O c tob er 2017 / No. 7 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 Archives and Library Assistant Frankie Drummond Charig Assistant Archivist and Records Manager Jenny Hill Cataloguer: Auction Catalogues Mary Peskett Smith Digital Manager Tom Scutt
Senior Research Fellow Hammad Nasar
Events Manager Ella Fleming
Research Fellow and Filmmaker Jonathan Law
Office Manager Suzannah Pearson
Advisory Council
Education Programme Manager Nermin Abdulla Picture Researcher Maisoon Rehani Finance Officer Barbara Ruddick Finance Officer Linda Constantine Editor Emily Lees Editor Baillie Card Fellowships, Grants, and Communications Officer Harriet Fisher Director’s Assistant & Office Administrator Bryony Botwright-Rance HR Manager Barbara Waugh
Iwona Blazwick, Whitechapel Gallery Alixe Bovey, Courtauld Institute of Art Christopher Breward, University of Edinburgh Anthony Geraghty, University of York Richard Marks, Art Historian and Curator 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
Receptionist Stephen O’Toole
Design
Buildings Officer George Szwejkowski
Baillie Card and Harriet Fisher Template by Cultureshock Media
PMC Fellow Hana Leaper
Contact us
Brian Allen Fellow Jessica Feather
B
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 October 2017 – No.7
2 Director’s Note 5 Feature: The Tiger in the Smoke 8 New Books 12 British Art Studies 14 Grants and Fellowships 20 Drawing Room Display 22 Photographic Archives 24 Library 26 Institutional and Art Historical Archives 30 Research Events 34 British Drawings Group 36 Bedford Square Festival 38 PMC Events 40 PMC Profile 41 YCBA Events
Front cover: Henry Robert Morland, Woman Reading by a Paper-Bell Shade, 1766, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Director’s Note The PMC will be buzzing with conversation this autumn. We have a packed programme of events, including a raft of conferences and workshops and a new Public Lecture Course on the entangled artistic histories of Britain and South Asia. Our research seminar series features talks on the artists Thomas Girtin and Aubrey Williams, and includes a virtual tour—broadcast live from New Haven—of an exhibition of studio ceramics at the Yale Center for British Art. Amongst many other such events, our Fellows’ Lunches showcase the fascinating research carried out with the PMC’s support, which in this instance ranges from new work on William Morris’s Red House to the role of the still life in modern British art. So, lots of animated discussions ahead! We recognise, however, that art-historical scholarship is not only kept alive by conversation; it is just as dependent on quietness, and on the silent activities of reading and looking. Accordingly, I’m delighted to use this Director’s Note to showcase the richness and variety of the books we are publishing this autumn, the details of which are provided in the following pages. Our autumn list, which has been supervised to publication by the PMC’s Emily Lees and by our colleagues at Yale University Press, includes a wonderful new study
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of the material world of the home in early modern England; a revelatory account of the eighteenth-century conversation piece; and a stunning exploration of British visual culture following the Second World War. We are also proud to have supported the publication of the latest Survey of London volumes on South-East Marylebone, which maintain the exemplary scholarship that has marked this great architectural series. All these books, together with the new forms of online publication that are also such an important part of our activities, should provide hours of quiet intellectual pleasure and visual reward to readers for years to come. In turn, of course—and thanks in part to events such as our new Book Night, in which readers and authors will be able to exchange their ideas in person—these publications will themselves prompt renewed discussion and debate. The PMC is as committed as ever to encouraging this virtuous circle of reading, looking, and talking, and thereby playing its part in maintaining the liveliness and excitement of scholarship on British art. Mark Hallett Director of Studies
Detail from Arthur Devis, Sir John Shaw and His Family in the Park at Eltham Lodge, Kent, 1761, Art Institute of Chicago. As found in Kate Retford’s book The Conversation Piece.
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Publications
COLOUR AND FOG Editor Emily Lees interviews Lynda Nead about her forthcoming book on October 2017 — No. 7 art and culture in post-war Britain.
