May 2018 / N o. 9 p aul-mellon - c e nt re.a c.uk
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 Archivist and Records Manager Charlotte Brunskill Assistant Librarian Natasha Held Assistant Archivist and Records Manager Jenny Hill 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 Editor Emily Lees
Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar Research Fellow and Filmmaker Jonathan Law Advisory Council Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Alixe Bovey, Courtauld Institute of Art Christopher Breward, University of Edinburgh Anthony Geraghty, University of York Richard Marks, University of Cambridge, University of York Martin Myrone, Tate Britain Lynda Nead, Birkbeck Andrew Saint, English Heritage MaryAnne Stevens, Art Historian and Curator Simon Wallis, The Hepworth Wakefield Shearer West, University of Sheffield 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 Baillie Card
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Director’s Assistant Bryony Botwright-Rance
Baillie Card and Harriet Fisher Template by Cultureshock Media
HR Manager Barbara Waugh
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Office Administrator Stephen O’Toole Buildings Officer George Szwejkowski Allen Fellow Jessica Feather
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Senior Research Fellow Hugh Belsey
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 May 2018 – No.9
Director’s Note 2 Research Projects Feature: Inside the RA Archives 4 The Great Spectacle 8 Crossing the Channel 12 The Look of Music 14 Fellowships and Grants Collaborative Curating 16 Collections The Peter and Renate Nahum Donation 20 Supporting the Spectacle 24 Publications New Books Summer 2018 26 PMC Publications at CAA 29 Upcoming Events PMC Events Calendar 30 Public Lecture Course 32 Bedford Square Festival 33 The Art of Protest 34 PMC Profile 36 YCBA Events Calendar 37
Front cover: Detail of Thomas Rowlandson, Viewing at the Royal Academy, ca. 1815, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Director’s Note The PMC has been taken over by exhibition fever. In April, we helped organise and host a conference and workshop that responded to the great Charles I: King and Collector exhibition at the Royal Academy, and brought to a close our spring-term Public Lecture Course Thinking about Exhibitions: Interpretation, Reconstruction, Curation. Furthermore, the end of May will see the launch of our major online publication, The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018, which will feature fully digitised, searchable facsimiles of every Summer Exhibition catalogue, together with individual commentaries on every Summer Exhibition since 1769, produced by more than ninety scholars, curators, critics, artists and film-makers. This is one of the most exciting and ambitious ventures on which we have worked in recent years, and it has been developed in tandem with another important project in which a number of us are involved: an exhibition at the Royal Academy entitled The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, which will open in June. This issue of PMC Notes provides plenty more information about these ventures, and about a host of other related events and activities, including a Drawing Room Display devoted to the literary spin-offs of
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the Summer Exhibition, and a two-day conference focusing on artistic rivalries, friendships, and enmities, particularly in the context of exhibition culture. But don’t worry, we haven’t become too obsessed with the topic of exhibitions—you will also find information here about a remarkably generous donation to our library collection from Peter and Renate Nahum; a trio of new books; a recent series of talks organised with the artist Jeremy Deller; and plenty more, including a full listing of our seminars and research lunches over May, June, and July, and a trailer for the second Bedford Square Festival. As you will gather, this is shaping up to be an especially busy and lively summer—we hope you will join us over the next few months, and bring your own energy to our proceedings.
Mark Hallett Director of Studies
Details of: Joshua Reynolds, Omai, ca. 1776, oil on canvas, 236 × 145.5 cm, Private Collection; George Frederic Watts, Photograph of Physical Energy installed at Burlington House, 1904, glass plate negative, Collection of Watts Gallery (COMWG2010.1.317); Laura Knight, Ruby Loftus Screwing a Breech-Ring, 1942, oil on canvas, 86.3 x 101.9 cm, Collection of Imperial War Museum, London (Art.IWM ART LD 2850).
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Inside the RA Archives Archivist Mark Pomeroy reflects on his role at the Royal Academy, and on its rich archival collections, as the institution prepares to celebrate the Summer Exhibition’s 250th anniversary.
The Muniment Room at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Š4Royal Academy of Arts, London. Photographer: Paul Highnam.
Can you tell us a little bit about the size and contents of the RA archives, and your role there as Archivist? To my mind the archive is about the size of a London bus, although these days it would have to tow a small horsebox additionally. In terms of contents it is simply glorious, particularly for the period 1760–1900. The official records of the Academy form the core of the archive; to these are added the records of the Society of Artists (1759–92), the Graphic Society (1833–91), and a cluster of important personal archives from figures such as Sir Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann, Sir Thomas Lawrence, John Gibson, George Richmond, and many others. What sorts of materials are most often consulted? Is it mainly art historians who visit the archives? The student admission registers are the most frequently requested documents in the archive. The Academy is, as far as I know, unique among the London art schools in preserving evidence of every single student since its foundation. Printed annual reports are consulted daily, as are the minute books of the Academy’s Council and General Assembly. We are in the early stages of planning the wholesale digitisation of these resources. Certainly, many of our visitors are art historians, but our public is surprisingly diverse, and our online catalogue is attracting an ever-widening audience. My most memorable enquiry came from post-punk legend Feargal Sharkey, who wanted to investigate Sir Francis Chantrey’s love of fly-fishing.
