O c tob er 2018 / No. 1 0 p aul-mellon - c e ntre. a c.uk
The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is an educational charity committed to promoting original research into the history of British art and architecture. It is a part of Yale University and its activities and resources include research events, public lectures, publications, fellowships, grants programmes, and a library and archival collection. PMC Notes, the Centre’s newsletter, is published three times per year.
PMC Staff Director of Studies Mark Hallett Deputy Director for Grants and Publications Martin Postle Deputy Director for Finance and Administration Sarah Ruddick Deputy Director for Research Sarah Victoria Turner Librarian Emma Floyd
Senior Research Fellow Hugh Belsey
Archivist and Records Manager Charlotte Brunskill
Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar
Assistant Librarian Natasha Held
Research Fellow and Filmmaker Jonathan Law
Assistant Archivist and Records Manager Jenny Hill
Advisory Council
Cataloguer: Auction Catalogues Mary Peskett Smith Digital Manager Tom Scutt Events Manager Ella Fleming Office Manager Suzannah Pearson Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Fellowships, Grants, and Communications Manager Harriet Fisher Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Finance Officer Barbara Ruddick Finance Officer Linda Constantine
Board of Governors Peter Salovey, President of Yale University Ben Polak, Provost of Yale University Amy Meyers, Director of Yale Center for British Art Stephen Murphy, Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer of Yale University
Editor Emily Lees
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Editor Baillie Card
Baillie Card and Harriet Fisher Template by Cultureshock Media
Director’s Assistant Bryony Botwright-Rance
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Christopher Breward, National Galleries of Scotland Tarnya Cooper, National Trust Anthony Geraghty, University of York Julian Luxford, University of St Andrews David Mellor, University of Sussex Martin Myrone, Tate Britain Lynda Nead, Birkbeck Christine Riding, Royal Museums Greenwich Andrew Saint, English Heritage MaryAnne Stevens, Art Historian and Curator Nicholas Tromans, Christies Education Simon Wallis, The Hepworth Gallery
Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA United Kingdom T: 020 7580 0311 www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk
Contents October 2018 – No.10
Director’s Note 2 New Book Spotlight: Hugh Lane 4 Malaysian Art, between Kuala Lumpur and London 13 Ash Wednesday 16 Treasures of the Continent 22 New Books 28 PMC Events Calendar 32 YCBA Events Calendar 35
Cover: George Shaw, Scenes from the Passion: The Telephone Box (detail), 2000. Cross Family Collection, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
Director’s Note This autumn sees the opening of the exhibition George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) in New Haven. This major survey of the artist’s work, which I have had the pleasure of curating, will run from the beginning of October to the end of December, before travelling in revised form to the Holburne Museum in Bath, where it will be on display between February and May of next year. The entire exhibition project has been a collaborative one, and typifies the ways in which we at the PMC are working ever more closely with our colleagues at the YCBA, in part thanks to the wonders of modern communication. Draft layouts of the sumptuous exhibition catalogue, designed and picture-researched by my London colleagues Emily Lees and Maisoon Rehani, have been criss-crossing the Atlantic in virtual form on a regular basis. At the YCBA, meanwhile, colleagues such as Nathan Flis and Matthew Hargraves have been piecing together the display with me, over the course of scores of emails, and during skype meetings in which we have first waved at and then talked to each other from seminar rooms thousands of miles apart.
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Technology, as well as facilitating such transatlantic conversations and collaborations, is, of course, rapidly changing the ways in which we think about exhibitions themselves, and about the kinds of publication that they might generate. This became powerfully clear to me in the development of another exhibition project in which I was recently involved, The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, which I co-curated with my PMC colleague Sarah Turner, and which came to the end of its run at the Royal Academy in August. Sarah and I decided that, as well as working on the exhibition proper, and on the accompanying catalogue, we would also use the opportunity to develop and launch a major online publication, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769-2018. This digital resource, developed with colleagues at a host of institutions and organisations, and conceived of as an intrinsic part of the overall exhibition project, has already been visited by thousands of users, and will, we hope, provide an enduring scholarly treasure-trove for all those interested in the topic. In the case of George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field, those of us in charge of organising the exhibition thought we’d try something different. Thanks to the generosity of a great supporter of the YCBA, Richard Burston, we have been able to commission four short films focusing on Shaw and his work, each of which looks at his practice from a very different perspective. These films – by Lily Ford, Jon Law and Jared Schiller - will be freely available to watch not only at the two exhibition venues, but also online, both during and after the run of the show. Once again, a familiar and still vitally important kind of scholarly accompaniment to an exhibition – the printed catalogue – will operate in tandem with another kind of art-historical resource, designed to be viewed online – in this case, a quartet of highly thoughtful, essayistic films. My hope, of course, is that those interested in Shaw’s fascinating practice will move fluidly between these two very different kinds of material, and enjoy the pleasures and benefits of each. In this utopian vision, I imagine people jumping from reading, for instance, Tom Crow’s catalogue essay on Shaw’s graphic art to watching Ford’s film on the artist’s use of enamel paint; or, to give another example, from watching Schiller’s lovely video essay on the artist’s family dynamics to reading Eugenie Shinkle’s brilliant disquisition on the parallels between Shaw’s imagery and that of modern topographic photography. The future of exhibitions, and of art-historical publication more generally, must surely lie in such intellectually fruitful forms of crosspollination and conversation, not only between individuals and institutions, but also across different media, both new and old. Mark Hallett Director of Studies
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New Book Spotlight:
Hugh Lane Professor Morna E. O’Neill, Wake Forest University, introduces the subject of her new book Hugh Lane: The Art Market and the Art Museum, 1893-1915, and discusses her research into his work and legacy with PMC Editor Baillie Card.
