PMC Notes

Protesting Precarity

The Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art is an educational charity that promotes 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.

Welcome to this issue of PMC Notes, which we hope will give you a sense of the wide-ranging research we support in the areas of British art and architecture.

In the pages that follow, we showcase the books we are publishing this autumn, which offer pioneering approaches to the artists Anthony van Dyck, James Gillray and Frank Auerbach, and similarly original interpretations of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. We are also excited to share with you a new online resource, Thomas Girtin (1775–1802): An Online Catalogue, Archive and Introduction to the Artist by Greg Smith. This open-access publication assembles more than 1,550 of Girtin’s drawings and watercolours together with a comprehensive archive of sales, exhibitions, publications and related manuscript material. After its launch on 4 October, you can visit the website at thomasgirtin.com.

Meanwhile, our three features explore, in turn, the improvised architecture of camps that sprang up during the British Mandate in Palestine; urgent issues of labour and precarity in the art world; the sometimes stuttering history of art history as an academic discipline in Britain. In addition, the event listings inside the cover wrap of this issue confirm that we are looking forward to a busy autumn programme. Our offerings over the next few months include

Hew Locke, The Procession, 2022. On view at Tate Britain, March 2022. Image courtesy of Hew Locke / Guy Bell / Alamy Stock Photo.

an exciting series of public lectures on eighteenth-century British art; two major conferences, dealing respectively with John Constable’s compelling correspondence and with the transformative potential of mass data for the discipline of art history; research seminars that, in their subject matter, stretch from Hans Holbein to the built environment surrounding Heathrow airport; and a sparkling set of research lunches that features a talk by one of this issue’s contributors, Hans Hönes. Sign up to as many of these events as you wish – you can enjoy them either in person or online.

Another event we are organising this autumn is a small workshop that will bring critics, curators, artists and academics together to discuss a remarkable piece of contemporary art: Hew Locke’s The Procession, which currently flows with carnivalesque majesty through the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain. Our gathering, which will include the artist himself, is designed to inform the making of a major film about Locke’s monumental installation, which we plan to produce over the coming year. This film will be intended both to record The Procession in its entirety and, through a polyvocal form of critical commentary, respond to the work’s astonishing complexity and range. We look forward to sharing it with you in 2023.

This project is just one of the ways in which we are exploring the use of film as a vehicle for original and innovative investigations into British art. Another is our undergraduate film initiative, British Art in Motion, which we launched this year, and which will culminate, in October, in the first ever PMC film festival. Taking place at our premises in Bedford Square, the festival will screen short arthistorical films made by students with the support of the PMC. We hope this inaugural festival will be the first of many, and that it will continue to grow in scale and ambition over the coming years. This new fixture in our calendar may never rival Cannes, but it will still be exciting, each year, to roll out the red carpet for British art.

Mark Hallett Director

From the mid-eighteenth century to the nineteen-twenties, from the birth of the Industrial Revolution to the height of Manchester’s global significance and the beginning of its decline, Shock City challenges the idea that Paris was the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’. Mark Crinson reorients this issue around the development of industrial production, particularly cotton and its manufacture by means of steam power, offering a fascinating and accessibly written account of how new relations in the industrial economy were manifested through the spaces and representations of the first industrial city. This book explores Manchester’s iconic buildings alongside paintings, prints, maps and photographs of the city throughout the period. Crinson interweaves analysis of buildings, images, urban spaces, new institutions, technology and industrial pollution to show how these were all the products of Manchester’s newly emergent industrial middle classes, who remade the city in their image.

