundtable: ‘Re-Imagining British Art History and Futures’, Jessie McLaughlin, Lu Zhang and Zarina Muhammad

9 November WIP Workshop: ‘Exploration, Cartography, Bombardment: The Search for Petroleum in Royal Dutch Shell’s Interwar Advertising Posters’, Tobah Aukland-Peck

16 November PhD Toolkit: ‘Interpreting Artworks’, Anjalie Dalal-Clayton

23 November WIP Workshop: ‘Laughing at the Pre-Raphaelites: Reading the Label in Visual Parodies’, Susie Beckham

7 December WIP Workshop: ‘Machine Learning Artworks as Systemsof-Systems’, Alasdair Milne

10 December Winter Social

2022

15 February PhD Toolkit: ‘How to Edit and Get Published’, Isabella Vitti, Sarah Victoria Turner and Baillie Card

22 February WIP Workshop: ‘A Gothic Legacy: James Wyatt and the Palace of Westminster, 1799–1835’, Murray Tremellen

1 March Roundtable: ‘Socially Engaged Art History and Beyond’, Clare Patey, Sammi Lukic-Scott and Jacob V. Joyce

8 March WIP Workshop: ‘The “Tendril” and the “Root”: Rethinking the Fin-deSiècle’s Artistic Landscape’, Emily Cox

12 April WIP Workshop: ‘Back to Nature: Exhibiting Trees in Contemporary England (1980–now)’, Laura Ouillon

10 May WIP Workshop: ‘Women as Professional Art Models and the Pre-Raphaelite Aesthetic Mission (1848–1865)’, Cátia Rodrigues

2022

27 January PMC Postdoc Lecture: ‘Masculinity and Apocalypticism in Contemporary British Art’, Edwin Coomasaru

28 March ‘Pivoting to the Commercial Art World’, Molly (Dorkin) Taylor, Sam Cornish, Rakeb Sile and John Hawley

31 May PMC Postdoc Lecture: ‘Writing a New Story of Tudor Art’ , Christina J. Faraday

DRN and ECRN Collaborative Events

2022

1 February ‘Digital Art History: Podcasts, Blogs, Social Media’, Lisa Anderson, Ferren Gipson, Zarina Muhammad and Madeleine Pelling

16 May ‘Caring and Precarity: Parents, Carers and Early Career Research’, Anna CohenMiller, Yelizaveta Kamilova, Catherine Grant, Lizzy Harris and Pandora Syperek

10 June ‘Re-Considering British Art History’: The ECRN and DRN Summer Symposium and Social

Session 1: ‘Writing British Art’, chaired by Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone, with papers by Emily Cox, Nicholas Dunn-McAfee, Dr Alex Gushurst-Moore and Laura Davidson

Session 2: ‘New Media and Methods’, chaired by Irene Fubara-Manuel, with papers by Eliza Goodpasture, Nick Mols, Rhian Addison McCreanor and Melissa Gustin

Early Career Researchers Network

2021

28 October PMC Postdoc Lecture: ‘The Atlas Unbound: John Webber, James Cook, and the End of Sympathy’, Ben Pollitt

29 November ‘From Thesis to Book’, Gregory Salter, Cora Gilroy-Ware and Zoë Thomas

10 December ECRN Winter Social

Session 3: ‘Beyond British Borders’, chaired by Sarah Victoria Turner, with papers by Sophie Rhodes, Emma Sharples and Robert Wilkes

Session 4: ‘Examining Empire’, chaired by Hassan Vawda, with papers by Thomas Cooper, Claudia Di Tosto, Jason Cyrus and Lindsay Wells

Special Projects

Photographic Archive

The digitised Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive was made available as a public resource on 8 November 2021. During the period covered by this report, twelve-thousand users collectively accessed more than seventy-five-thousand resources on the website. Audience analysis suggests that 60 per cent of these users were from outside the United Kingdom, indicating that the collection is now being used by researchers who may otherwise have been unaware or unfamiliar with the resource when it was solely accessible in the Public Study Room at Bedford Square. The number of enquiries made in relation to the collection has increased considerably, and Archives & Library staff are now able to use the improved search facilities to respond with increased precision and efficiency.