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Born in Ireland in 1875, the art dealer Hugh Lane died aged only forty when German torpedoes sunk the Lusitania. In between, with little formal education and scant training, he orchestrated high-profile sales of paintings by Titian, Holbein and Velasquez, among others, as he assembled collections for a Municipal Gallery of Modern Art in Dublin, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, and a collection of Dutch paintings for Cape Town in 1913. His career suggests the singular way that an art dealer might shape the early phases of an art museum at the beginning of the twentieth century and the diverse meanings that can accrue to works of art in local, national and global contexts.
BC: The Municipal Gallery of Modern Art was an ambitious and groundbreaking institution—what were Lane’s aspirations when he founded it? MO: Lane’s aspirations were many and often conflicting! One of my favourite recollections of him, by the artist Henry Tonks, declares: “he did not care twopence if people came in to see his pictures, he would be quite content if they came in to keep themselves warm.” Although many critics have described the funereal association of museums as the place where culture goes to die, Lane believed that museums like the National Gallery of Ireland and modern art galleries were vital entities. They presented important examples of beauty and cultural achievement that provided education, inspiration, and enjoyment for a general public. In particular, Lane declared his hope that the Municipal Gallery of Modern Art would nurture “a distinct school of painting in Ireland”. BC: What hand did Lane have in the installation of works there, and in the decoration of its galleries? MO: He was preoccupied with every aspect of the installation and decoration of the galleries, from the placement of the paintings to the arrangement of furniture and flowers. His aunt Lady Gregory recalled that Lane gave her and other ladies flowers at the opening of the gallery and directed them to pose in certain corners to add to the “decorative effect” of the pictures. Lane planned to display his collection of modern art amidst a decorative programme of scenes from Irish legend. By doing so, I argue, he positioned his French Impressionist pictures as part of a decorative tradition that included Celtic art, thus fusing them to an Irish identity in unexpected ways.
Antonio Mancini, Sir Hugh Lane (detail), 1904. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh
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BC: When the new gallery was opened, how did the public respond? What about Irish artists and art critics, in particular? MO: We could say that the public response was mixed: while some praised Lane’s gift, and his selection of paintings, others puzzled over the nature and meaning of this new institution. All of the works in the gallery (285 of them) were gifts or promised gifts from Lane as well as artists and other benefactors. The best-known group, the French Impressionist paintings purchased by Lane, were part of a group of thirty-nine works known as “the conditional gift”, to be given to the city once they established a permanent home for the collection. As caricatured by Max Beerbohm in 1909, the connoisseur Lane was a kind of magician, pulling Manets and Monets out of a hat. This trick baffles his Irish audience, who appear both rural and provincial. The men wear the wide collars of farmers, and the woman cover their heads with scarves. They are either wide-eyed with horror or stoically unimpressed . . . Beerbohm intuits the complaints of Lane’s critics, who suggested that Ireland was not prepared culturally or socially for modern art and that public money was better spent addressing issues of sanitation, for example, or public housing.
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Max Beerbohm, Sir Hugh Lane Producing Masterpieces for Dublin (detail), 1909. Dublin City Gallery, The Hugh Lane.
BC: You write about Lane’s involvement in building historic and modern collections for two public art galleries in South Africa. How did colonial politics impact his curatorial work for those institutions? MO: Colonial politics determined every aspect of Lane’s work for these two institutions. His success in Dublin brought him to the attention of Lady Florence Phillips, whose husband had banking and mining interests in South Africa, and she asked Lane to assemble a collection of modern British and French art for the Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1910–11. The collection of modern art would articulate South Africa’s relationship to the British Empire in both local and global contexts in the decade after the Second South African War (1899–1902). With his work in Johannesburg complete, he turned his attention to assembling a gallery of seventeenth-century Dutch art that would unite Boer and Briton through “the representation of the art in which the Dutch and English first met in spirit”. Lane’s museums were supposed to heal the wounds of war by drawing upon notions of a shared cultural heritage amongst the white populations of South Africa. Yet the dealer himself recedes in this episode; he is no longer the central organizing force but rather the conduit who tries—and at times fails—to shape the ambitions of others, especially his donors.
Rembrandt van Rijn and studio of Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of a Lady Holding a Glove (known as the “Demidoff Rembrandt”, detail), c. 1632-3. National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin.