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How have you been involved in preparing for the Summer Exhibition anniversary celebrations at the RA? The archive has been effectively exploited in support of most aspects of this year’s activities, whether it be display (The Great Spectacle and Collections displays), publishing (the RA Chronicle and The Royal Academy of Arts: History and Collections), learning, marketing, merchandising, or fundraising. You have written two fascinating entries in our RA Chronicle, for the years 1868 and 1901. Which stories did you choose to highlight, and why? I feel deeply conflicted about being asked to write history. Sir Hilary Jenkinson, father of the British archival profession, once intoned, “an Archivist should not an Historian be”, and I’m afraid I do agree with him. There are sound reasons for this position. Archivists are responsible for maintaining,
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preserving, and making accessible the raw materials of history. If they are simultaneously participating in academic discourse their archival work can become biased. Writing also takes an archivist away from their proper work. I think I was told to do 1868. I chose 1901 as it contained a neat example of the changing relationship of amateur artists to the exhibition. So many RA Chronicle authors have visited the archives to do research for their essays. Did their investigations bring any interesting new RA facts to light? It has been wonderful to have so many people pass through the Library over the last two years, all engaged on the same project. I have no idea what people might have turned up, and look forward to discovering this once the Chronicle launches. From conversations, I know for sure that scholars have found new avenues to explore.
The Selection Committee of the Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, 21 March 1967. Photograph by Roger Jackson. Digital image courtesy Getty Images.
Which part of the archive do you think is the most underexplored by researchers? Everything after 1945. The post-war archive is not catalogued to a high degree of detail and so remains somewhat hidden from view. I would like to devote resources to the 1950s and 1960s and await an upsurge of scholarly interest in the inter-institutional politics of the period. Even so, large swathes of the nineteenth century are still available for exploration. Only recently I rediscovered a group of student attendance records dating from 1826–52. These provide a rare perspective on a pivotal period and lay bare the personal engagement of students with the Academy. Is the archive always expanding? How closely does the RA document its activities today, and do you ever acquire historical material to fill in gaps? I am records manager for the Academy as well as its archivist. This means I am a spider at the centre of a data-web created by 340 members of staff. Most of this work is digital and the archive already holds corporate records amounting to 4 terabytes of storage. The future of corporate archives is digital and the preservation of electronic records is my most significant challenge. External archives and artists’ papers are acquired according to our collecting policy, which states that we accept archives that bear directly on the Academy and its membership.
Mark Pomeroy was interviewed by PMC Editor Baillie Card.
Preparations for the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, 1996. Members of the public deliver their work to the vaults of the Royal Academy © Royal Academy of Arts, London.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
The Great Spectacle Director of Studies Mark Hallett invites PMC Notes readers to see The Great Spectacle exhibition at the Royal Academy this summer. Sometimes, you can really tell when artists have enjoyed themselves. This must have been the case, surely, when Thomas Rowlandson produced the image that adorns the cover of this issue of PMC Notes. In this typically lively and deftly drawn work, which he made sometime around 1815, the famous satirist wryly lampoons a clutch of visitors to the Royal Academy’s annual exhibition at Somerset House. The Academy’s exhibition, packed to the rafters with paintings, sculptures, and drawings, and thronged with people, was the central event of the British art world in his period, and was lauded by its admirers as a symbol of Britain’s artistic and cultural sophistication. Rowlandson takes a very different, far more mischievous view of the exhibition, and, more particularly, of its visitors, whom he transforms into a comic assembly: we see, amongst others, a grotesquely corpulent gentleman, a red-faced cleric, stooping connoisseurs (their bottoms perfectly in sync), an overdressed matron and two beautiful young women, the latter of whom smile, pink-cheeked, as they look at a wall of paintings adorned with a female nude. It is easy to imagine that Rowlandson had a smile on his face as he drew: look, for instance, at the way he uses these visitors’ mouths and jaws to suggest their babbling conversation and ignorant gawping—this is an image that revels in lolling and puckered lips, slack and darting tongues, and a parade of lurching and retreating chins.
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Detail of Thomas Rowlandson, Viewing at the Royal Academy, ca. 1815, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection
Rowlandson’s cheerful satire, which is owned by the Yale Center for British Art, is one of the many works that will feature in The Great Spectacle: 250 Years of the Summer Exhibition, which opens at the Royal Academy in June. The show, which I have had the pleasure of co-curating with my colleague Sarah Turner, and on which we have worked closely with other colleagues here at the PMC and at the RA—most especially, Jessica Feather, Per Rumberg and Anna Testar—is designed to offer a stimulating, scholarly, and, we hope, surprising introduction to the history of the Royal Academy’s remarkably long-lasting display, which has taken place every year since 1769. Timed to coincide with this year’s Summer Exhibition, and to help celebrate the Academy’s 250th anniversary, The Great Spectacle will include over eighty paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from the first such exhibition right through to the present day, together with a rich variety of contextual materials, including catalogues, tickets, illustrated guides, photographs, and exhibition posters. All have been chosen to tell a particular story about the summer exhibition, and include works by such artists as Joshua Reynolds, Angelica Kauffmann, Joseph Wright of Derby, Thomas Gainsborough, Thomas Lawrence, David Wilkie, John Constable, J. M. W. Turner, John Everett Millais, Sir Frederic Leighton, John Singer Sargent, Laura Knight, Peter Blake, Sandra Blow, Tracey Emin, Zaha Hadid, Sir Michael Craig-Martin, David Hockney and Wolfgang Tillmans, amongst many others. We think this is a pretty interesting line-up, as I hope will all those who decide to make the journey to The Great Spectacle this summer. Please come. As far as I know, there will be no satirists lurking in the corners of our exhibition rooms with pens or brushes in hand; and in any case, I am sure that even Rowlandson would find it difficult to picture the readers of PMC Notes as either ungraceful or unsophisticated.