Tell us a little bit about your new book, The Tiger in the Smoke. It’s a study of the art and culture of postwar Britain, from the end of the Second World War to around 1960. It looks at a wide range of cultural forms including film, painting, photography, and journalism. Bringing all of these media together, it aims to define and examine the specific feel or atmosphere of the culture of this period, and the key debates that influenced it and which it expresses. What was it that first got you interested in this period? Although I have done a lot of work on Victorian Britain, my last major study was on the relationships between painting, photography, and film around 1900, in the first years of cinema. So gradually I have been moving into the history of art and visual media in the twentieth century! There are also some intriguing connections between the Victorian period and post-war Britain that I really wanted to explore in The Tiger in the Smoke. What do you feel is new about your perspective? I have always been interested in the history of visual media more generally, rather than looking at issues relating to single forms such as painting or sculpture. By looking across film, advertising, photography, and art it is possible to see how particular
Opposite: Detail from No. 15 bus to Kew Green in fog with man carring a flare, December 1952. © Monty Fresco/Stringer/Getty Images
themes are repeated or changed and can become what Raymond Williams has referred to as a “structure of feeling”. There have been some wonderful general and cultural histories of post-war Britain, but these do not pay much attention to art and culture. The Tiger in the Smoke is a new study of the visual arts in this period. I think it captures a very distinctive feel and look to the arts at this time. Colour played a vital role in the design of your book. Why was that? There is a dialogue in the book between black and white (or, more accurately, greyscale) and colour. Colour was drawn into all the key debates within the period concerning the social and cultural identity of the nation and what it meant to reconstruct and modernise after the Second World War. Whereas greyscale was atmospheric and could be seen as the subtler chromatic scale, colour was seen as modern and progressive but also dangerous and seductive. Colour is always more than simply colour in this period, and the book examines how race and post-war migration are drawn into debates about the meaning of colour in post-war Britain. These debates concerning the meanings of colour became one of the most important aspects of the book, which is why it was so important to have a lot of colour illustrations, so that it is clear what was at stake in, for example, the British Colour Council colour charts, or in clothing styles and advertising.
Detail from Cecil Beaton, ‘The Western Campanile of St Paul’s Cathedral Seen Through a Victorian Shop Front’, as reproduced in J.M. Richards, The Bombed Buildings of Britain, 2nd edn (London: Architectural Press, 1947), p.2.
Bert Hardy and Picture Post feature prominently - do you feel they have been unfairly neglected in dicsussion of postwar British culture? Picture Post is the most amazing publication. A weekly illustrated news magazine, it was published from 1938 to 1957. It drew on the graphic styles of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s and introduced a new style of photojournalism to Britain. It really came into its own during the war years and in the immediate post-war period when its photographers captured the distinctive qualities of British society and the look of everyday life. A number of great photographers worked for the magazine but, for me, Bert Hardy was the greatest. He was a fascinating character who came from a working-class London family and worked his way up through the photographic industry. I have drawn on his photography extensively in the book and my next project is a more detailed study of his life and work. Although there has been some work on
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Picture Post and Bert Hardy, they are mostly picture books and there has been surprisingly little serious examination of the journal, its photography, and their role in defining the look of post-war Britain. How does the Festival of Britain fit into your story? The Festival of Britain is probably the most well-known aspect of post-war British culture and there have been some very good studies of it. I didn’t want to repeat this work but equally it can’t be ignored, and so I have woven the Festival of Britain and the Festival Pleasure Gardens at Battersea into my story of colour and atmosphere in the post-war nation. I have looked at the relationship between the two main London Festival sites (the South Bank and Battersea) and at how they influenced national and local politics. Using local archives, I believe I have added some new perspectives to the material on the 1951 Festival projects.
Left to right: Barbara Jones, ‘Black Eyes & Lemonade’: A Festival of Britain Exhibition of British Popular and Traditional Art (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1951), cover design; Ernest Dyche, Woman Seated by a Table, undated, Dyche Photographic Studio Collection, Birmingham Archives and Heritage Photographic Collections, Photograph © Peter Thomas; ‘Here’s to a Holiday of Long Lasting Enjoyment’, advertisement for Rowntree’s Fruit Gums, Picture Post, 4 August 1951, p.9.
Film is a recurring subject in your book. What was so distinctive about British film at this time? British film in the post-war period is outstanding, and immersing myself in this film culture has been one of the real pleasures of this research. Whilst blackand-white film has the most subtle grainy qualities, the impact of Technicolor and other colour technologies also introduced incredibly distinctive images. The blackand-white films seem to draw the viewer into atmospheric contrast and depth, whereas colour “pops” out at you, which is to do with the specific technical qualities of the film and cameras, as well as the photography, design, and direction. Is there one film in particular that everyone interested in this period simply must see? I have become such a fan of post-war British film that it is really hard to choose only one out of the many wonderful films made in this period. Of course, Ealing Studios were responsible for a number of these, and one of my favourites is It Always Rains on Sunday, a black-and-white film directed by Robert Hamer in 1947. It is set in the East End of London and traces the impact of an escaped convict on one woman (played by the fabulous Googie Withers) and her family (no plot spoilers here!). It is a fascinating dramatization of home, family, marriage, and desire in postwar Britain, and absolutely captures the visual and atmospheric qualities that I was focusing on in my book.
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Detail from John Bratby, Still Life with Chip Frier, 1954. Photo © Tate, London 2016.
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New Books
Autumn/ Winter 2017
The Tiger in the Smoke: Art and Culture in Post-War Britain Lynda Nead
Taking an interdisciplinary approach that looks at film, television and advertisements as well as more traditional media like painting, The Tiger in the Smoke provides an unprecedented analysis of the art and culture of post-war Britain. With fascinating insights into how the Great Fogs of the 1950s influenced the newfound fashion for atmospheric cinematic effects and how the widespread use of colour in advertisements was part of an increased ideological awareness of racial difference, Lynda Nead captures the complex meanings of images and image-making throughout the post-war years. Tracing the parallel ways that different media developed new means of creating images that variously harkened back to Victorian ideals, agitated for modern innovations or redefined domesticity, this book’s broad purview gives a complete picture of how the visual culture of post-war Britain expressed the concerns of a society that was struggling to forge a new identity.