Shock City: Image and Architecture in Industrial Manchester Mark Crinson Publication date September 2022 Dimensions 255 × 245 mm Pages 256 Illustrations 175 Price £35

As a courtier, figure of fashion and object of erotic fascination, Anthony van Dyck transformed the professional identities available to English artists. By making his portrait sittings into a form of courtly spectacle, Van Dyck inspired poets and playwrights at the same time that he offended guardians of traditional hierarchies. A self-consciously Van Dyckian lineage of artists, many of them women, extends from his lifetime to the end of the eighteenth century and beyond. Recovering the often surprising responses of both writers and painters to Van Dyck’s portraits, this book provides an alternative perspective on English art’s historical self-consciousness. Built around close readings of artworks and texts ranging from poems and plays to early biographies and studio gossip, it traces the reception of Van Dyck’s art on the part of artists such as Mary Beale, William Hogarth and Richard and Maria Cosway to bestow historical specificity on the frequent claim that Van Dyck founded an English school of portraiture.

Van Dyck and the Making of English Portraiture Adam Eaker Publication date September 2022 Dimensions 270 × 185mm Pages 256 Illustrations 100 Price £35

New Books

This book offers an original approach to one of Britain’s leading artists: Frank Auerbach. It looks in detail at his portrait drawings, which Auerbach has been making since the 1950s, and which he has always considered important, free-standing works of art. By turns eerie, shocking, enigmatic and hauntingly tender, they demand fresh interpretation and investigation. Reproducing more than a hundred and thirty examples of these portraits, some for the first time, and featuring new essays by curators, scholars and critics, this book provides an unprecedented opportunity to explore and reassess these striking and sometimes unsettling works of graphic art. Frank Auerbach: Drawings of People includes texts by both the editors and the artist himself, and new essays by Kate Aspinall, James Finch, Alex Massouras, David A. Mellor and Barnaby Wright.

Frank Auerbach: Drawings of People Edited by Mark Hallett and Catherine Lampert Publication date October 2022 Dimensions 254 × 203mm Pages 336 Illustrations 200 Price £40

The Edwardian Baroque was the closest British architecture ever came to achieving an ‘imperial’ style. With the aim of articulating British global power and prestige, it adorned civic and commercial structures both in Britain and in the wider British world, especially in the ‘white settler’ Dominions of Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Evoking the contemporary and emotive idea of ‘Greater Britain’, this new book by distinguished historian G. A. Bremner represents a groundbreaking study of this intriguing architectural movement in Britain and its empire. It explores the Edwardian Baroque’s significance as a response to the growing anxiety over Britain’s place in the world, its widely perceived geopolitical decline, and its need to bolster confidence amid the Great Power rivalries of the period. It combines architectural, political and imperial history and theory, providing a nuanced understanding of the Edwardian Baroque from a material culture perspective, including its foundation in notions of race and gender.

Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, 1885–1920 G. A. Bremner

Publication date November 2022

Dimensions 290 × 248mm Pages 368 Illustrations 292 Price £50

New Books

James Gillray (1756–1815) was late Georgian Britain’s funniest, most inventive and most celebrated graphic satirist and continues to influence cartoonists today. His exceptional drawing, matched by his flair for clever dialogue and amusing titles, won him unprecedented fame. His sophisticated designs often parodied artists such as William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds and Henry Fuseli, while he wittily redeployed celebrated passages from William Shakespeare and John Milton to send up politicians in an age – as now – where anxieties abounded, truth was sometimes scarce, and public opinion mattered. This definitive biography explores Gillray’s life and work through his friends, publishers –the most important being women – and collaborators, identifying those involved in inventing satirical prints and the people who bought them. It thoughtfully explores the tensions between artistic independence, financial necessity and the conflicting demands of patrons and self-appointed censors in a time of political and social turmoil.

James Gillray:

A Revolution in Satire

Tim Clayton

Publication date November 2022 Dimensions 290 × 248mm Pages 408 Illustrations 205 Price £50

New Books

Camps in Mandatory Palestine

Irit Katz studies spaces that undergo radical transformations under extreme conditions. Here she explores the ad hoc architecture of camps in Palestine during British rule (1917–48), surveying its complex uses and afterlives. This research was undertaken with the support of a PMC postdoctoral fellowship in 2018, and forms part of her new book The Common Camp: Architecture of Power and Resistance in Israel–Palestine (2022). Irit Katz is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Studies in the Department of Architecture, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College.

