Director's Welcome

Mark Hallett, Director

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 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.