Publication date: October 2017 ISBN: 9780300214604 Dimensions: 256 x 192mm Pages: 416
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A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500-1700 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson
This fascinating book offers the first sustained investigation of the complex relationship between the middling sort and their domestic spaces in the tumultuous, rapidly changing culture of early modern England. Presented in an innovative and engaging narrative form that follows the pattern of a typical day from early morning through to the middle of the night, A Day at Home in Early Modern England examines the profound connections that existed between the domestic material environment and modes of thought and behaviour at the middling social level. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson recreate the layered complexity of lived household experience and explore how investment in rooms, decoration, possessions, and provisions served to articulate not only the status and aspirations of householders, but the social, commercial, and religious concerns that characterised their daily existence.
Publication date: October 2017 ISBN: 9780300195019 Dimensions: 254 x 190mm Pages: 320
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The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain Kate Retford Pioneered by William Hogarth (1697–1764) and his peers in the early eighteenth century, and then revitalised by Johan Zoffany (1733–1810), the conversation piece was an innovative mode of portraiture, depicting groups posed in landscape or domestic settings. These artists grappled with creating complex multi-figured compositions and intricate narratives, filling their paintings with representations of socially, nationally and temporally precise customs. Paying particular attention to the vibrant (and at times fabricated) interior and exterior settings in these works, Kate Retford discusses the various ways that the conversation piece engaged with the rich material culture of Georgian Britain. The book also explores how these portraits served a wide array of interests and concerns among familial networks and larger social groups. The conversation piece was a nuanced expression of a multifaceted society.
Publication date: October 2017 ISBN: 9780300194807 Dimensions: 270 x 230mm Pages: 440
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Survey of London: South-East Marylebone, Volumes 51 and 52 Philip Temple, Colin Thom, Andrew Saint Providing essential knowledge about the British capital’s built environment, these two volumes cover a large portion of the parish of St. Marylebone, bounded to the south by Oxford Street and to the north by the Marylebone Road, and stretching from just west of Marylebone High Street to the parish boundary along Cleveland Street near Tottenham Court Road to the east. This area is rich in historic buildings and includes some of London’s most celebrated addresses, including Portland Place, Cavendish Square, and Harley Street. Among the most important buildings covered in this superbly illustrated book are Robert and James Adam’s development of Portland Place, where the Royal Institute of British Architects’ headquarters is a notable 20th-century insertion. Other landmarks include Marylebone Parish Church, All Saints Margaret Street and All Souls Langham Place.
Publication date: October 2017 ISBN:9780300221978 Dimensions: 279 x 216mm Pages: 944
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Open Culture and ‘Objects in Motion’ Editor Baillie Card writes about the continued positive reception of British Art Studies, and a new digital publishing partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Muse Award Our online journal British Art Studies has been honoured twice in recent months as a leader in the field of scholarly arts publishing. In May, at the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) conference in St Louis, it won a gold-level MUSE award for the “Open Culture” category. The award recognises BAS for its open access model, which allows readers to read and download content in the journal without a subscription, fee, or password. The journal also publishes its content under a licence that allows the re-use of its materials for non-commercial ends and applies principles of fair use to image reproduction where appropriate. Anne Young, who is Manager of Rights and Reproductions at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and chair
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of this competition category, said that BAS “presents one of the most elegant solutions to the sharing and reuse of peer-reviewed, published research while actively applying fair use and fair dealing exemptions of copyright laws”.
Best in Heritage Conference More recently, BAS was invited to give a presentation at the Best in Heritage conference in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in late September. I participated in a day-long strand of talks on multimedia and new technology achievements in the arts and heritage sector. The conference is organised annually in partnership with the International Council of Museums and showcases award-winning museum,
heritage, and conservation projects. By bringing together the laureates of a rich variety of industry prizes, it offers a threeday panorama of recent innovations and best practices. The event highlighted that there is much interconnection between scholarly and museum publishing and, among other things, encouraged the BAS team to continue collaborating with museums and galleries.
‘Objects in Motion’ BAS has also embarked on an exciting new digital publishing partnership with the Terra Foundation for American Art. This summer, the journal won a grant from the Terra Foundation to develop and publish a series of articles and features—under the project title ‘Objects in Motion’—on cross-cultural dialogues between Britain and the United States. Scholars interested in participating have submitted their proposals, and a final group will join the BAS editorial team for a workshop at the Terra Foundation’s
property in Giverny, France in April 2018. Participants will refine their subjects through collaborative discussion, and determine how the digital tools that BAS offers can both shape their research and enhance its presentation. From 2019 onward, ‘Objects in Motion’ will furnish a series of articles and features in the journal that explore the material circumstances by which art travels—both physically or as stories, ideas, and knowledge—creating new markets, audiences, and meanings. The partnership reflects a founding mission statement of BAS, which is to publish research on British art in its “most diverse and international contexts.” It also speaks to how working practices at the journal have evolved: the digital format has led us to collaborate with authors at ever-earlier stages in the publication process, offering editorial advice on project proposals (rather than on finished manuscripts) to authors who wish to make the most of digital opportunities from the outset.