In light of the conclusion of the digitisation project, accession and management policies were reviewed and updated. It was decided that no further photographic archives would be acquired from outside the PMC, and that the only images that will be added to the photographic archive in future will be those created by the PMC in the course of its everyday business; for example, photographs of works commissioned as part of our publications programme. It was also decided that the Tate Photographic Archive would remain available to consult onsite at the Centre, with no plans for digitisation. Work with colleagues in the PHAROS International Consortium of Photo Archives continued, with the PMC joining the Andrew W. Mellon Foundationfunded pilot project by contributing its collections data and images to the ResearchSpace platform, in advance of its public launch in autumn 2022. Charlotte Brunskill and Sarah Victoria Turner remained active members of the Intellectual Property and Executive Steering Committees respectively, supporting the initiative with their time and expertise.

London, Asia

The London, Asia research project is co-led by the PMC’s Deputy Director, Sarah Victoria Turner, and Hammad Nasar, Senior Research Fellow. 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. The project has built a large, dynamic and international community of researchers, artists, curators and educators who regularly interact through events and meetings. It was established in 2016 in collaboration with Asia Art Archive, Hong Kong, 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. A third and final phase of activity is focused on the delivery of an exhibition, Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends, to be held at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge, from November 2023 to February 2024. This is a research-led project that focuses on the the artist Li Yuan-chia’s LYC Museum & Art Gallery in the village of Banks in the northwest of England between 1972 and 1983. The exhibition will be curated by Hammad Nasar, Sarah Victoria Turner and Amy Tobin (Curator of Exhibitions, Events and Research at Kettle’s Yard and Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge). The exhibition brings together works by Li, the artists who were part of the artistic programme at the LYC (including Winifred Nicholson, David Nash, Lygia Clark, Takis and Liliane Lijn), alongside contemporary artists whose work resonates with the spirit of Li and the LYC. It will be accompanied by a catalogue and programme of public events and performances. The project has also funded the digitisation of the collection of the LYC exhibition catalogues held at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library at the University of Manchester. The project leads, Turner and Nasar, also acted as members of the Advisory Board of the Postwar Modern exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery. This kind of advisory role is a crucial element of sharing and socialising the ideas generated by this research project.

Generation Landscape

This project, led by the Centre’s Director, Mark Hallett, is intended to bring a host of fresh, critical perspectives to bear on a famous generation of British landscape artists born in the 1770s and early 1780s, who include J. M. W. Turner, John Constable, John Sell Cotman and Thomas Girtin. It is also aimed at looking anew at one of the most familiar and deeply studied strands of British art: images of the landscape of the early nineteenth century.

A programme of four online seminars organised as part of the project –entitled Graphic Landscape: The Landscape Print Series in Britain, c.1775–1850 – ran over two weeks in November 2021. Co-organised by Hallett and Felicity Myrone (British Library), the seminars (details of which are found elsewhere in this report) explored the topographical print sequences that proliferated in the late eighteenth century and in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The seminars sought to question the assumptions that are typically brought to bear on such material. Why were print series produced? Who produced them, and what was their appeal? Why did they so regularly focus on landscape and topographical subjects? What were the commercial stakes of producing prints in series? These and many other questions were addressed across the four seminars, which featured a rich array of presentations by leading academics and curators.

The spring and summer of 2022 saw plans being put in place for a second major scholarly event attached to the project: a one-day conference devoted to John Constable’s extraordinarily rich correspondence. Co-convened by Hallett and Professor Stephen Daniels, a distinguished historian of Georgian art and culture, the conference – scheduled to take place in December 2022 – was designed to open up Constable’s letters to a variety of new art-historical and literary approaches, and to interpret them in relation to the thriving epistolary networks of early nineteenth-century Britain.

Staff Activities

Mark Hallett Director

This year, Professor Hallett continued his research for a forthcoming Tate Britain exhibition on the artists John Constable and J. M. W. Turner, which is due to take place across the winter of 2025–6. This major display, which is being arranged to mark the 250th anniversary of the birth of both artists (Turner in 1775, Constable in 1776), is designed to explore the relationship between their two very different conceptions of landscape painting. Professor Hallett also continued working on a monographic study of Constable that takes the form of an experimental visual chronicle spanning the entirety of the artist’s career, and pursued his research project on Turner’s book of prints, the Liber Studiorum.

