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.

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.

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