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The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018 Final text still to come.
Published by the Paul Mellon Centre, this online and open-access publication brings together stories, artwork, and data spanning 250 years of the Summer Exhibition’s history. chronicle250.com Launches 30 May, 2018
Detail of Conrad Shawcross’s The Dappled Light of the Sun (2015) installed in the courtyard of Burlington House alongside Alfred Drury’s statue Sir Joshua Reynolds (1931) on the occasion of the 247th Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, 2015. Image courtesy of Getty Images | Photo: Peter Macdiarmid. 10
de Rijke Marsh Morgan Architects (dRMM), Hastings Pier Regeneration, 2016. Courtesy: dRMM, photographer: Francesco Montaguti
The conference in session. Image courtesy Architectural Association Photo Library.
January 2018— No. 8
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Crossing the Channel Tate Britain curator Caroline Corbeau-Parsons reports on the conference Crossing the Channel: French Refugee Artists in London (1870-1904). On 25–26 January, the PMC and Tate Britain jointly organised a conference to expand on the themes of the exhibition Impressionists in London: French Artists in Exile (1870–1904). The proceedings opened at Tate Britain with a highly stimulating keynote by MaryAnne Stevens, Impressionists–Impressionism–London, which investigated London’s role in the development of Impressionism and as a commercial platform for that group of artists. The Tate show primarily focuses on Anglo-French networks in London at the time of the Franco-Prussian War and Paris Commune, and the contribution of French refugee artists to representations of London. As well as paintings, it includes photography, works on paper, and a significant amount of sculptures. The PMC conference on 26 January was an opportunity to go further and consider the impact of refugee artists on other media and practices. The breadth of topics covered was particularly striking, and the speakers represented diverse backgrounds, coming from France, the UK, and the USA, with specialisms in paintings, prints, sculpture, and ceramics. This interdisciplinary approach gave rise to fresh perspectives, for instance, on the picturesque and antipicturesque in the work of Pissarro and Sisley. The conference was a platform for new research on major figures such as Dalou and Tissot, but ground-breaking papers were also delivered on little-known but central figures in Anglo-French artistic networks. These included the painter and ceramic artist Jean-Charles Cazin, the porcelain artist Mark-LouisEmanuel Solon (who introduced pâte-sur-pâte in England), the collector Kaye Knowles, and the printmaker Auguste Delâtre. These discussions opened up exciting new lines of enquiry for nineteenth-century studies. In their role as chairs, MaryAnne Stevens, Rebecca Wallis, Stephen Bann, and Andrew Stephenson expertly contextualised these papers to offer a much-enriched picture of artistic practices, the art market, and collecting in the late nineteenth century. The conference was brought to a close with thought-provoking remarks by Anna Gruetzner Robins, who put forward the idea that the group of artists coming from the Petite Ecole were the YBAs of the nineteenth century, and posited that Alphonse Legros’ Tinker may have been the starting point of naturalism in Britain. The atmosphere was particularly congenial, and delegates commented on how much they learnt from other disciplines on the day.
Detail of James Tissot, The Ball on the Shipboard, c. 1874. Tate Britain, London. Digital image courtesy of Tate.
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Es Devlin and Jeremy Deller during Devlin’s Voice Space event, part of The Look of Music series. Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
The Look of Music 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. 14 14
What does music look like? What are the interrelations between the sounds of rock and pop music and the aesthetics and images they inspire? These were the provocatively and purposely broad questions that the artist Jeremy Deller posed to himself and five collaborators— the writer Jon Savage, the set and stage designer Es Devlin, the designers Scott King and Mark Farrow, and the musician Neil Tennant (one half of the Pet Shop Boys). In many ways, this series of events took up where last year’s Mellon Lectures—given by Professor Tom Crow on the relationship between art, music, and style in 1950s and ’60s London—left off. Continuing with the idea that popular music has had an indelible effect in producing aesthetic styles and sensibilities, Deller opened the series with a lecture at the Barbican Centre on 10 January exploring the imagery of rock and pop music against the background of industrial decline in 1970s and ’80s Britain, referencing work of his own such as the performance Acid Brass (1997). A week later, in the atmospheric surroundings of the Royal Academy’s Life Room, Jon Savage and Deller discussed the image of the male rock and pop star, from the sculpted body of Iggy Pop to the plastic dolls produced for fans of One Direction. The process of creating spectacular environments for musical performance was the key theme of Deller’s conversation with Es Devlin, designer of numerous opera and theatre productions, Devlin is becoming one of the most in-demand designers for major arena tours and performances, having worked with internationally renowned music stars such as Adele, Kanye
West and Beyoncé. Projected images of her work on an 8 by 5 metre wall at 180, The Strand, helped recreate the absorbing atmospheres of these performances. Discussing how her designs often use animated images of these music stars’ bodies, Deller and Devlin discussed how the historic conventions of portraiture are manipulated by Devlin to create an interactive experience for the audience. The series ended with a conversation between Scott King, Mark Farrow, and Neil Tennant focusing on the creation and communication of a “look” through record design. Farrow has designed nearly all of the Pet Shop Boys album and singles covers, creating what is now an iconic series of images of the British electronic music duo. In different ways, all these talks highlighted the way in which historical art is often remixed and reused by musicians and designers to create a “look” which feels new and contemporary yet is often deeply imbricated with the past.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Collaborative Curating: Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’
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Our Curatorial Research Grants have allowed many exhibitions to come to fruition. To celebrate exhibitions supported by the Centre, we have invited four recipients of these grants to speak during our Summer series of Fellows Lunches. One of the speakers, Trish Scott, a Research Curator at Turner Contemporary, writes below about the collaborative curatorial process behind the exhibition Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’.
Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ installed at Turner Contemporary, photography Thierry Ball.
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In April 2015, with the support of a Paul Mellon Grant, I joined Turner Contemporary as Research Curator to develop a pioneering new approach to a curatorial project. The result is the exhibition Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’, a visual response to T. S. Eliot’s poem The Waste Land, which was partly written in Margate in 1921. The show, originally initiated by Professor Mike Tooby, has been developed in collaboration with a group of local residents, aged between twenty and eighty, who have all brought their differing thoughts and life experiences to bear on this seminal literary work. This Research Group has undertaken everything from thematic research to design and interpretation, to create an exhibition of 100 artworks and artefacts by over 60 artists, including Fiona Banner, Leonora Carrington, Cecil Collins, Tacita Dean, Edward Hopper, Winifred Knights, Henry Moore, Paul Nash, Paula Rego, and J. M. W. Turner. Just as the poem contains many voices and jumps between different moments in time, so too, very deliberately, does the exhibition. Developing the exhibition has involved thinking about curating experientially. Rather than acting as sole decision maker, I have helped a diverse group of people to develop structures and processes for making decisions themselves, engaging with and re-thinking procedures usually invisible and off-bounds to audiences. The input of people with different backgrounds and interests throughout the research process has led to some rich juxtapositions, which are unlikely to have come about had the show been curated in a more traditional way. For example, one Research Group member (having previously worked as a translator for a Scientific Committee exploring the history of quantum physics) proposed an archival image of sub-atomic particle tracks. This now sits in the exhibition alongside Man Ray’s 1921 photograph Dust Breeding; both reflect on the treatment of time in The Waste Land, and on what constitutes nothingness in relation to the poem’s famous words “I can connect/ Nothing with nothing.” The exhibition is also distinctive in its layout and use of verbatim interpretation. Snippets of conversations, accessed via listening points throughout the exhibition, reflect the various viewpoints of Research Group members and present artworks as debatable propositions rather than rarified choices. Through this collaboration, Research Group members have developed new skills and competencies, which are already yielding fresh projects, such as a public series of nearly forty events occurring across Margate in partnership with eighteen local venues. For me, the exhibition has been an opportunity to examine subjectivity in the curatorial process and to develop alternative methods for decision making, in ways that address concerns around entitlement and validation in cultural programming.
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Trish Scott will speak about this exhibition at the Paul Mellon Centre on 22 May as part of the Fellows Lunch: Curator series. For more information, please see our Events Calendar on page 30.
Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’ installed at Turner Contemporary, photography Thierry Ball.
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The Peter and Renate Nahum Donation PMC Librarian Emma Floyd introduces a valuable recent addition to the Centre’s Library collection.
In December 2012, the Centre’s Library received its largest ever gift: the Peter and Renate Nahum donation of over 2,000 books, exhibition catalogues, and journals. The scope of this donation is unprecedented in its subject range and depth, as well as in the number of noteworthy items that it contains. The incredibly generous donors, Peter and Renate Nahum, ran “Peter Nahum At The Leicester Galleries” in St James’s for twenty-five years and continue to work as art advisers. Before becoming a dealer, Peter Nahum was a senior director of Sotheby’s and head of the Victorian and Modern British departments. He is also an author and was a regular contributor to the Antiques Roadshow on BBC TV for twentytwo years. The donation comprises materials on nineteenth- and twentieth-century British art and artists. The depth of coverage on
each artist is notable and has added greatly to the Library’s holdings. The donation was timely and arrived just as the Library’s collecting policy was expanding to include post-war and contemporary art. Its great strengths lie in areas such as Victorian painting and twentieth-century sculpture, where the Library’s holdings were already good. But it also makes major contributions to smaller areas of the collection, such as British Surrealism, the art of the Second World War, and post-war British artists’ exhibition catalogues. For example, it has more than doubled our holdings on the influential art historian and critic Herbert Read (1893–1968) and has added an entire set of books on the artists Maxwell Armfield (1881–1972) and Conroy Maddox (1912–2005). There are treasures such as the very rare This Man: A Series of Wood-engravings (1939) by Elizabeth Rivers (1903–1964),
Cover designs from issues of the journal Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, which were published in the early 1960s. Digital images courtesy Harriet Fisher.