Postage stamp from etc. etc.
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Grants and Fellowships
Publication Grants Grants, Fellowships, and Communications Officer Harriet Fisher details the recent changes made to the Paul Mellon Centre Publication Grant and introduces two authors who are past recipients of our publications grants.
Publications have always been an important strand of our Grants and Fellowships programme. From the outset, we have aimed to fund book projects that we believe would otherwise not be published. We have now helped to support over 200 publications from monographs to exhibition catalogues, covering a diverse range of topics on British art and architecture. We believe in the importance of financially supporting not only publishers, but also authors, for the costs they incur personally to include illustrations in their publications. Ahead of the Autumn 2017 round of grants, we have made improvements to how we manage funding for publications, combining the two separate Author and Publisher grants into one “Publication Grant�. Under this umbrella, authors and publishers can apply for funding either together or separately, so long as only one application is made per publication. We also acknowledge the need for funding to support articles and other smaller publishing projects, and have incorporated a section into the application specifically for authors preparing this type of work. We have asked two authors who have been assisted by Paul Mellon Centre publication grant funding to write for this issue of PMC Notes. On the following pages Jill Turnbull reflects on her work for the
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newly released From Goblets to Gaslights, whose publisher, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, was a recipient of a Publisher Grant in 2014. Clare Backhouse, who received an Author Grant in 2013, writes about her newly published book Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England (I. B.Tauris).
Detail from William Henry Hunt, A Lady Reading, ca. 1835, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
Jill Turnbull describes producing her book From Goblets to Gaslights, which was supported by a Paul Mellon Center Publisher Grant in 2014. Researching and writing my recently published book From Goblets to Gaslights: The Scottish Glass Industry, 1750–2006, and the complementary process of getting it published, have naturally been very different experiences. The wonderful archives in Edinburgh and institutions all over Scotland and beyond never cease to surprise and delight. Conducting new research is sometimes challenging but valuable finds are worth all of the necessary perseverance. For this book, I amassed copies of old documents, letters, advertisements, glass recipe books, and personal stories. Discovering these sources and presenting them in narrative form was both time consuming and immensely satisfying. Factory pattern books and catalogues were particularly useful, as they offer the only way to identify most glass unless it is marked. Thirteen Edinburgh Crystal pattern books containing designs dating from the 1880s, together with drawings and catalogues from the Holyrood Glassworks in Edinburgh, were invaluable—and rare—sources and a pleasure to explore and publish. Reaching the point when your text and images are ready to submit for publication presents a very different challenge. The readership and
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Detail from Designs for jugs, ca. 1820, in the Ford-Ranken archive, courtesy of Museum of Edinburgh. Text overlay from cover design of From Goblets to Gaslights.
therefore the print run of such a book will inevitably be small—we all use glass but few collect it or study the history of its production. Glossy paper for over 550 images is expensive, as is the hardback cover. Given its importance as a primary resource, the text is accompanied by a DVD that contains a full reproduction of a nineteenth-century glass pattern book, now in the Corning Museum of Glass in the United States, which also added to the overall cost. So, who best to publish this book? The Society of Antiquaries of Scotland is a charity, which publishes archaeological and historical research, but requires funding for publications. Grants for research are more numerous than grants to publish the results. Fortunately, I received grants from a local funding institution, the Strathmartine Trust in St Andrews, as well as the Paul Mellon Centre, plus others on a smaller scale. Collectively, they have given me the pleasure and privilege of holding in my hands a beautifully produced, colourful, volume which has taken fifteen years to complete. I am immensely grateful.
From Goblets to Gaslights is available to purchase for £50 from www.socantscot.org.
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Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
On Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England Clare Backhouse introduces her book On Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England, which was supported by a Paul Mellon Centre Author Grant in 2013.
On Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England is the first book to illustrate and analyse black-letter broadside ballads, which were some of the cheapest, crudest, and most accessible visual products available in the seventeenth century. Ballads are roughly A4-sized sheets, printed with rhyming texts and woodcut images. They are full of jokes, cultural commentary, and emotive gloss on current events. Their wide-ranging pictorial references include church and gallows, playhouse, and court portraits. Originally ballad-mongers advertised them by singing the verses in the streets; purchasers put them up on the walls of homes and alehouses. Once available in their thousands right across England, today they are rare and a little-known type of print. Until recently, ballads have been rather ignored as historical source material, and their anonymous images dismissed as worthless and repetitious. My book offers a fresh and warmer appreciation of ballads and a careful analysis of their pictures. Its title bears witness to the remarkable, multi-layered relationship between ballads and the clothing trades. Ballads often featured pictures and discussions of fashionable dress (decades before dedicated fashion journalism), and were typically sold alongside items of clothing. Even their
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paper was made out of recycled dress—all matters to which ballad texts themselves referred. The changing visual conventions for depicting clothes and the body—often documented in court portraits, such as the move from detailed full-length portraits to semi-draped busts—are also evident in ballad pictures. One of the many challenges of the book was to account for this influence, which seemed to directly contradict the increasingly commercial focus of ballads. One of the project’s many rewards was to experience just how funny, broad-ranging, and complex ballads can be, as they responded to developments in national policy, economic ideas, religious practice, and developments in technology and sumptuary law. The Paul Mellon Centre’s grant allowed this book to publish what has been significantly lacking in the secondary literature: a liberal number of good-sized images of ballads, in which the reader can clearly see each sheet as a whole, and decipher both the images and texts. These are presented alongside illustrations of paintings, etchings, engravings, and other woodcuts relating to the ballads at hand. I hope the result will be interesting and useful to scholars of art history, print, fashion, dress, cultural and social history, and material culture.
Detail from The Country Lass,/Who left her Spinning-Wheel for a more pleasant Employment, Pepys Ballads, 1675-1696, Magdalene College - Pepys collection.
On Fashion and Popular Print in Early Modern England is available to purchase for ÂŁ58 from www.ibtauris.com.
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I began my career in art history straight from school in an unassuming administrative position at National Museums Liverpool (NML)—then known as National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside (NMGM). Under our much loved and sadly missed former Director Sir Richard Foster, staff were given the opportunity to tour the eight museums
First held in 1957, the John Moores Painting Prize is named after the Liverpool-based local businessman and philanthropist Sir John Moores (1896 1993). The competition culminates in an exhibition held at the Walker Art Gallery every two years and now forms a key component of the Liverpool Biennial Festival of Contemporary Art. John Moores
Collections
The John Moores Painting Prize Catalogues PMC Fellow Hana Leaper writes about our current Drawing Room Display, which looks at the catalogues of the John Moores Painting Prize in honour of its 60th anniversary.
and galleries that formed the Trust, and to view the stores and other behind-thescenes areas. This privileged interaction with collections and their venues sparked my love of the arts and led me to study art history at university. For this reason, it is very special to me to present an aspect of the illustrious history of a flagship NML institution: the John Moores Painting Prize.
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inaugurated the competition to support artists and to bring the best contemporary painting from across the UK to Liverpool. The John Moores Painting Prize has displayed some of Britain’s greatest contemporary art talents, with catalogues that have reflected distinctive moments in twentieth century design.
After former Walker Art Gallery Director Timothy Stephens kindly donated an almost complete run of these publications to our library (see pp.24-25 in this issue), we are delighted to be showcasing our complete collection of these catalogues in honour of the 60th anniversary of the Prize. Between their covers, these small yet significant pamphlets contain rich histories of post-war British art. The works listed within their pages represent the many schools and styles of an exciting, eventful, and often contentious epoch. They also document the Prize’s illustrious roster of jurors—a topic deserving of a cultural history of its own. The catalogue covers themselves are significant aesthetic and historical objects, illuminating trends in design and curatorial methodologies, as well as the status and importance of the prize and the vicissitudes of its host institution. Our display will focus on the appearance of the catalogue covers, demonstrating the extent of our holdings and enticing researchers to delve into the fascinating histories of the John Moores Painting Prize. This Drawing Room Display is on until mid-January 2018. It is free to visit during the Centre’s opening hours: Monday to Friday, from 10am to 5pm.
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Digitisation of the Paul Mellon Centre’s Photographic Archives Digital Manager Tom Scutt outlines our plans to digitise the Paul Mellon Centre’s photographic archive, as part of the Centre’s membership in the PHAROS consortium.
The practice of documentation, identification, and classification is fundamental to the discipline of art history. Like many research centres specialising in the history of art, the Paul Mellon Centre holds a large collection of photographs that record the sale, exhibition, and dissemination of British art: approximately 150,000 reference photographs of paintings, decorative painting, sculpture, drawings, and prints make up the collection. Together, these documents plot the development of the discipline, map trends in thought, and chart the movement of objects over the course of the twentieth century. The collections are artefacts of their time and of the people who collated and maintained them: the librarians, archivists, photographers, and researchers who have invested their efforts in contributing material. The process of mounting prints and accessioning them into the collections has not been undertaken since 2013, but the practice of commissioning new photography continues. For instance, our Picture Researcher, Maisoon Rehani, continually sends photographers out to far-flung locations to capture images of otherwise undocumented works of art for inclusion in our publications. Recognising that the Centre’s valuable photographic resources may be better utilised were they available for reference beyond our reading rooms, the Centre has decided to instigate the digitisation of its institutional photographic archive collection in its entirety. In the words of Thomas Gaehtgens of the Getty Research Institute: “All these photo archives are
Detail from a mounted photograph in the Paul Mellon Centre Photographic Archive depicting Richard Wilson, Villa Emiliana.