From an architectural perspective, British rule over Palestine, which continued for more than three decades from 1917 until 1948, transformed the territory by creating different types of spaces, including camps. While camps are rarely seen as inventive architectural creations – and their design is often perceived as repetitive, unimaginative and detached from local realities – the British military camps, detention camps and Zionist settler camps of Mandatory Palestine were flexible spaces along a military–civilian continuum, which adapted to the ongoing geopolitical transformations of the region. They had a formative impact on how land and populations were controlled in the area and became a point of emergence for the longer spatial genealogy of camps in Israel and Palestine.

The numerous camps created in Mandatory Palestine reflect that period’s complex political reality of a contested territory torn between Jewish and Arab communities under British rule. It was also subject to contradictory political agreements: the Hussein–McMahon Correspondence (1915–16) had promised the “independence of the Arab” over the area, while the Sykes–Picot Agreement (1916) strategically divided the occupied lands between colonial French and British powers, and the Balfour Declaration (1917) supported “the

establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people”. Although generally seen as temporary and transitory spaces, the camps created in that period of double colonialism – by British rule and Zionist settler expansion – often evolved into places central to the way the area was reshaped and managed.

The first British military camps in Palestine, which appeared as the conquering army progressed, later multiplied and expanded to serve both local and international political and military needs, responding to events such as the Jewish–Arab riots in 1921, the Palestinian Arab Revolt in 1936–39, and the Second World War. Most of the military camps in Mandatory Palestine were formed according to a standard grid layout with the use of prefabricated huts made from light materials such as timber and corrugated steel. Perhaps the best known such design was the curved Nissen hut, made from kits of steel ribs and corrugated skin that could be quickly assembled. Such prefabricated huts, transported along roads and railways, were key in larger logistical apparatuses that translated the ability to rapidly reshape spaces into expressions of territorial and colonial power.

During the Second World War, new military camps were built in Palestine to secure British assets in the Near East while functioning as the rear front for the Allied forces fighting in Iraq, Syria and North Africa. Their creation was a joint effort by military personnel, civilian professionals and around fifty thousand Arab and Jewish builders who worked together while living in temporary work camps. War shortages saw all these workers adapting and using local materials; the military chief engineer’s September 1940 report examined the creative use of mud, olive oil and cow dung for hut construction. Despite the apparent simplicity of camp huts, in 1940 British and local professionals collaborated to conduct no less than “15 experiments with clay, chopped straw, kerosene and colas” to design the new Gut Hut, a local adaptation of the imported template.

After the war, in 1947, the army in Palestine made up one-tenth of the British Empire’s armed forces, occupying around one thousand facilities, which would later provide a foundational infrastructure for Israel’s army. British military camps evolved in several other ways, as well: they were used to shelter massive waves of Jewish immigrants; they laid the foundations for new cities, such as at Rosh HaAyin; and, in Gaza, provided shelter for Palestinian refugees.

This continuity between military and civilian spheres seen in the lives and legacies of British camps was especially relevant to

Zionist settler camps, which went through a significant process of militarisation. Settler colonialism was at the heart of Zionism, which saw agricultural settlement as a territorial practice, as described in a quote attributed to Zionist national hero Yosef Trumpeldor, stating that “wherever the Jewish plough cultivates its last furrow, that is where the border will run”. Temporary settler tent camps were used in the earliest stages of Zionist expansion to further “the frontier”, with Kibbutz Ein Harod, established in 1921, being one of the first settlements founded as a tent camp.