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as well as a number of books by Claude Flight (1881–1955) such as Lino-cuts: A Hand-book of Linoleum-cut Colour Printing (1927), The Art and Craft of Lino Cutting and Printing (1934), and the rare Christmas and Other Feasts and Festivals (1936). There are also copies of scarce exhibition catalogues, such as an original edition of This is Tomorrow, the catalogue of the seminal Whitechapel Art Gallery exhibition held in 1956. There is great depth to the donation: for example, an original copy of Unit One: The Modern Movement in English Painting, Sculpture, and Architecture by Herbert Read (1934) is accompanied by catalogues of later commemorative exhibitions: Unit 1: Portsmouth Festival Exhibition 1978 (1978) and Unit One: Spirit of the 30’s: May–June 1984 (1984). The donation also includes extensive runs of significant journals such as The Studio: An Illustrated Magazine of Fine and Applied Art (1890s–1960s), Horizon: A Review of Literature and Art (1940s) and The Year’s Art (1890s–1940s). Of particular note are a set of volumes of The Pageant, a short-lived journal from the 1890s; issues 1–7 of Motif: A Journal of the Visual Arts, from the early 1960s; and two issues of AXIS:
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Claude Flight, Royal Academy Banquet, 1936. Digital image courtesy Paul Mellon Centre Library.
A Quarterly Review of Contemporary “Abstract” Painting & Sculpture edited by Myfanwy Evans in the 1930s. The donation is consulted regularly by the Library’s readers and has proved itself a useful tool for teaching groups of students. Our own research projects at the PMC have also been supported by various published series in the donation relating to the Royal Academy, such as Royal Academy Pictures, Royal Academy Illustrated, Academy Notes, and Academy Sketches. A selection of these will be appearing in the Centre’s forthcoming Drawing Room Display. This donation has broadened and enriched the Centre’s Library holdings to an unprecedented degree and we are enormously grateful to Peter and Renate Nahum for their generosity. It has been catalogued and integrated into the Library collection and is available for consultation in the Centre’s Public Study Room. For more information about this donation, please contact: collections@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.
Claude Flight, Café Chantant, 1936. Digital image courtesy Paul Mellon Centre Library.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Supporting the Spectacle: The Summer Exhibition and its Spin-Offs Bryony Botwright-Rance introduces the new Drawing Room Display, which features published material relating to the history of the Summer Exhibition. To coincide with the forthcoming Royal Academy show, The Great Spectacle: 250 years of the Summer Exhibition, the PMC’s ninth Drawing Room Display will investigate the varied kinds of publication that have been prompted by the Summer Exhibition over its long history. As well as showcasing the Academy’s own publications – in particular, its Summer Exhibition catalogues and the Royal Academy Illustrated – the display will focus on the especially rich array of exhibition-related guides, pamphlets and illustrated supplements that were issued by other publishers in the latter part of the nineteenth century. The display will draw upon the PMC’s substantial collection of catalogues, journals and ephemera, and is designed to provide a brief introduction to this little-investigated yet fascinating subject.
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The first part of the display will focus on the Royal Academy’s in-house publications. The Academy has published a catalogue to accompany its Summer Exhibition every year since the first display in 1769. Ever since 1780, this catalogue has provided its readers with a list of works that is organised in relation to the order in which these works are distributed across the exhibition – a format that is still used today. These catalogues have long been used by exhibition goers to chart their journey around the exhibition space, to mark those works which they consider to be of most important or interesting, and to keep as a souvenir of the exhibition. Meanwhile, the Royal Academy Illustrated, which pictures a selection of the pieces on display, and which is published by the Academy itself, has long served as a popular supplement to the catalogue. The Academy’s decision to publish an illustrated supplement to the Summer Exhibition catalogue can best be understood as a response to the dramatic emergence of unofficial illustrated guides to the exhibition in the Victorian period, which will provide the focus for the second part of our display. Interest in the Royal Academy and its Summer Exhibition burgeoned in the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Huge numbers of visitors travelled to Burlington House to see the annual show, and newspaper reviews pored over the exhibition’s contents in great detail. A dramatic boom in publications on the Summer Exhibition accompanied this growth of interest in the event. New art periodicals such as the Art Journal and The Magazine of Art offered their own perspectives on the exhibition and, in the case of the latter, produced a supplementary illustrated guide. John Ruskin self-published extended and often controversial pamphlet commentaries upon the exhibition, whilst Henry Blackburn, a leading commercial publisher, offered readers less partial textual tours of the summer display and later an illustrated guide. In the Drawing Room Display, Ruskin and Blackburn’s publications will take their place amongst other materials geared to the Victorian visitors who flocked to the Academy’s annual event in such great numbers. The display can be viewed for free at the Centre from 10.00am to 5.00pm, Monday–Friday, between 28 May and 21 September 2018.
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New Books
The Royal Academy of Arts History and Collections
Summer 2018
Edited by Robin Simon with MaryAnne Stevens
Animated by an unprecedented study of its collections, this book tells the story of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, and illuminates the history of art in Britain over the last two and a half centuries. Thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings and engravings, as well as silver, furniture, medals and historic photographs, make up this monumental collection, featured here in stunning illustrations, and including an array of little-studied works of art and other objects of the highest quality. The works of art complement an archive of 600,000 documents and the first library in Britain dedicated to the fine arts. This fresh history reveals the central role of the Royal Academy in British national life, especially during the 19th century. It also explores periods of turmoil in the 20th century, when the Academy sought either to defy or to come to terms with modernism, challenging linear histories and frequently held notions of progress and innovation.