Sleeping Beauties, and they are waiting to be discovered and kissed” (New York Times, 14 March, 2017). The Centre will partner with the Dutch digitisation company Picturae to undertake this project. The collections will be moved from their current locations and taken to a facility in Heiloo in the Netherlands for up to six months. There, the front and back of each mount will be photographed and catalogued. The resulting images will—eventually—be made available for research through a new “digital collections” platform. This initiative is connected to the Centre’s ongoing involvement in the PHAROS consortium, an assembly of fourteen European and North American art-historical photo archives. A recent meeting in Rome at the Bibliotheca Hertziana reaffirmed the group’s commitment to creating an online research platform allowing for comprehensive consolidated access to photo archive images in as unimpeded a manner as possible. As a founding member, the Centre will add its images and catalogue data to the corpus of materials. The project website (pharosartresearch.org) currently illustrates around 97,000 images from the Italian school, but will grow exponentially over the coming years as consortium members increase their digitisation efforts. If you have any comments or wish to contribute to the project, please contact tscutt@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.
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Small, but Perfectly Formed Librarian Emma Floyd reports on recent donations to the Centre’s library.
The Library at the Paul Mellon Centre often receives donations of books and journals from readers, authors, and publishers. Some donations number in the hundreds or even thousands of books, but more often the Library receives smaller collections, often covering a particular subject. This article focuses on just three that were received recently. Victorian Architecture In the spring of 2016, a collection of books on the architect George Edmund Street (1824–1881) was donated to the Centre. This collection had been carefully curated by Paul Joyce (1934–2014), an architectural historian who had worked on Street since the 1960s. Joyce had bequeathed his archive and these books to Michael Hall who subsequently donated them to the Centre. The collection includes copies of Street’s principal publications, together with a group of books on churches that he designed or restored, amounting to twenty-one volumes in all. This generous donation allows the work of this nineteenth-century architect to be studied in depth at the Centre. Contemporary Art In the summer of 2016, the Centre was given sixteen catalogues of the John Moores Liverpool Exhibitions. As the Library did not begin collecting publications on contemporary art until 2012, none of these catalogues had been acquired earlier and the donation was gratefully received. The biennial show, held at the Walker Art Gallery since 1957, was the idea of its sponsor and local entrepreneur Sir John Moores (1896–1993). After filling almost all of the gaps in the sequence by purchase, two still proved elusive. The donor Timothy Stevens, previously Director of the Walker Art Gallery, put us in touch with the museum, whose staff tracked down the missing catalogues. The Centre is now the proud owner of a complete set of catalogues for these exhibitions which, when started, were for a municipal gallery a pioneering engagement with contemporary painting. Equally innovative was the sponsorship of Sir John Moores, whose generosity enabled substantial prizes to be given. The Centre has created a public display around them, curated by Hana Leaper, which is on view at the Centre until mid-January (see pp. 20 and 21 of this issue).
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Photography The Centre has collected books on Victorian photography for some years, but in 2012 started collecting books and journals on twentiethand twenty-first-century photography. The latter collection was almost non-existent and greatly augmented by two gifts in the spring and early summer of 2017 of runs of History of Photography, Image, and PhotoResearcher, all key journals for the study of the history of photography. Particularly notable are the early issues of Image published in the 1950s, which are rare in libraries in the United Kingdom. These were donated by the Wilson Centre for Photography and augmented by Hope Kingsley from her own personal collection. The Centre is extremely grateful to the generous donors of these gifts and all the others received on a regular basis, large or small. For further information on the library’s holdings, please consult the library catalogue on the Centre’s website or email collections@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk.
Selection of cover designs and an interior spread from issues of Image in the Centre’s library collection. Clockwise from top left: Vol. 19, No.2; Vol. 18, No.2; Vol. 17, No. 4; and Vol. 18, No. 2, pp. 20-21.
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Oral Histories of the PMC Archives & Library Assistant Frankie Drummond Charig reflects on the oral histories programme within the Centre’s Institutional Archive.
Although not always visible to the public, most organizations maintain an institutional archive. At the Paul Mellon Centre, in addition to managing the collected archives of art historians, critics, dealers, and gallery directors, Research Collections staff also preserve records relating to the institutional history of the organisation. Alongside traditional records, such as minutes, directors’ correspondence, grant applications, photographs, or project files, the Centre’s Institutional Archive also includes more unusual records, such as oral history audio recordings. I have very much enjoyed working with this material and believe it to be amongst the most important held in our Institutional Archive. The Centre first set up an oral history programme in 2012, when the then director Brian Allen and deputy director Kasha Jenkinson were due to retire. The first set of interviews was conducted by Liz Bruchet, an expert in the field (having conducted the interviews for the Art Historians’ Lives project organised by the Association of Art Historians). They are incredibly comprehensive and cover not only the individuals’ activities whilst at the Centre, but also their lives—often from childhood to retirement. Such recordings greatly enhance the “record” in a way that may not necessarily be captured by more
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traditional archive materials. The Institutional Archive now holds over 50 recorded hours of oral histories from eight individuals. Each of them played a key role in the life of the Centre, either as a member of staff or as an associate involved in related projects. Having worked on these interviews myself—either by checking the recordings, transcribing the audio or, more recently, conducting the sessions themselves—my knowledge of the Centre’s history has been enhanced beyond measure. The individuals’ recollections lend rich context and colour to the letters, minutes, photographs, and project notes also held in the archive. The recordings also provide an informative commentary on social history as experienced by the interviewees. I find this particularly exciting: in years to come, they will be a valuable resource for individuals studying, for example, art education, post-war opportunities, women’s experience of work, London art world networks, and other art organizations. Extracts from some of the Centre’s oral history recordings have already been used both in our Drawing Room Displays programme and on our website. See for example: http://www.paul-mellon-centre. ac.uk/about/1970-present.