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BC: You describe Lane as a dealer, collector, philanthropist and curator, who highlighted the intersections between the art market and art museum. What does his example bring to discussions today about commerce in public art galleries? MO: In 2010, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles made headlines by naming the art dealer Jeffrey Deitch as director. But when Hugh Lane was appointed Director of the National Gallery of Ireland in 1915, there was little complaint. Lane had cultivated a close relationship with the gallery, donating several works to their collection in the decade before his appointment, and he agreed to donate his salary to its acquisitions budget. Recent commentators were scandalized by the way the Deitch appointment laid bare the intersection of the art market and the art museum, especially since the art market tends to put a price on a work of art, while the art museum protects the work of art as priceless. In his life and work, Lane’s actions affirmed the ideal of the art museum: art is worthy of display for the benefit, enjoyment and education of the public. Lane’s actions, and the debates they generated, resonate powerfully today because they remind us to protect the ways in which the museum can and should articulate a regime of value beyond the market. BC: Throughout the book, you give attention to individual works of art and the stories they tell about Lane’s collecting. Is there a particular painting whose story you feel really illuminates Lane’s complex position in the art world? MO: Philip Wilson Steer’s A Chelsea Window (1909). With Hugh Lane’s guidance, Lady Florence Phillips purchased this painting in 1909 as the first work acquired for the Johannesburg Art Gallery. (A story circulated that she traded in a 21.5 carat blue diamond ring to purchase this and two other paintings.) In Steer’s painting, the young woman gazes upon the globe while the fingers on her right hand play upon its surface, perhaps an evocation of place finding, emphasising the role of globes and maps in envisioning the intertwined projects of exploration and empire. Sitting at her window with the south bank of the Thames as a backdrop, the woman at A Chelsea Window seems to contemplate the commercial, industrial and financial connections that brought her to South Africa. The dreamy look of the young woman gives no hint of Steer’s own disdain for Lane’s involvement with the Johannesburg Art Gallery project: as he wrote to Lane, “I’d rather be poor in London than rich in Johannesburg.” Hugh Lane is a Paul Mellon Centre publication, which was released by Yale University Press in September 2018.
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Philip Wilson Steer, A Chelsea Window (detail), c. 1909. Johannesburg Art Gallery, presented by Florence Philips.
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The Muniment Room at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. ©10 Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Highnam.
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Malaysian Art, between Kuala Lumpur and London Dr. Sarena Abdullah, Universiti Sains Malaysia, is the inaugural recipient of a research award offered by the Paul Mellon Centre and Asia Art Archive (Hong Kong). Here she describes her recent investigation into exhibitions of modern Malaysian art held in London during the 1950s and 1960s.
Nationalistic narratives of modern Malaysian art have always located Kuala Lumpur at their centre. But my work as part of the London, Asia Research Award has uncovered the complex relations between Kuala Lumpur and London in the 1950s and 1960s, which profoundly impacted Malaysian artists and art institutions. Archival collections at the National Visual Arts Gallery in Malaysia contain catalogues and brochures that document exhibitions of modern Malaysian art held internationally. These shows were mainly organised in the years immediately following the Gallery’s establishment in 1958, and today are not very well known. The records reveal that at least two such international exhibitions took place each year, primarily through channels of “soft power” or arts-based diplomacy. Often, they were organised and co-organised by high commissions or arts councils in the UK, Australia, New Zealand and France. In London, my research has focused on the exhibitions of Malaysian art that were held at, or organised by, the Commonwealth Institute during the 1950s and 1960s (its former building today houses the Design Museum in South Kensington). Established in 1888 first as the Imperial Institute, and renamed in 1958, the Commonwealth Institute played a key role in the creation of a perceived transnational Commonwealth community.
Previous spread: Syed Ahmad Jamal, Tulisan (Writing) (detail), 1961. Muzium and Galeri Tuanku Fauziah (MGTF), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM). Opposite: Chuah Thean Teng, Fruit Season (detail), 1968. National Visual Arts Gallery Collection, Kuala Lumpur.
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Malaysia had gained independence just a year before the establishment of its National Art Gallery in Kuala Lumpur in 1958. Yet styles and ideas associated with modern art were easily accepted and even promoted in postcolonial Malaysia, and this internationalisation reflects the larger dynamics of new nationhood, as well as the commonwealth identity advocated for Malaysia by the British. Artists such as Tay Hooi Keat, Syed Ahmad Jamal and Yeoh Jin Leng, for example, adopted the Abstract Expressionist style in depicting Malaysian and Southeast Asian regional landscapes. Chuah Thean Teng, a pioneer of modern batik painting (which adapted a traditional dying process to painting), was given two solo exhibitions at the Commonwealth Institute in the late 1950s and early 1960s. During these decades, some Malaysian artists were also sent to the United Kingdom to pursue their art education. After graduating, most came back to Malaysia and helped to set up local art departments, such as the Specialist Teachers’ Training Institute in Cheras, and later the Art and Design programme at the MARA Institute of Technology (ITM) in Shah Alam. The establishment of Malaysian art schools reflects the influences and changes in art education at the time, particularly those that had happened in London. The diploma programme at the School of Art and Design at ITM, founded in 1967, was developed after the Bauhaus model, an approach spearheaded at the Hornsey College of Art. After a one-year foundation, students were required to major in subjects such as ThreeDimensional Design, Graphic Design, Textile Design, Fashion Design or Fine Art.
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Familiarity with this model was brought to the Malaysian context by Hornsey graduates Redza Piyadasa and Sulaiman Esa, who together with other major Malaysian artists, such as Choong Kam Kow, Hashim Hassan, Joseph Tan, Ahmad Khalid Yusof, Latiff Mohiddin, Tan Tuck Kan and Yeoh Jin Leng, joined early as its academic staff. Archives of visual materials are very new in Malaysia, and the fellowship has been an occasion to engage with this particular research method. Not many of the exhibitions of Malaysian art held in the 1950s or 1960s have been studied, and this fieldwork has offered me a unique opportunity to demystify this history.