Publication date: May 2018 Dimensions: 290 x 248mm Pages: 676 Illustrations: 550
Edited by
ROBIN SIMON
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THE
A History of the Collections
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS
THE PAUL MELLON CENTRE FOR STUDIES IN BRITISH ART
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THE
ROYAL ACADEMY OF ARTS History and Collections
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The Pre-Raphaelites and Science
John Holmes
This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture and architecture. In their manifesto, The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to creating a new kind of art modelled on science, in which precise observation could lead to new discoveries about nature and humanity. In Oxford and London, Victorian scientists and Pre-Raphaelite artists worked together to design and decorate new natural history museums as temples to God’s creation. At the same time, new journals like Nature and the Fortnightly Review combined natural science with Pre-Raphaelite art theory and poetry to find meaning and coherence within a world view turned upside down by Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Publication date: June 2018 Dimensions: 256 x 192mm Pages: 412 Illustrations: 200
John Holmes
The PRE-RAPHAELITES and SCIENCE
THE PRE-RAPHAELITES AND SCIENCE
John Holmes
The PRE-RAPHAELITES and SCIENCE This revelatory book traces how the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and their close associates put scientific principles into practice across their painting, poetry, sculpture and architecture. In their manifesto, The Germ, the Pre-Raphaelites committed themselves to creating a new kind of art modelled on science, in which precise observation could lead to new discoveries about nature and humanity. In Oxford and London, Victorian scientists and Pre-Raphaelite artists worked together to design and decorate new natural history museums as temples to God’s creation. At the same time, new journals like Nature and the Fortnightly Review combined natural science with Pre-Raphaelite art theory and poetry to find meaning and coherence within a world view turned upside down by Darwin’s theory of evolution. Offering reinterpretations of well-known works by John Everett Millais, William Holman Hunt, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown and William Morris, this major revaluation of the popular Victorian movement also considers less-familiar artists who were no less central to the Pre-Raphaelite project. These include William Michael Rossetti, Walter Deverell, James Collinson, John and Rosa Brett, John Lucas Tupper and the O’Shea brothers, along with the architects Benjamin Woodward and Alfred Waterhouse.
May 2018 — No. 9 Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
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Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales Jill Francis
The extravagant gardens of the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury British aristocracy are well-documented and celebrated, but the more modest gardens of the rural county gentry have rarely been examined. Jill Francis presents new, never-before published material as well as fresh interpretations of previously examined sources to reveal gardening as a practical activity in which a broad spectrum of society was engaged – from the labourers who dug, manured and weeded, to the gentleman owners who sought to create gardens that both exemplified their personal tastes and displayed their wealth and status. Enhanced by beautiful and compelling illustrations, this book contributes to a broader understanding of early modern society and its culture by situating the activity of gardening within the wider social and cultural concerns of the age, reflecting the anxieties, hopes and aspirations of people at the time.
Publication date: June 2018 Dimensions: 290 x 248mm Pages: 308 Illustrations: 160
LISHED FOR THE PAUL MELLON CENTRE STUDIES IN BRITISH ART
r based on an illustration of gardeners ork from Thomas Hyll’s The Gardeners nth, 1651 (see fig. 61).
78-0-300-23208-0
300 232080
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in early modern England and wales
is an independent archer and garden historian. also teaches early modern history e University of Birmingham and University of Worcester.
FRAN CI S
Gardens and Gardening
extravagant gardens of the sixteenthseventeenth-century British aristocracy are -documented and celebrated, but the more est gardens of the rural county gentry e rarely been examined. Focusing on the od 1560 to 1660, Jill Francis presents new, er-before published material as well as h interpretations of previously examined ces to reveal gardening as a practical ity in which a broad spectrum of society engaged – from the labourers who dug, ured and weeded, to the gentleman ers who sought to create gardens that h exemplified their personal tastes displayed their wealth and status. anced by beautiful and compelling rations, this book contributes to a der understanding of early modern society its culture by situating the activity of ening within the wider social and cultural cerns of the age, reflecting the anxieties, es and aspirations of people at the time.
Jill Francis
Gardens and Gardening in early modern England and wales
Jill Francis
PMC Publications at CAA PMC Editor Baillie Card reports on a successful trip to the College Art Association Conference in Los Angeles. From 21 to 24 February, the annual conference of the College Art Association – the largest gathering of art historians and arts professionals in North America – was held in Los Angeles. Four staff members of the Paul Mellon Centre attended and immensely enjoyed participating in the panel sessions and learning more about research activities and programmes at the city’s arts institutions. Jessica Feather, Allen Fellow at the PMC, gave a paper in the session “The Exhibition as Critical Practice” that presented the Centre’s major in-house research project and forthcoming publication on the history of the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Members of the British Art Studies editorial team (Sarah Victoria Turner, Tom Scutt, and Baillie Card) also chaired a panel on the use of 3D models in art-historical research, titled “Digital Surrogates”. It saw three different early career researchers—Katrina Grant, Stephanie Hagan, and Matthew Lincoln—give fascinating papers on how the use of digital reconstructions shifts the emphasis from output to process, highlights gaps and assumptions in scholarly reasoning, and encourages collaboration. Alongside the conference, the Centre’s team had the opportunity to connect with colleagues at The Huntington and at the Getty Research Institute. Among its many other activities, the Getty is a leader in the expansion and exploration of digital open access publishing in the arts—a value shared by the Centre. The joint Yale Center for British Art and Paul Mellon Centre reception held during the conference provided another welcome opportunity to see friends and collaborators based at other institutions.