Oliver Millar Archive Archivist Georgina Lever writes about the Oliver Millar archive cataloguing project.
As reported in May’s edition of PMC Notes, work has been ongoing since January 2017 to catalogue Oliver Millar’s papers. We are delighted to announce the completion of this project: the Oliver Millar Archive has now been fully catalogued and the descriptions are available online through the Collections section of our website. Sir Oliver Millar (1923-2007) served in the Royal Household as Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures from 1947, Keeper from 1972 and was the first Director of the Royal Collection. The archive contains material collected and compiled throughout Millar’s career and encapsulates his vast knowledge and interest in sixteenth and seventeenth century art, in particular collecting in Britain. Two core parts of the archive are 46 journals, covering the period 19452006, and a series of nearly 400 research files containing information on hundreds of artists. The material on Van Dyck and Lely is especially comprehensive. The new online catalogue contains a considerable level of detail and features 200 digital images of selected items. It can be searched by artist, house or any other keyword. A search for “Van Dyck” for example, brings up 170 files; “Lely” 67 files; “Chatsworth” 13 files; “Louvre” 16 files; and “Christie’s” 81 files. The number of images in each file has been recorded, and the
content of each letter and research note is summarised. Other aspects of the archive include Millar’s preparatory notes for the 2004 publication Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, a series of annotated books and pamphlets, and files tracing the inventory of paintings owned or commissioned by aristocratic families in Great Britain. If you would like to consult any of the material or if you have an enquiry concerning the collection, please contact us at: collections@paul-mellon-centre. ac.uk.
Photograph of Charles I in Robes of State by Anthony Van Dyck, from the Oliver Millar Archive (ref: ONM/2/62.
October 2017 — No. 7
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Thinking about Exhibitions Interpretation Reconstruction Curation
Mark Hallett Public Lecture Course Thursday evenings 1 March - 29 March, 2018 16 Bedford Square
Detail from William Payne, Private View of the Royal Academy, 1858, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
Left: Detail from Lawrence Alma-Tadema, In the Corner of My Studio, 1893, Private Collection.
Events
Cultural Spaces, People, and Places Deputy Director for Research Sarah Turner looks ahead to the conferences and research activities that the Paul Mellon Centre is involved with coming up this Autumn.
Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity Do people make places, or do places make people? Artists’ studio-homes are particularly rich cultural spaces when thinking about the relationship between architecture, artistic careers, and personal and professional networks. A symposium in October, organized to coincide with the exhibition Alma-Tadema: At Home in Antiquity at Leighton House Museum, will explore the fascination of the artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) with the representation of domestic life in antiquity and how this interest was expressed through the two remarkable studio-houses he and his family created in the London neighbourhood of St John’s Wood. Speakers will address the phenomenon of the nineteenth-century studio-home more broadly, with a second day, held at Birkbeck, focusing on Alma-Tadema, antiquity, and modern cinema. AA XX 100: AA Women and Architecture, 1917–2017 Creating space is the focus of another conference organized in collaboration with the AA XX project and our neighbours across Bedford Square, the Architectural Association. AA XX 100: AA Women and Architecture, 1917– 2017 will mark the centenary of women at the Architectural Association. Over three days, a range of international speakers will examine—through papers, presentations, discussion panels, and design charrettes—the pioneering contributions of women architects across this period. They will also debate issues relating to gender and sexuality for architecture and architectural practice. 30
Left: Detail from Zaha Hadid Architects: London Aquatics Centre, 2011, ©Hufton+Crow.