Brochure cover design for the exhibition Malaysian Art, held at the Commonwealth Institute in 1966. Opposite: Yeoh Jin Leng, Seberang Takir (detail), 1964. Muzium and Galeri Tuanku Fauziah (MGTF), Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM).
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Ash Wednesday Mark Hallett introduces examples of the work of George Shaw, the subject of a forthcoming exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art.
Ash Wednesday: 8:00 am. A tree rises up out of a sun-dappled patch of scuffed grass, casting its shadows against the golden expanse of a gable-end wall. The painter’s brush dwells with loving detail on the wrinkles and fissures of the tree-trunk, and on the intricately interlaced pattern of the shadows that flicker across the wall’s surfaces. It is 8:00 am on a chilly but blueskied winter’s day, and the tree itself, its branches reaching up into the air, seems almost to be stretching out its arms with an early morning yawn. In the background, behind the hedge, light shines on the bedroom windows of some neighbouring houses, and onto their frosty roofs. The Midlands council estate of Tile Hill is waking up, just as it does every morning; but it is waking up, in this instance, to a different kind of day: Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, and an important moment in the Catholic religious calendar. This painting by the contemporary British artist George Shaw, is one of the highlights of the forthcoming exhibition of his work at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven and the Holburne Museum at Bath. The picture is one of a series of seven pictures entitled Ash Wednesday, painted by the artist over a twelve-month period between 2004 and 2005. Each work in this sequence depicts a scene in Tile Hill—the council estate on which
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Shaw had grown up—at a particular time of day, and at half-hour intervals: the first is set at 6:00 am, the last, at 9:00 am. The series was inspired in part by the temporal structure of James Joyce’s Ulysses, the actions of which famously take place over a single day. Following this model, Shaw went out early one February morning, and spent the whole day on a long, slow walk around Tile Hill and the nearby woods, taking hundreds of photographs. The day, though cold, was bright and sharp and Tile Hill looked uncommonly fine. The artist ended his walk confident that it would provide him with a good body of source material for his new, hour-by-hour, pictorial chronicle of the estate and its surroundings. Soon afterwards, he realised that the day he had chosen for his walk—25 February 2004—was actually Ash Wednesday that year, which he instantly recognised could provide his new project with a supplementary, and highly resonant, religious theme. Shaw, a lapsed Catholic, was fully aware that the day carried a powerful resonance, as one set aside by many Christians for fasting and repentance, and one marking the beginning of the forty-day period that saw Christ being cast into the desert, and that ended with his crucifixion and resurrection. But it was also a day that, for the artist, was
loaded with personal associations: he remembered going as a child to the special Ash Wednesday service that was held at 9:00 am at his local Catholic church, and undergoing its distinctive rituals: ‘Ash Wednesday began for me with a dirty smudge of ash placed on my forehead by the serious thumb of a Catholic priest.’ And he was haunted, too, by the words that he remembered the priest saying as he applied his thumbprint of dust: ‘Remember man that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.’ Thanks in part to this conjunction of ideas and events, the pictorial series that Shaw ended up producing out of his mass of photographic sources enjoys a highly textured character. First of all, it offers an image of Tile Hill that seems, of all his many depictions of the estate, the most lyrical
and uplifting. Indeed, Ash Wednesday can be seen to present Tile Hill itself, built in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, as a kind of quiet modernist utopia, in which the array of council houses that are pictured in almost every image, and that become increasingly illuminated by sunshine as the morning wears on, gradually become ever more symbolic of the kind of harmonious community dreamt of by the estate’s architect, Donald Gibson, and by the welfare state he represented. Thus, in Ash Wednesday: 8:00 am, as we have already seen, a gableend is transformed into a spectacular screen, on which is projected a magical dance of shadows. In the sequence’s final, far quieter image, Ash Wednesday: 9:00 am, meanwhile, the signs of a proudly managed landscape serve to animate the
George Shaw, Ash Wednesday: 8:00 am, 2004-5. Private Collection, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
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more utilitarian surfaces and spaces of the estate: a silver birch rises elegantly at the image’s centre; the shadows of branches once again flicker across walls and windows; and exquisitely painted plants swirl across pebbledash and brick. Even the ripple of net curtains in an upstairs window is granted an aesthetically pleasing rhythm. Over the course of this morning, it seems, Tile Hill enjoys a momentary place in the sun. Yet even as it offers something approaching a celebration of Tile Hill itself, and of the ideals of postwar public housing in England, Shaw’s pictorial series is shadowed by the more melancholy narratives of the particular day it describes, and by the traces of religious symbolism that run through its imagery. As so often in Shaw’s work, this half-buried Christian iconography finds it most powerful vehicle
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in the trees that play a central role in Ash Wednesday. Here, they are repeatedly deployed to evoke the Crucifixion to which the Christian rituals of Ash Wednesday inevitably allude. This is most dramatically evident in Ash Wednesday: 8:00 am, where Shaw’s depiction of the gnarled tree and its bold shadow unmistakably evokes William Holman Hunt’s Pre-Raphaelite painting The Shadow of Death (1873), in which the figure of Christ, his arms similarly outstretched, casts an analogous and highly ominous shadow across a neighbouring wall. To enrich this symbolism, Shaw adds a telling detail to his painting: a stain, buried deep within the tree’s shadow, drips down the wall, just as blood dripped from the wound made in Christ’s crucified body by a soldier’s spear. From such perspectives, even the final painting in the Ash Wednesday sequence invites being