In addition, Professor Hallett spent the year working on the book Frank Auerbach: Drawings of People, together with his co-editor Catherine Lampert. The book, scheduled for publication in the autumn of 2022, features a series of new essays on the artist’s portrait drawings, together with more than 130 reproductions of such works.

The year also saw Professor Hallett developing a film project devoted to The Procession, a monumental installation by the contemporary artist Hew Locke that was unveiled as a Tate Britain Duveen Gallery commission in the spring of 2022.

Professor Hallett also joined the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest (RCEWA). This Committee advises the British government on the export of cultural property.

John Constable, Osmington Village, 1816-17, oil on canvas, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, B2001.2.156

Sarah Victoria Turner Deputy Director

This year saw Dr Turner become Deputy Director of the Centre. As part of this newly created role and a restructuring of responsibilities at the PMC, she assumed responsibility for the Centre’s publishing activities and the Archive and Library, in addition to her oversight of the digital team and her position as Editor-in-Chief of British Art Studies.

In autumn 2021, Dr Turner released the second series of the Sculpting Lives podcast, a collaboration with Jo Baring (Director, Ingram Collection). Focusing on historic and contemporary women sculptors, the podcast has been nominated as ‘Art podcast of the Week’ in The Guardian and reviewed in the Spectator and Evening Standard. The release of the second series was accompanied by a Drawing Room Display at the Centre, Sculpting in Sound: Researching Sculpting Lives (4 October–14 December). The Centre was loaned a sculpture and two drawings by Elisabeth Frink, an artist featured in the podcast, from the Ingram Collection. These were displayed alongside material from the PMC’s Archive and Library that had been used in researching the project.

Working in collaboration with Dr Amy Tobin (Curator of Exhibitions, Events and Research at Kettle’s Yard and Lecturer in the Department of History of Art, University of Cambridge) and Hammad Nasar (Senior Research Fellow, PMC), Dr Turner is developing an exhibition for Kettle’s Yard in Cambridge entitled Making New Worlds: Li Yuan-chia & Friends, which will open in 2023.

Dr Turner published an essay on the artist Frederick Cayley Robinson in the catalogue of the Modern Pre-Raphaelite Visionaries, British Art 1880–1930 exhibition held at Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum (May–September 2022). She also delivered a keynote paper at the accompanying conference.

Dr Turner was also invited to give a number of talks at virtual events outside of the Centre, including at the Gamble House (Pasadena, California) and the Warburg Institute. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and serves as a member of the Advisory Council of the Warburg Institute in London and the Advisory Board of Tate Etc. magazine.

Installation view of Pietà 1: Playing Dead, 2018, Cathie Pilkington: Working from Home (Pallant House Gallery, 2019). Photo: Mr Perou © the artist

Sria Chatterjee Head of Research and

Learning

Dr Sria Chatterjee started at the Paul Mellon Centre in January 2022. She continued her research and writing on the relationships between art history and the environment, with a particular focus on climate, colonialism and environmental justice. Her essay ‘Tropics’ was published in Words of Weather: A Glossary, published by the Onassis Foundation. The publication accompanied the exhibition Weather Engines, curated by Daphne Dragona and Jussi Parikka. For Radical Landscapes: Art, Identity and Activism, edited by Darren Pih and published alongside the Radical Landscapes exhibition at Tate Liverpool, Dr Chatterjee wrote an essay titled ‘Abstraction and Belonging’, which looked at the works of two artists, Aubrey Williams and Tanoa Sasraku, to consider the relationships between art, land, colonialism, migration and nationalism. With Pih, Dr Chatterjee programmed a two-day conference in July 2022 titled ‘Finding Common Ground: Making the Landscape Radical’, which would delve further into these topics.

Dr Chatterjee was invited to give numerous lectures and talks this year outside the Centre. Highlights included a talk in March 2022 at the ‘Towards Ecocritical Art History: Methods and Practices’ workshop, organised by the University of Edinburgh and the Vienna Anthropocene Network, titled ‘What Are We Looking At? Art, Climate & Colonialism’. For Humboldt University’s ‘Dis/ Entangling Material Futures’ lecture series, Dr Chatterjee gave a talk about the visual and cultural politics of soil and air. She was invited by Brooklyn Rail to be a part of their series on ‘Art, Science, and Medicine’, where she spoke about her work on the research project ‘Visualising the Virus’, which investigates the diverse ways in which viruses and pandemics are visualised and the inequalities they make visible.