Enlightened Princesses: Britain and Europe, 1700–1820 Caroline of Ansbach (1683–1737), Augusta of Saxe Gotha (1719–1772), and Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz (1744–1818), the three Protestant German princesses who became variously the Princess of Wales, Queen Consort, and Princess Dowager of Great Britain, are the focus of an exhibition which opened at our sister institution, the Yale Center for British Art, and is now on display at Kensington Palace. A symposium to be held from 29–31 October, Enlightened Princesses: Britain and Europe, 1700–1820, will bring together eminent academics and museum scholars to investigate the role played by royal women—electresses, princesses, queens consort, reigning queens, and empresses—in the shaping of court culture and politics in Europe during the long eighteenth century. Landscape Now Landscape Now is the final conference of the Autumn term, bringing together an interdisciplinary group of researchers to explore the image of the British landscape from different perspectives. The pictorial representation of the landscape has long played an important role in the history of British art, but our current political and social climate gives rise to pressing questions about the image of the land in relation to national identity, memory, and post-imperial decline. This conference, which is organized collaboratively by the Paul Mellon Centre, the Yale Center for British Art, and the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens, will take into account these and other emergent concerns. PMC Book Nights We are introducing PMC Book Nights to showcase the Centre’s Summer and Autumn publications to the public. As well as these Book Nights and major conferences, the event programme (listed in full on pp.38-39) will include a range of evening and lunchtime talks. We hope you will join us to listen to, enjoy, and interact with this new research on British art.
Right: Detail from Thomas Gainsborough, Wooded Landscape with a Cottage and Shepherd, 1748-1750, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
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Detail from Spencer Frederick Gore, An Extensive Landscape in Yorkshire, ca. 1907, Yale Center for British Art, Gift of Joseph F. McCrindle, Yale LLB 1948.
British Drawings Brian Allen Fellow Jessica Feather reports on events developed by a new subgroup of the British Art Network.
In June, a group of around twenty curators, researchers, and academics met at Tate Britain, for the first workshop of a new subgroup of the British Art Network, dedicated to the study of British drawings. This group has been convened by myself and two fellow collaborators (Amy Concannon at Tate Britain and Victoria Osborne from Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery), as we have overlapping but different interests in the field of British drawings, defined in the broadest terms of medium and chronology. This group aims to stimulate discussion, to foster productive collaborations between curators, academics, researchers, and practitioners, and to capitalize on new interest in a growing area of research and scholarship within UK museums, galleries, and universities. Over the next year, we are planning a series of fun, lively, and innovative workshops and visits, which will use objects as jumping-off points for discussion and exchange, and will incorporate a wide range of approaches and scholarly voices—both senior and less established— from across the UK. The events are designed to generate debate around practical issues pertaining to the display, storage, interpretation, and digitization of drawings collections, and a series of related conceptual questions.
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Our first event in June, led by Amy Concannon, was entitled “From Place to Paper: Thinking about Topographical Drawings”. It included presentations on recent digitization projects at Buxton Museum and Art Gallery and the British Library, as well as a stimulating presentation by Sam Smiles, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Plymouth, on the meaning of “topography” in relation to post-1900 landscape drawings. Despite it being one of the hottest days of the year, workshop participants were enthusiastic and engaged (whilst fanning themselves discreetly). Feedback on this workshop has been rewardingly positive, suggesting the very real need for such a forum. Our second workshop will take place at Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery on 24 October, entitled “Interpreting and Collecting: New Perspectives on 19th-Century Drawings”. A further event on architectural drawing will take place in early 2018 as a collaboration between Sir John Soane’s Museum and the Paul Mellon Centre. As we are in the early stages of building this network, we are keen to hear from any colleagues who are interested in joining the subgroup. Potential members are asked to register their interest at BritishArtNetwork@tate.org.uk, but can also contact the convenors at the email addresses below. For more information on the British Art Network, please see the Projects section of the Paul Mellon Centre website. amy.concannon@tate.org.uk jfeather@paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk victoria.osborne@birminghammuseums.org.uk
Detail from George Frost, Landscape with Donkeys, undated, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.
October 2017 — No. 7
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Bedford Square Festival 2017 The inaugural Bedford Square Festival took place earlier this year. The PMC’s Harriet Fisher, who was part of the Festival commitee, shares highlights of the event. The first ever Bedford Square Festival took place between 28 June - 1 July, and welcomed over 500 visitors to the five participating institutions. The Paul Mellon Centre, New College of the Humanities, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, the Architectural Association, and Yale University Press each opened their doors to host a series of events over four days.
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The festival organisers created a busy timetable of events that highlighted the cultural activities for which each participating institution is best-known. From art history to architecture and publishing to education, there was something for everyone over the four days. The festival brought new audiences to Bedford Square and to the institutions based there. All of the events were free (with donations made for the charity Centre Point) and most were fully booked prior to the festival starting. There was a busy and lively atmosphere to proceedings from the first event, which was a walking tour through the centre of Bedford Square led by garden historian and architect Todd Longstaffe-Gowan. Some of the festival highlights that took place at the Paul Mellon Centre included the ‘Bloomsbury Breakfast’, an exploration of the artists who lived, studied and painted throughout Bloomsbury’s bedsits in the early twentieth century; ‘Hogarth and the City’, a talk by Mark Hallett on Hogarth’s inventive images of London’s streets, alleyways, squares and suburbs; and a video live stream gallery tour of the Yale Center for British Art, which took visitors on a virtual journey through the Louis I. Kahn building and Paul Mellon’s art collection. The participating institutions also collaboratively hosted an outdoor production of Romeo and Juliet in Montague Street Gardens, reimagined to take place in 1950s Naples. Across the four days of the festival, