Director's Note

Mark Hallett, Director

Welcome to this issue of PMC Notes. There is much news to report.

First of all, this autumn will see the launch of the Paul Mellon Centre’s online photographic archive. Producing, collecting and cataloguing reference photographs of works of British art was, for many years, a central strand of the Centre’s activity. Our photographic archive, consisting of more than 100,000 works, has now been scanned, catalogued and optimised for a new digital collections platform. Users will be able to search, compare, study and download high-quality images in ways that have never previously been possible. Our platform will also include a series of newly commissioned scholarly texts that highlight the archive’s interest and relevance for contemporary researchers, while a set of short films will explore the archive from the points of view of an artist, curator, art historian, dealer, archivist and photographer. This resource will open up a new world of research possibilities, and I urge you to explore it when it goes live in November.

I would also like to alert you to the packed research and learning events programme we have in store for the coming months, which testifies to the kinds of scholarly collaboration that are at the heart of the Centre’s work. The programme includes a new series of Paul Mellon lectures, organised with our colleagues at the Yale Center for British Art, in which a group of leading museum directors will address the state of the museum and gallery today. We will also be hosting an online conference exploring the dynamics of collage in modern British art, and a series of webinars looking at landscape print series in late Georgian and early Victorian Britain. These initiatives have been developed with colleagues from Tate Britain and the British Library respectively. In a similar spirit, and on the occasion of its fiftieth anniversary, we have worked with The Photographer’s Gallery to organise a set of events exploring networks of photographic practice, display and exhibition in modern Britain. Finally, the autumn will see us hosting numerous lunchtime research seminars, and running a Public Lecture Course with the title “Black British Art and Political Activism”, convened by Elizabeth Robles of the University of Bristol. I hope you will join us for at least some of these events.

I also want to use this opportunity to mark an important moment in the development of the British Art Network, which we are so delighted to support. The network, which promotes curatorial research, practice and theory in the field of British art, now has its own website, which you can access at britishartnetwork.org.uk. I encourage you to visit the website to find out more about the network and its many activities.

Above all, however, I invite you to enjoy the essays that make up this issue of PMC Notes. As always, they provide an insight into new kinds of research being undertaken on British art, which we are now communicating through an ever-expanding range of outlets, from the monograph and the journal to the podcast and the film.