George Shaw, Ash Wednesday: 9:00 am, 2005. Collection of Dr. Ian and Hazel Rowan, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
interpreted as a domesticated version of Golgotha. The pictured tree can once again be understood as a kind of symbolic substitute for the pale, hanging body of Christ, to which the branches of another, nearby tree give the requisite outstretched arms; meanwhile, the presence of the shadow on the right-hand wall conjures up the presence of the other crosses, the other hanging men, that were to be found at the site of the Crucifixion. Significantly, Shaw’s pictorial series is suggested as one that culminates at precisely 9 o’clock in the morning, the time that he remembers the Ash Wednesday service always taking place when he was a boy. In stopping at this point, we are invited, just like the celebrants of the service itself, to meditate on what we have just been looking at and experiencing as we have proceeded on our visual journey through the series, from painting to painting. Reading the Ash Wednesday exhibition catalogue makes this correlation between the two rituals—religious and visual—explicit: for, on the page following the final image of his series, Shaw inserts a quotation that directly echoes the Catholic incantation (‘Remember man that you are dust, and to dust you shall return’) to which he had repeatedly been subjected during his childhood. Taken from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, it reads: ‘Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney-sweepers, come to dust.’ In using that quotation, Shaw places his own metaphorical thumbprint of dust on our foreheads, and asks that we should read his series, despite all its uplifting imagery of community and wonder, as a modern kind of memento mori.
Indeed, Ash Wednesday invites a sombre form of reflection on our own part, in which we are invited, having moved through its seven images, to mull not only upon that Christian imagery of mortality to which his series alludes, but also on the passing of youth signified by Shakespeare’s ‘golden lads and girls’ and, ultimately, the passing of the pictured estate itself. Although bathed in golden light over the course of this fine morning, and over the course of his lyrical series of paintings, Tile Hill will one day—so Ash Wednesday reminds us—return to dust. Somewhat chillingly, this is precisely the fate that, as is seen later in the exhibition, Shaw went on to record in a number of his subsequent paintings of the estate, which, prompted by the demolition of a series of local buildings, are full of the imagery of rubble and wreckage.
William Holman Hunt, The Shadow of Death, 1873. Manchester City Art Gallery. Next page: George Shaw, The End of Pleasure (detail), 2013. Cross Family Collection, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London.
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In January 2018, Deputy Director for Research Sarah Victoria Turner collaborated with the artist Jeremy Deller to co-organise a series of four public discussions under the title The Look of Music. Here she reflects on these memorable events. 20
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Treasures of the Continent In 2015, the National Trust’s Furniture Research and Cataloguing Project received a Curatorial Research Grant from the Paul Mellon Centre. Dr. Wolf Burchard, Furniture Research Curator at the National Trust, describes the richness of European furniture found in the Trust’s collection and the research undertaken by this project.
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Detail of George II’s silver chandelier, designed by William Kent and made by the German silversmith Balthasar Friedrich Behrens for the royal palaces in Hanover in 1736-7.
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The year 2018 saw the world of furniture entirely captivated by the tercentenary of Thomas Chippendale’s birth. To mark the occasion, the National Trust launched its first ever online exhibition, Chippendale Revealed. Complete with new high-quality photography, it focuses on the collection at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire, where one of the best documented and most comprehensive Chippendale commissions survives. British furniture is indeed one of the greatest strengths of the National Trust’s art collection and has generally received more scholarly attention than continental pieces. The key exceptions to this trend tend to be outstanding examples of European craftsmanship, such as the celebrated French furniture at Waddesdon Manor and Pope Sixtus’s extraordinary pietre dure cabinet at Stourhead. The international nature of its collections adds to the unique character of the British country house. Exceptional treasures imported from Europe tell the story of the houses’ former owners’ relationships with the continent. Mount Stewart in Northern Ireland, for example, looks after a remarkable suite of early nineteenth-century furniture associated with the Congress of Vienna, in which the inhabitants of Mount Stewart, the brothers Viscount Castlereagh and Lord Stewart, were both key players. The socalled Congress of Vienna Table with its rich gilt bronze balustrade—produced at a time when French ormolu was banned from import—on which the treaty is said to have been signed (at least by some delegates), is a supreme example of Austrian craftsmanship. Who made the desk remains unknown, although it must have been a workshop of the scale
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The Library at Nostell Priory, West Yorkshire
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and importance of that run by Johann Danhauser, who rarely stamped his work. The twenty Congress of Vienna Chairs, in turn, are very likely to have been made by Gregor Nutzinger or Michael Remele, both of whom provided seat furniture to the Habsburg Imperial palace and court circles. Their petit-point canvas work covers, bearing the arms of the congress’s delegates, were supplied by Monsieur Legros from Nantes in the early 1930s and the work was probably subcontracted to local nunneries. Another set of early nineteenth-century chairs, recovered at the beginning of the twentieth century, can be found at Attingham Park, Shropshire. Contrary to family tradition, the furniture—comprising a daybed, various sofas and numerous armchairs, chairs and stools—did not belong to Napoleon’s sister Caroline Murat, but rather Queen Marie Antoinette’s niece, Maria Theresa of Sardinia. As recently established, the majority of the furniture was designed by the architect Carlo Randoni for the Palazzo Tursi in Genoa, where Maria Theresa lived after her husband’s abdication. William 3rd Lord Berwick, who was British envoy to Cagliari, then Turin and finally Naples, kept a house in Genoa and probably acquired Maria Theresa’s furniture shortly after her death and before permanently returning to Shropshire in 1833. Anglesey Abbey houses yet another National Trust collection filled with rare European furniture and decorative works of art, including two of George II’s silver chandeliers, designed by William Kent and made by the German silversmith Balthasar Friedrich Behrens for the royal palaces in
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A Russian marquetry roll-top desk, Anglesey Abbey. May 2018 — No. 9
Hanover in 1736–7. A Russian marquetry roll-top desk, previously wrongly attributed to David Roentgen, exhibits a combination of Italian and Russian cityscapes. It was probably sold to Lord Fairhaven in 1929 as having belonged to Tsar Paul I, but so far there is no documentary evidence to substantiate this claim. We know that similar pieces of furniture were supplied by ébénistes such as Matvei Yakovlevitch Veretennikov to Peterhof, Tsarskoie Selo and Gatchina, but further research will be required in order to establish the desk’s maker. The few objects mentioned here are but a fraction of the exceptional wealth of the Trust’s collection of continental European furniture. The study of these pieces reveals some truly exciting stories. It provides snapshots of the personalities and travels of the former owners of National Trust houses and can tangibly illustrate political and diplomatic life, grand tours and mainstream fashions, as well as very personal forms of taste. A selection of the Trust’s European furniture has recently received new attention, but a great deal more research will be required in the coming years. A major cataloguing project, made possible thanks to the support of the Paul Mellon Centre and the Royal Oak Foundation, endeavours to revisit all 55,000 furniture catalogue entries on our freely accessible collections website www. nationaltrustcollections.org.uk. Around 16,000 records have been updated in the last three years and the research of the most significant pieces will culminate in a large book, Furniture in National Trust Houses, authored by the Trust’s Curator of Furniture, Christopher Rowell, to be published by Yale University Press.
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New Books
George Shaw A Corner of a Foreign Field
Autumn/ Winter 2018
Edited by Mark Hallett
Nominated for the Turner Prize in 2011, George Shaw (b.1966) is one of Britain’s leading painters, best known for his painstakingly detailed, luminous and often elegiac representations of the contemporary British suburban landscape. Beautifully designed and generously illustrated, this book is the first to explore the entirety of Shaw’s artistic output. Beginning with his work at the Royal College of Art in the 1990s and ending with his most recent paintings, this volume places Shaw’s work in a wide variety of contexts, ranging from the traditions of English landscape painting to the repercussions of Brexit. An introductory essay and a comprehensive series of catalogue texts by Mark Hallett are accompanied by essays on the artist’s work by Catherine Lampert, David Alan Mellor, Eugenie Shinkle and Thomas Crow. An interview between Shaw and Jeremy Deller offers a series of lively insights into the artist’s practice, while an illustrated chronology provides a detailed record of his career.
Publication date: September 2018 Dimensions: 255 x 277mm Pages: 360 Illustrations: 380
MARK HALLETT
GEORGE SHAW
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CORNER
OF A
FOREIGN
FIELD
PUBLISHED BY
Yale Center for British Art, New Haven Holburne Museum, Bath Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art, London IN ASSOCIATION WITH
Yale University Press, New Haven and London
Hugh Lane The Art Market and the Art Museum Morna O’Neill
This book charts a geography of the art market and the art museum in the early twentieth century through the legacy of one influential dealer. Born in Ireland, Hugh Lane (1875–1915) established himself in London in the 1890s. With little formal education or training, he orchestrated high-profile sales of paintings by the likes of Holbein, Titian and Velázquez and described his life’s work as ‘selling pictures by old painters to buy pictures by living painters’, a practice he called ‘good business’. Lane assembled a collection of modern art for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, amassed a collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings for Cape Town and gave his own collection of modern art to the National Gallery in London. He also donated paintings to the National Gallery of Ireland, where he was named director in 1914. Each chapter in this revelatory study focuses on an important city in Lane’s practice as a dealer to understand the interrelationship of event and place.
Publication date: September 2018 Dimensions: 256 x 192mm Pages: 284 Illustrations: 96
MORNA O’NEILL
HughLane
HughLane
MORNA O’NEILL
HughLane The Art Market and the Art Museum
This book charts a geography of the art market and the art museum in the early twentieth century through the legacy of one influential dealer. Born in Ireland, Hugh Lane (1875–1915) established himself in London in the 1890s. With little formal education or training, he orchestrated high-profile sales of paintings by the likes of Holbein, Titian, and Velázquez and described his life’s work as “selling pictures by old painters to buy pictures by living painters,” a practice he described as “good business.” Lane assembled a collection of modern art for the Johannesburg Art Gallery, amassed a collection of Dutch and Flemish paintings for Cape Town, and gave his own collection of modern art to the National Gallery in London. He also donated paintings to the National Gallery of Ireland, where he was named director in 1914. Each chapter in this revelatory study focuses on an important city in Lane’s practice as a dealer to understand the interrelationship of event and place.