The fortified “wall and tower” outpost camps that were erected during the years of the Palestinian Arab Revolt (1936–39) were probably the most commonly constructed type of Zionist prefabricated frontier settler camps. The first was constructed in 1936 by the members of Kibbutz Tel Amal, who were attempting to gain control over land that had been purchased by the Jewish National Fund, but which could not be settled due to the Arab uprising. Tel Amal was designed to permit the hasty construction of prefabricated and fortified structures, which had to be transported and erected in six to eight hours so that its inhabitants could defend themselves immediately. The camp’s wooden walls enclosed a square area with two bastions for gun emplacements and two fences of barbed wire that protected the settlers. Inside, four shacks accommodated forty people and a prefabricated watchtower with a searchlight was erected to overlook the surrounding area. These fortified settler camps – fifty-two of which were constructed throughout the country between 1936 and 1939 and then rapidly transformed into permanent settlements – significantly changed the map of Jewish habitations in Palestine and were core to the formation of a continuous Jewish territory later acknowledged in the United Nations partition plan for Palestine. While at the beginning the British authorities supported this form of settlement and provided infrastructure and protection, their attitude changed drastically during the Palestinian Arab Revolt, and strict limitations on Jewish land purchase and settlement in Palestine and on Jewish immigration quotas were imposed by the British government’s White Paper of 1939. Although the organised illegal immigration of Jewish people to Palestine had started a year after Hitler came to power, this restriction saw the number of illegal entries soar.

The Atlit Detention Camp was opened in 1940 by the British to detain such men, women and children arriving to Palestine illegally

until they were awarded entry certificates in line with the new quota. Two fences of barbed wire encircled the camp with armed guards patrolling between them; inside, seventy-seven numbered wooden huts with thirty-two beds in each were used for the detainees’ accommodation, while larger structures included the cookhouse and the disinfection facility. Despite the heavy security, including daily roll calls, the detainees were active in the camp, working in the communal kitchen and growing vegetables, while detained doctors and nurses worked in the camp’s hospital and nursery. After the Second World War, when Atlit and other detention camps in Palestine were filled to capacity, passengers were forcibly transferred to new designated detention camps established in Cyprus to contain the thousands of Jewish immigrants and refugees until they met the quota, including thousands of unaccompanied minors.

British military and detention camps, and Zionist settler camps, formed an initial part of the unique typology of transitory spaces that have structured Palestine and Israel over the past century. The common attributes of many of these camps – the continuity between military and civilian forms and functions, their prefabricated components and their modes of spatial adaptation – were central to their rapid creation as built instruments erected to achieve particular goals. A close examination of the spatial and material components of the many manifestations of these camps and their often contradictory purposes allows a fuller understanding of the complex meanings and functions of camps in Israel–Palestine and beyond.

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Aerial view of Beit Yosef wall and tower camp, Bet-She’an Valley, 1937 (detail). Courtesy of the Central Zionist Archives, PHAL\1624342.

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British military huts in Mahane Israel, a former British military camp converted into an immigrant camp, 1950. Photo by Zoltan Kluger. Courtesy of Zoltan Kluger /National Photo Collection of Israel, Government Press Office.

Nurses play with Jewish immigrant children at the Atlit Detention Camp, 1944. Photo by Zoltan Kluger. Courtesy of Zoltan Kluger /National Photo Collection of Israel, Government Press Office.

In July 2022, the PMC held its second Graduate Summer School, bringing together participants studying art and art history at Yale University and several UK universities. Taking in both historical and contemporary viewpoints, the theme was ‘Art & Labour’, a topic that spanned aesthetic, theoretical and social concerns around how we value artistic work, its role in society, and its relationship to global regimes of production.

In this interview, the summer school’s Academic Convenor Richard Birkett speaks with members of Precarious Workers Brigade (PWB), who contributed to a day-long workshop focused on labour activism in the arts. Established in 2010, PWB is a UK-based group of workers in culture and education who have developed vital research, actions and tools in order to challenge conditions of precarity experienced in the art field and beyond.

Interview

Labour Organising in the Arts: Precarious Workers Brigade

Richard: I’d like to start by asking about the initial constellating of PWB in 2010. The group formed through the overlapping activities of a number of collectives working in art and education, activism and political theory. How did these areas of work and thought come together in PWB?