The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, 2017. Photo courtesy Ian D. Keating, CC BY 2.0.
May 2018 — No. 9
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Events
Summer Calendar All events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated.
16 May, 18.00-20.00
25 May, 12.30-14.00
Research Seminar
Research Lunch
2 May, 18.00-20.00
The Many Lives of Landseer’s
Perceiving Prints in 18th Century
Research Seminar
Monarch
Print Rooms: Commerce, Play
Chronicling the Summer
Christopher Baker
and Display
May 2018
Exhibition: The Early Years
Louise Voll Box
Esther Chadwick, Amy Concannon
18 May, 12.30-14.00
and Mark Hallett
Research Lunch
29 May, 12.30-14.00
Art History from Below:
Fellows Lunch - Curator Series
11 May, 12.30-14.00
The Demotic Portraits of a
Radical Visions: The Early
Research Lunch
journeyman Facemaker
History of Four Corners and
AS in DS: The World of Alison
David Hansen
Camerawork 1972-1987
Smithson Giulia Smith
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Carla Mitchell 22 May, 12.30-14.00 Fellows Lunch - Curator Series
31 May
15 May, 12.30-14.00
Collaborative Curating:
Event for London History Day,
Fellows Lunch - Curator Series
Journeys with ‘The Waste Land’
12.30-14.00
No Man’s Land: Women’s
Trish Scott
The Suffering Soldier:
Photography and the First World
Depictions of Courage in
War
Eighteenth-Century British Art
Pippa Oldfield
Mark Hallett
Detail from Edwin Landseer, Monarch of the Glen, 1851, Purchased by the National Galleries of Scotland as a part gift from Diageo Scotland Ltd, with contributions from the Heritage Lottery Fund, Dunard Fund, the Art Fund, the William Jacob Bequest, the Tam O’ Shanter Trust, the Turtleton Trust, and the K. T. Wiedemann Foundation, Inc. and through public appeal 2017.
Detail from John Dempsey, Town Crier, Bridlington, watercolour. Presented by Mr. C.E. Docker, 1956, Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery, AG556. David Hansen talks about Dempsey’s demotic portraits on 18 May.
June 2018 5 June, 12.30-14.00 Fellows Lunch - Curator Series Basic Instincts Jacqueline Riding 8 June, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch Travellers and Translators: The Returning Indian Turban as East India Company Uniform, c.17601810 Beth Richards 13 June, 18.00-20.00 Research Seminar Chronicling the Contemporary Summer Exhibition Mark Hallett and Sarah Victoria Turner in conversation with Christopher Le Brun, President of the Royal Academy 20 June, 18.00-20.30 Book Night A celebration of recent PMC publications with talks by authors Jill Frances, John Holmes, Martin Postle and MaryAnne Stevens. 22 June, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch The Lost Collection: Charles I and Whitehall Palace, A Digital Initiative Niko Munz 4-7 July Bedford Square Festival 19-20 July Conference Frenemies: Friendship, Enmity and Rivalry in British Art, 17692018 Royal Academy Lecture Theatre 29
The Artist and the Garden Autumn Public Lecture Course
Detail of John S. Muller, A General Prospect of Vaux Hall Gardens, Shewing at one View the disposition of the whole Gardens, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Every Thursday evening from 27 September to 25 October. The course will be led by Martin Postle and will feature weekly guest speakers. Booking will open online on 20 August at 10am. 32
Bedford Square Festival: Share the Square Ella Fleming, Events Manager and member of Bedford Square Festival committee, introduces the theme for this year’s Festival. After the success of last year’s inaugural Bedford Square Festival, which welcomed over 300 visitors, we are planning the next one for Wednesday 4 – Saturday 7 July. The theme for Bedford Square Festival 2018 is ‘Share the Square’, focussing on collaborative events across the partner institutions. The Festival once again is partnering with Shakespeare in the Squares, who will be putting on ‘As You Like It’ in Bedford Square Garden on 5th July. The Bedford Square Festival is a collaboration between five of the cultural institutions that reside in the Square: the Architectural Association, the New College of the Humanities, the Paul Mellon Centre, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, and Yale University Press. It aims to build a sense of community among those who visit, work, and live in and around Bedford Square. It also seeks to open up the square’s grand Georgian buildings to the public and to celebrate the cultural activities in which we engage—art, architecture, education, and publishing. As was the case last year, all of our events will be free; and rather than charging admission, we will encourage people to make donations to local charity CentrePoint. Full programme and tickets will be released online on 8 May at: www.bedfordsquarefestival.co.uk
May 2018 — No. 9
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The Art of Protest:
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Suffrage and the Summer Exhibition At the Bedford Square Festival, Sarah Turner will speak about her research on Mary Wood, the suffragettes, and the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy. Here she introduces their fascinating connections.