October 2018 — No. 10
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Kensington Palace Art, Architecture and Society
Edited by Olivia Fryman Kensington Palace is renowned for its architecture, historic interiors, internationally important collections and its many royal residents over 300 years. This first comprehensive study of the palace explores its rich material and cultural history, alongside its unique human stories, presenting extensive new research drawn from archives, newspapers, letters, images and new analysis of the building itself. Originally a fashionable Jacobean villa, Kensington was dramatically rebuilt from 1689 by Christopher Wren. The palace became a favourite home of five sovereigns, yet also survived fires, partial collapse, bombings and periods of neglect. Queen Victoria recognised the national significance of her birthplace and childhood home, turning the palace into her own memorial as well as a home for members of her extended family and their descendants. With 450 illustrations, including specially commissioned reconstructions and historic plans, this volume explores British and European royal taste and fashions over three centuries.
Publication date: October 2018 Dimensions: 290 x 248mm Pages: 408 Illustrations: 450
Edited by
OLIVIA FRYMAN
KENSINGTON PALACE
yal
Head of
London, nd Royal
at Historic
at Historic
ngton
K
P ALACE
ENSINGTON
K
P ALACE
ENSINGTON
Kensington Palace is renowned for its architecture, historic interiors, internationally important collections and its many royal residents over 300 years. This first comprehensive study of Kensington explores the palace’s rich material and cultural history, alongside its unique human stories, presenting extensive new research drawn from archives, newspapers, letters, images and new analysis of the building itself. Originally a fashionable Jacobean villa, Kensington was dramatically rebuilt from 1689 by Christopher Wren for the newly crowned monarchs, William III and Mary II. The palace became a favourite home of five sovereigns, yet also survived fires, partial collapse, bombings and periods of neglect. Queen Victoria recognised the national significance of her birthplace and childhood home, turning the palace into her own memorial as well as a home for members of her extended family and their descendants. With 450 illustrations, including specially commissioned reconstructions and historic plans, this volume explores British and European royal taste and fashions over three centuries. Kensington Palace provides a new and illuminating social and architectural history of one of Britain’s most important royal buildings.
.
ISBN 978-0-300-23653-8
Art, Architecture and Society
PUBLISHED FOR THE PAUL MELLON CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN BRITISH ART
9 780300 236538
30
Thomas Gainsborough The Portraits, Fancy Pictures and Copies after Old Masters Hugh Belsey Scholars and enthusiasts alike will revel in this ambitious two-volume catalogue raisonné of Thomas Gainsborough’s portraits, ‘fancy’ pictures and copies of Old Master works. The catalogue contains approximately 1,100 paintings, including nearly 200 works newly attributed to the British master, as well as updated information about his subjects and specially commissioned photography. Each portrait entry includes the biography of the sitter – including several newly identified – the painting’s provenance and exhibitions in which each work was shown. The so-called ‘fancy’ pictures that the artist developed in the 1780s are examined in detail for the first time, and Gainsborough’s copies after Old Masters, painted in admiration and used to assimilate their style of painting into his own work, are documented here as well. Research includes in-depth analysis of newspaper archives and other printed material to establish the date of a painting’s production, chart the development of the artist’s style and assess the impression the work made within the context of its time. Publication date: February 2019 Dimensions: 295 x 248mm Two volumes: 536 pages and 576 pages Illustrations: 1300
Thomas
Thomas
GAINSBOROUGH
GAINSBOROUGH
Hugh Belsey
Hugh Belsey
T H E P O RT R A I T S, FA N C Y P I C T U R E S A N D C O P I E S A F T E R O L D M A S T E R S • VO LU M E 1
T H E P O RT R A I T S, FA N C Y P I C T U R E S A N D C O P I E S A F T E R O L D M A S T E R S • VO LU M E 2
October 2018 — No. 10
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Events
Autumn Calendar All events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated.