PWB: PWB developed from the work of Carrotworkers Collective, a group formed in 2009 and focused on addressing unpaid internships at UK art institutions. In June 2010, curators at the ICA in London approached Carrotworkers about undertaking a residency there that would grow support for ending unpaid work at this publicly funded institution, which at the time was making mass redundancies in response to an economic crisis. Carrotworkers in turn convened an assembly of art workers and others to open up this invitation as a possible platform to collectivise against the normalisation of free labour (including, but extending way beyond just internships) that was concealing the decimation of public resources. From this assembly, and subsequent meetings, a proto-constellation of Precarious Workers Brigade began to form.

Many who joined PWB shared Carrotworkers’ growing anger; as cultural producers and educators, we were desperate to find meaningful ways to resist the neoliberal meltdown of the art and education sectors, and the rising tide of precarity writ large. Something else we shared was a growing disdain for cultural and other programming that amounted to ‘political content production without political consequence,’ as we like to say in Carrotworkers Collective and PWB. We were committed to making actual change through collective practice.

Richard: Do you see precedents for the work of PWB in other groups, historical or contemporary?

PWB: We have experimented with organising methods inspired by feminist activism, participatory action research and forum theatre. Many of us were also influenced by Colectivo Situaciones, a Buenos Aires-based collective of militant researchers who were involved in the Argentine uprisings in 2001. They were invited to London in October 2009 by Micropolitics Research Group, a proto-constellation of the Carrotworkers Collective.

Militant research does not separate the production of knowledge from action. This process is instigated and conducted by those affected and struggling for transformation. By working from the bottom up, we can better understand

what we are experiencing and how this is shaped by social and other conditions.

Richard: What are the particular tools and actions that PWB has initiated and how does PWB consider the role of creativity and art in its activities?

PWB: We are interested in novel forms of political organising that build on but also depart from traditional models like trade unions. Art and creativity have been vital in developing new political methods of investigating the conditions and complex intersections at work in precarity, and in building solidarities.

We have used tools and actions such as the People’s Tribunal, which draws on courtroom protocols (giving/listening to testimony, calling expert witnesses, formulating a ruling) to publicly and collectively address injustices and to take collective action. The production of a verdict can be a very emotional yet empowering moment. Embodied understanding is also key to the visual storytelling of our Photo Romances. We capture the lived experience of precarity by staging and photographing narratives and presenting them as comic strip-like sequences.

We have also adopted donkey masks to maintain anonymity and used carrot props in the context of demonstrations to act out our slogans. One of our favourite tools is the Bust Your Boss Card. Inspired by cards handed out at protests, it reminds freelance cultural workers of their rights. Several adaptions of the card have been developed in various languages for migrant workers who are at risk of deportation. For more information on these and other resources, see our two publications, Training for Exploitation?

Politicising Employability and Reclaiming Education and Surviving Internships: A Counter Guide to Labour in the Arts.

Richard: Do you consider artists to be particularly prone to conditions of precarity, or in a position of solidarity with other people experiencing exploitative working conditions?

PWB: There are many reasons why precarious labour has been normalised in cultural production, including the romantic idea that loving your work trumps paying your bills! We can only nod, here, to how this connects to age-old discussions about art’s autonomy and exceptionalism. Suffice to say that PWB’s aspiration has always been to act outside the commercial and other art worlds, and to stand in solidarity with precarious workers beyond

the cultural sector. We have been involved in direct actions with the Latin American Workers Association (LAWAS) and the anti-raid campaign to stop the deportation of migrant workers, and with groups such as Future Interns and No Pay No Way and Boycott Workfare.

Richard: A number of people who have been involved with PWB work in academia. Many artists and writers in the UK are dependent on research grants and lecturer wages to make ends meet. Have you experienced this relationship between art and academia changing over the last decade? How has it defined the nature of precarity in the arts?

PWB: The gig economy has gripped academia in the last decade in lockstep with the privatisation of education. Students are often shocked when they learn that many of their tutors make so little, work so much unpaid overtime and are stuck on short-term contracts. If not to the faculty, where do the fees go? How do teaching and research staff make ends meet? Asking these questions can help to highlight why academia is an increasingly unreliable ‘day job’ for artists and writers.