Dr Chatterjee serves as Editorial Advisor for the journal British Art Studies and is on the steering group of the British Art Network.

Martin Myrone Convenor, British Art Network

Dr Myrone was the co-curator of the major Tate Britain exhibition Hogarth and Europe (3 November 2021–20 March 2022). The show featured an outstanding selection of William Hogarth’s works, including several paintings not seen in the UK for many decades. These were displayed alongside key pictures by his European contemporaries, such as Jean-Siméon Chardin, Pietro Longhi, Cornelis Troost and Étienne Jeaurat, revealing cross-currents and contrasts as these artists began to explore themes from contemporary urban life. Ambitiously seeking to engage with the larger social and global contexts for European art of the period, the show and catalogue incorporated incisive commentary and interpretation from a range of scholars and artists, leading to a furious critical debate which reached the national press and media.

Dr Myrone continued his academic research in the field of eighteenthand nineteenth-century British art, contributing an essay titled ‘Painting’ to The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion, edited by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Cambridge University Press, 2021). This explored the neglected role of church patronage and faith commitments in British Romantic art. He also prepared his Biographical Dictionary of Royal Academy Students, 1769–1830, which will be published as a whole volume of the Walpole Society in 2022.

Dr Myrone continued as a Trustee of Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury, as the house and gallery approach completion of a major redevelopment.

Martin Postle Deputy Director for Grants and Publications (to September 2021) Senior Research Fellow (from October 2021)

In September 2021, Dr Postle completed his role as Deputy Director for Grants and Publications and took up a new four-year full-time post as Senior Research Fellow, involving scholarly research, the organisation of the annual PMC public lecture series and an annual series of seminars relating to the art trade, as well as the teaching of annual courses for the PMC’s Yale in London programme. Dr Postle’s research activities in the period centred on research towards a projected catalogue raisonné of the oil paintings of Joseph Wright of Derby, to be published by the Paul Mellon Centre. Dr Postle continued to serve on the following committees and boards: the UK government’s Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art and Objects of Cultural Interest; International Advisory Board, The British Art Journal; the Council of the Attingham Trust; Trustee of the Catalogue Raisonné of Works by Philip de László; and Trustee of Strawberry Hill House, Twickenham. In September 2021, Dr Postle was appointed by Arts Council England to serve on the Acceptance in Lieu Panel.

Board of Governors

Governors

Susan Gibbons

Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communication, Yale University, and ex-officio Chief Executive of the Paul Mellon Centre

Stephen C. Murphy Vice President for Finance & Chief Financial Officer, Yale University

Peter Salovey President and Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology, Yale University

Scott Strobel University Provost and Henry Ford II Professor of Molecular Biophysics & Biochemistry (MB&B), Yale University

Members

Timothy Barringer Paul Mellon Professor History of Art, Yale University

Marvin Chun

Dean of Yale College, Richard M. Colgate Professor of Psychology and Professor of Neuroscience, Yale University

Edward S. Cooke, Jr

Charles F Montgomery Professor of the History of Art, Director of the Center of Study in American Decorative Arts and Material Culture; Professor of American Studies, Director of Undergraduate Studies for History of Art at Yale University

Pericles Lewis

Vice President for Global Strategy and Vice Provost for Academic Initiatives and Douglas Tracy Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Professor of English, Yale University

Courtney J. Martin Director of the Yale Center for British Art

Jules D. Prown

Paul Mellon Professor Emeritus Director of History of Art at Yale University

Keith Wrightson

Randolph W. Townsend, Jr. Professor of History at Yale University

Advisory council

Jo Applin

Courtauld Institute of Art

Tarnya Cooper

National Trust

Elena Crippa

Tate Britain

Caroline Dakers

Central Saint Martins

David Dibosa

Chelsea College of Arts

John Goodall

Country Life

Julian Luxford

University of St Andrews

Lynda Nead (until 30 June 2022)

Birbeck

Dorothy Price

Courtauld Institute of Art

Christine Riding

National Gallery

Mark Sealy

Autograph ABP

Nicholas Tromans

Independent Art Historian