September 2018
16 October, 12.00-13.00 Fellows Lunch
Every Thursday from 27 September
‘Monad to Man’: Gendering
to 25 October, 18.30-20.30
Shifting Natural Histories in the
Public Lecture Course
Index Museum
The Artist and the Garden
Pandora Syperek 17 October, 18.00-20.00
October 2018
Research Seminar Gothic Sculpture: Idols Old and
1 October, 2018 to 14 January, 2019
New
Artist’s Letters: Three Stories
Paul Binski
from the Paul Mellon Centre’s Archive Collections
18 October, 13.00-14.00
Drawing Room Display
Talk: Part of Bloomsbury Festival The Art of Protest: Suffrage and
2 October, 12.00-13.00
the Summer Exhibition
Fellows Lunch
Sarah Victoria Turner
Italian Royal Furniture at Attingham Park
26 October, 13.00-14.00
Wolf Burchard
Research Lunch Neo-Classical Display in the
5 October, 13.00-14.00
Suburbs: Recreating a Lost
Research Seminar
Adam Garden Temple Built for
Ancient Sculpture and the
George Bubb Dodington
Narratives of Collecting: (Re)
Clare Hornsby and Rodolfo
Contextualising the Collection &
Acevedo Rodriguez
Display of Classical Art in Britain Nicole Cochrane
31 October, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar Medardo Rosso’s London Networks Sharon Hecker
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Virgin and Child ivory sculpture, France, ca. 1320-30. Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
November 2018
December 2018
2 November, 13.00-14.00
5 December, 18.00-20.30
Research Lunch
PMC Book Night
From London to Paris: Defining
Authors: Elizabeth Prettejohn,
the British School through
Marcia Kupfer, Morna O’Neill, and
Printmaking
Mark Hallett
Alice Ottazzi 6 November, 12.00-13.00 Fellows Lunch Communities of Curating: Professional Networks in World Cultures Museum Practice, 1945-1980 Claire Wintle 7 November, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar R.B. Kitaj and the Revolution in History Painting Ben Thomas 16 November, 13.00-14.00 Research Lunch The Central School of Arts and Crafts: An ‘Informal Nucleus’ of Collaborative Practices in PostWar London Rosie Ram 21 November, 18.00-20.30 Research Seminar The Famous Women Dinner Service “Dinner Party” 29 to 30 November Conference Portraiture and Biography National Portrait Gallery
Joseph Wright of Derby, Academy by Lamplight (detail), 1769. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
October 2018 — No. 10
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2019
MELLON LECTURES Tim Barringer
Global Landscape in the Age of Empire 7 January
14 January
South: Grand Tours and the Origins of the Picturesque
21 January
North: The Industrial Revolution and the British Isles
28 January
East: Orientalism and the British in India
4 February
West: The Black Atlantic and the American Sublime
Winter 2019 Monday Evenings 34
The Global Panorama
6.30-7.30PM National Gallery
Opposite: Thomas Moran, The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (detail), 1872. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Lent by the Department of the Interior Museum. This page: Thomas Daniell, Jami Masjid (detail), Delhi, 1811. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. 35
A Notice from the Paul Mellon Centre: General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and Your Personal Information As many of you may be aware, the GDPR came into force on 25 May 2018. GDPR is a regulation in EU law which aims to provide a set of standardised data protection laws across all the member countries. Its ultimate purpose is to better protect EU citizens from privacy and data breaches in an increasingly data-driven world. The Paul Mellon Centre takes its responsibilities under GDPR very seriously and has embarked upon a Records Management project which will help us work towards compliance. You can find our Data Protection and Records Management policies, which support this work, online here: http://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk/about/records-management As the Records Management project progresses we will be reviewing how we collect, hold and manage personal data relating to all our activities. This will include, for example, information about speakers, lecturers and attendees at our events; applicants for grant and fellowship awards; academics proposing publications; donors of library and archive material; individuals using our Research Collections; Yale in London students as well as all the colleagues with whom we regularly collaborate on a wide variety of projects. A key part of our work towards compliance will also involve ensuring all our contact databases and mailing lists are up to date and accurate. You will be hearing more about these efforts over the next few months. In the meantime, please let us know if you have any questions about how the Centre is managing your personal data. Please contact us if you no longer wish to receive either copies of this printed newsletter or regular e-mail updates. You can either write to information@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk or call us on 02075800311.
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YCBA Exhibitions and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA Exhibitions 4 October – 30 December George Shaw: A Corner of a Foreign Field Spanning three decades of George Shaw’s prolific artistic practice, the exhibition will feature nearly seventy paintings, more than sixty drawings, numerous prints, and a range of sketchbook and notebook materials, as well as several new works. Organized in collaboration with the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, this will be the artist’s first solo show in the United States.
10 October, 17.30
28 November, 17.30
Lecture
Panel Discussion
9 October, 17.30
War, Peace, and Moore’s “Atom
Painting Free: In Conversation
Exhibition Opening Conversation
Piece”
with Howardena Pindell
George Shaw: A Corner of a
Anne Wagner, Class of 1936
Howardena Pindell, Yale MFA 1967,
Foreign Field
Professor Emerita, University of
and Courtney J. Martin, Yale PhD
Mark Hallett, the exhibition
California, Berkeley
2009, Deputy Director and Chief
Lectures and Talks
curator, in conversation with the artist George Shaw.
Curator, Dia Art Foundation 24 October, 17.30 Paul Mellon Lecture
13 December, 17.30
10 October, 11.30
Ruskin and the Idea of the
Concert
Film Screening and Discussion
Walton, Britten, and Finzi!
The Art of George Shaw: Four
Museum Tristram Hunt, Director, Victoria &
Short Films
Albert Museum, London
acclaimed pianist and Associate
Wei-Yi Yang, internationally
Filmmakers Lily Ford, Jon Law,
Professor at the Yale School of
and Jared Schiller. Moderated by
Music, with graduates from the
Mark Hallett.
Curtis Institute of Music: Rimbo Wong, viola; Shannon Lee, violin; and Zachary Mowitz, cello.
To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programmes, visit britishart.yale.edu.
George Shaw, Ash Wednesday: 7.00am, 2004–5. Private Collection, courtesy of the artist and the Anthony Wilkinson Gallery, London. January 2016 — No. 5 37