Similarly, funding in the arts and humanities is increasingly competitive. Changing expectations and a lack of feedback on unsuccessful applications leaves many – especially those outside of high-profile networks – feeling demoralised and atomised. These realities, combined with the rising cost of living and growing globalised disruption and uncertainty, are creating the particular nexus that defines precarity across education and the arts.

Richard: What changes have you experienced in wider understandings of worker precarity over the last decade?

PWB: In 2015 PWB gathered for a two-day meeting to review our scope and goals. Five years after the collective’s constellation, we realised that a redefinition of precarity beyond work was required. As someone at the meeting suggested, precarity can be seen today as a specific model of impoverishment that happens under neoliberal conditions; it is deeply entangled with the housing crisis and public health, spanning the impoverishment of time, affectivity, care and resources.

Richard: PWB is currently ‘on hiatus’. It seems often the case historically that activist groups emerging in the arts remain viable for only short periods. Do you think there are ways to sustain the praxis of groups such as PWB as future-oriented, even if the

conditions under which they exist have to change?

PWB: That PWB’s labour was largely unpaid is a great paradox at the heart of the collective. Occasional fees and funding offered partial compensation for outwardly-facing work, but the behind-the-scenes activity of social reproduction relied on cross-subsidisation, which has only ever been minimal. This hierarchy of value is as familiar as it is frustrating.

However strange it may sound, there was an intimate relationship between PWB’s persistence and the fragility of its social reproduction, including its administration and organisation. We have often reflected that our most intense activity, which spanned the better part of a decade, hinged on us taking so little for granted. Our comradeship was syncopated as some of us stepped forward and others stepped back in response to the unpredictable demands of our precarious lives. Though PWB’s hiatus may now be permanent, the collective as a network persists as many and varied associations. These continue to find new forms in response to changing contexts, conditions and circumstances.

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Precarious Workers Brigade’s action with No Pay No Way at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) march, 20 October 2012, London (detail). Photo by Precarious Workers Brigade.

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Precarity: A Participatory People’s Tribunal, The Carrotworkers and the Precarious Workers Brigade, 20 March 2011, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo by Marsha Bradfield.

Precarity: A Participatory People’s Tribunal, details of the verdicts, Carrotworkers Collective and Precarious Workers Brigade, 20 March 2011, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. Photo by Marsha Bradfield.

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Bust Your Boss card (front and back), action tool designed by the Precarious Workers Brigade, circa 2011–12. Image files courtesy of Precarious Workers Brigade.

On Not Teaching Art History

Hans C. Hönes, Lecturer in Art History at the University of Aberdeen, revisits the position against teaching art history at universities, which was held by many artists, art historians and critics in Britain until the 1960s. Hönes is completing a Research Collection Fellowship at the PMC this year, exploring the institutions key to British art history in the mid-twentieth century.

For anybody interested in the future of art history, it may be useful to recall that its status as a university subject was, until the mid-twentieth century, challenged by many who cared most deeply for art and its study. The British art historian, critic and art collector Paul Oppé (1878–1957), whose archive is held at the PMC, was exemplary in his passion for the subject and his opposition to its formalisation. In 1905, Oppé resigned from his job as a lecturer in Classics at Edinburgh University – a dramatic decision for a young scholar who had only recently been appointed to this prestigious position. Oppé had other plans: he would devote his life to studying art history. In his later years, he became one of the most renowned connoisseurs and collectors of British drawings and watercolours of the eighteenth century. But, at the time of his resignation, none of this was certain.

In early twentieth-century Britain, an art-historical career was something of a chimera. There was no defined way to become an historian of art; the subject was hardly established at British universities. Art history was mainly practised at the extreme ends of the class spectrum: it had either been promoted by committed socialists (such as John Ruskin and William Morris) for the betterment of the working classes, and taught in working men’s colleges and similar institutions; or it was the domain of gentleman scholars, who often had close connections with the aristocracy, and thus access to the many artworks still in private hands, and often locked away behind country house doors. Oppé quickly resigned himself to the fact that there was indeed no career in art history, and so took a job as a civil servant –though his family was wealthy (his father was a successful silk merchant), he still needed a regular income. The office job was dull but also undemanding, leaving plenty of time for gallery visits, discussions in the Athenaeum club and independent research.

Oppé could have tried to combine an academic career in Classics and an interest in art. In 1904, a job as university lecturer was not necessarily more demanding than a position in the civil service, and academia granted the postholder a great degree of personal freedom. Furthermore, Oppé’s academic post did give him the opportunity to teach courses on classical art, such as one titled ‘Greek Sculpture’ that he offered at St. Andrews in 1902. The course not only covered key

developments in ancient art but also included ample digressions on later sculptors such as Michelangelo, as well as philosophical debates about the purpose of art more broadly.

Oppé’s ideal of art seems to have been the main reason he abandoned this academic path. His diaries at the PMC highlight the fact that he loathed the idea of pursuing his love for art as a job for financial gain. In the aestheticist climate of Britain around 1900, fine art held sway primarily as a utopian realm of ideal beauty, detached from the mundane realities of life. As Oppé wrote, in 1904: “All day today and generally I long to paint, to study and feast upon the only satisfying of earthly qualities, the light and colour and form of nature. Or I wish to be a poet and to express in a form not inadequate some of the emotions and thoughts which make up my real life.” “Real life” evidently happens in an ideal, aesthetic realm and is separate from a professional existence as a civil servant, or even as a university lecturer.

While Oppé desperately wanted to become a full-time art historian, he was also convinced that his field of study should not be taught at university level. Many practising artists agreed, such as the Royal Academy of Arts president Edward Poynter, who cautioned against the history of art as a serious field of study. Historicism, Poynter argued, would only hamper a fresh, spontaneous feeling for art and beauty, which he saw as providing the foundations for a blossoming of art practice in twentiethcentury Britain. The discipline’s

academic fortunes only changed with the foundation of the Courtauld Institute of Art in 1932, the first (and, for a long time, only) institution for higher education that offered an undergraduate degree in the subject.

This reticence is often taken as evidence – particularly by continental art historians – that British scholars were simply not temperamentally equipped for the kind of serious art history that had been taking shape on the continent, especially in Germany, since the late nineteenth century. In 1952, the architectural historian Nikolaus Pevsner had pondered whether art history was “an un-English activity”; two years later, his colleague Erwin Panofsky quipped that the British treated artworks like their mistresses, which is to say as something to admire in private, without profaning their beauty through too much analysis.

In many cases, however, the British position was a conscious decision and not an issue of temperament. In the 1930s, Roger Fry argued explicitly for “art-history” as a discipline that was not purely historical (i.e. focused on artworks as embedded in their time of creation), but primarily open to questions of aesthetics and philosophy. This approach, Fry argued, should be underpinned by extensive engagement with recent developments in psychology, ethnology and prehistoric archaeology. These disciplines would offer fresh insights into the empirical foundations of beauty – and thus the tools for a scrupulous, scientific analysis of beauty itself. This agenda was shared by some

of the very few university teachers in the field. In 1918, Gerard Baldwin Brown, chair of fine art at Edinburgh University, for example, had argued that art should not be studied as part of cultural history but as “a world of her own”: an aesthetic counter-reality, following autonomous rules. His preferred instruments for analysing this realm of beauty were, once again, drawn not from the historian’s toolkit but from empirical aesthetics and the psychology of art.

There was also no single counterposition, as attempts to introduce art history as a university subject came from different quarters. At Aberdeen University in the early 1920s, for example, the classicist John Harrower pioneered a degree course called ‘Fine Art: History and Theory’. Thus, in North East Scotland, students could graduate with a diploma in the subject ten years before the foundation of the Courtauld. Harrower’s historicist take on the study of art differed significantly from Fry’s or Baldwin Brown’s agenda. The latter two figures seem, in many respects, more aligned with continental developments that promoted an Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft – a general science of art – which prioritised a philosophical and empirical understanding of art. The lack of art history at British universities was thus often a challenge to exclusively historical methods, in favour of a normative, aesthetic approach to the subject. In the eyes of many professional historians, “art history” thus remained “open to suspicion”, as Hamish Miles phrased it as late as 1967, in his inaugural lecture as a professor of the

history of art at Leicester University.

A “general science of art”, however, never found a secure institutional footing. In Britain from the 1930s, the foundation of émigré-led institutions such as the Warburg Institute encouraged a shift towards the historical study of art.

By the 1960s, the subject was widely established at British universities. Looking back on these early debates in the discipline should remind us that its current form – as art history – was not always unchallenged. But it also might, on the other hand, make us aware of its present strengths. Art history has been remarkably successful in absorbing subfields such as visual studies, whose emergence was initially regarded as

a threat to the field. New challenges are undoubtedly on the horizon, given the defunding of humanities subjects by recent British governments and the growing lack of security in academic jobs. Many departments are nevertheless in a position of strength, training hundreds of graduates and scores of postgraduates every year and hiring staff with expertise beyond European art. This is astonishing for a discipline taught only rarely at school. If anything, art history might soon need to ask itself whether there are limits to its academic growth. Just how many art history PhDs can we train sustainably, with clear prospects for a meaningful role in communities of research?

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Unknown photographer, Paul Oppé, year unknown. Courtesy of the Paul Oppé Archive, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (APO/10/3/1/G).

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Edward John Poynter, Apelles: Design for a Mosaic in the Museum (the “Kensington Valhalla”), 1864, oil on canvas, 104.5 × 34.5 cm. Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Image courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (all rights reserved).

Edward John Poynter, Phidias, 1864, oil on canvas, 265.4 × 87.6 cm. Collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (1761-1869). Image courtesy of the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (all rights reserved).

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M.I. Batten, “A Great London Gain: The Courtauld Institute of Art in Portman Square”, The Sphere, 25 March 1933 (detail). Courtesy of the Frank Simpson Archive, Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art (FHS/1/2a).

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Receptionist

Karen Pilz

Head of Research and Learning Sria Chatterjee Learning Programme Manager

Nermin Abdulla Events Manager Ella Fleming Events Assistant Danielle Convey Head of Grants, Fellowships and Networks Martin Myrone Grants and Fellowships Manager Harriet Sweet Grants and Fellowships Manager (Parental Leave Cover)

Gareth Clayton PMC Networks Manager and Director’s Assistant Bryony Botwright-Rance

Human Resources Manager Barbara Waugh Human Resources Officer

Gabriella Rhodes Senior Research Fellow Martin Postle Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar

Advisory Council Jo Applin Courtauld Institute of Art

Viccy Coltman Edinburgh College of Art

Tarnya Cooper National Trust

Elena Crippa Tate Britain

Caroline Dakers University of the Arts London

David Dibosa Chelsea College of Arts

John Goodall Country Life Julian Luxford University of St Andrews

Dorothy Price Courtauld Institute of Art Christine Riding National Gallery Mark Sealy Autograph

Nicholas Tromans Independent Art Historian

Governors

Peter Salovey President, Yale University

Scott Strobel Provost, Yale University

Susan Gibbons Chief of Staff to the President, Vice Provost for Collections and Scholarly Communication, Yale University

Stephen Murphy Vice President for Finance and Chief Financial Officer, Yale University

Template Design

Strick&Williams

Editing and Layout

Baillie Card and Harriet Sweet Printed by Blackmore

Fonts

Saol Text and Galaxie Polaris Paper Fedrigoni Arena Natural Smooth

Contact us

Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art 16 Bedford Square London, WC1B 3JA United Kingdom T: 020 7580 0311 www.paul-melloncentre.ac.uk