On the morning of 4 May 1914, the fashionable crowd at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition was sent “running from one room to the other and pushing through the doorways of Burlington House, forgetting pictures and catalogues, and regardless of torn clothes”, according to the report in the Daily Graphic. A ruckus in Gallery III was the cause of this commotion, instigated by an attack on John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Henry James. A suffragette named Mary Wood had entered the Summer Exhibition on the opening day, much like other members of the public, except that hidden within the folds of her gown was a meat cleaver, which she used to slash the canvas, cutting across James’s face. After Wood’s assault on Sargent’s painting, the Summer Exhibition became the focus of two further attacks by suffragettes. Following the media storm created by Mary Richardson’s attack on Velázquez’s Rokeby Venus at the National Gallery in March of the same year, the display provided a high-profile scene of protest for the suffragettes’ cause, which had only had small-scale interaction with the Academy previously, most notably in
the form of a “Votes for Women” poster stuck on top of Solomon J. Solomon’s portrait of the Prime Minister, Herbert Henry Asquith. The fact that the Summer Exhibition was a selling show also allowed Wood to make an argument about the difference in commercial value between work made by men and women. This was an iconoclastic protest that struck at the heart of the cultural establishment, raising such issues as the visibility and value of women artists as a result. In a talk at the forthcoming Bedford Square Festival, the PMC’s Deputy Director for Research, Sarah Victoria Turner, will discuss her recent research on Mary Wood, the suffragettes, and the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, as well as the broader context of the imagery and iconoclasm of the campaign for the vote for women in the early twentieth century. The talk will take place on Friday 6 July.
Detail of the portrait of Henry James O.M. by J.S. Sargent R.A. after being damaged by a suffragette, May 1914, unidentified photographer, ca. May 1914, © Royal Academy of Arts, London January 2016 — No. January 2018 No. January 2018 —— No. January 2018 — No. 858 8
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PMC Profile
Stephen O’Toole PMC Office Administrator Stephen O’Toole interviews himself.
Hello Stephen, you look familiar.
You fancy yourself a bit of a writer, don’t you?
What did you do before coming here?
Yes, if you’ve visited the Centre at any point in the last two years, chances are we’ll have met. In many ways, myself and my colleague Bryony are the public face of the PMC and it’s a part of my job I really enjoy—speaking to readers who use our Public Study Room or those regular attendees of our events.
It’s what I like to fill my time with outside of the office, yes.
I’m originally from Glasgow, where I worked for many years as the duty manager of an arts centre. I have also worked as a cheesemonger, projectionist, and support worker for adults in longterm psychiatric care.
That’s nice, I’m sure they enjoy chatting with you too—but I meant, you know, because you are me; because you’re interviewing yourself. Ah. I see. You were trying to be funny. Well—I thought it might be nice for our readers to see what my colleagues have to put up with.
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And inside, sometimes: who could forget your PMC Christmas Carol? And all those pun-filled e-mails to the entire staff. I work very hard! What’s an average day like for you? Every day is different. One moment I might be helping to catalogue material for the Brian Sewell archive, the next I could be taking part in a dissertation workshop for students, and finish it off by assisting the Office Manager develop a health and safety policy for the building!
From your time at the Paul Mellon Centre, can you pick a highlight? I really enjoyed working with the Collections team on the Sewell archive. I combed through the hundreds of articles he wrote on subjects other than art. It was interesting to see which ones he returned to again and again: he generated a surprising amount of material on The Wind in the Willows and the pigeons in Trafalgar Square!
YCBA Exhibitions and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA
Exhibitions
Lectures and Talks
6 April – 19 August
2 May, 17.30
11 July, 17.30
Art in Focus: John Goto’s “High
Staged Reading
Opening Event | Panel Discussion
Summer”
The Mysterious Mother
Salt and Silver: Early
An annual initiative of the
A staged reading of Horace
Center’s Student Guide program,
Walpole’s play The Mysterious
Photography, 1840–1860 Mark Osterman, Process
the Art in Focus exhibition series
Mother (1768). Directed by Misty
Historian at the George Eastman
provides Yale undergraduates
G. Anderson, Lindsay Young
Museum, Rochester, NY; Hope
with curatorial and research
Professor of English, University of
Kingsley, Curator of Education
experience. This exhibition
Tennessee.
and Collections, Wilson Centre for Photography; and Chitra
examines a portfolio of prints, High Summer (2000–2001), by the
13 June, 17.30
Ramalingam, Assistant Curator
photographer John Goto (born
International Festival of Arts & Ideas
of Photography, Yale Center for
1949) and explores the historical
Germany and the European Union
British Art
sites that are referenced in his
David Cameron, Professor of
work.
Political Science and Director of
21 July, 14.00
the Yale Program in the European
Leaning into the Wind – Andy
Union Studies. Tennessee.
Goldsworthy (2017)
28 June – 9 September
Directed by Thomas
Salt and Silver: Early Photography, 1840–1860
16 June, 10 – 14.30
Riedelsheimer (rated PG; 93
The Center will showcase a
Children’s Film Festival
minutes)
selection of salted paper prints, one of the earliest forms of
20 June, 17.30
photography and a British
International Festival of Arts & Ideas
invention. Featuring more than
The Act You’ve Known for all
one hundred seldom-displayed
These Years: Deconstructing
salt prints on loan from the
Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Wilson Centre for Photography
Club Band
in London, the exhibition
Scott Freiman, composer and
will provide visitors with an
producer
opportunity to see some of the earliest photographs in the world. The exhibition has been organized by the Yale Center for British Art in partnership with the Wilson Centre for Photography. To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programmes, visit britishart.yale.edu.
Detail of William Henry Fox Talbot, Nelson’s Column Under Construction, Trafalgar Square, April 1844, salted paper print from paper negative, courtesy of the Wilson Centre for Photography
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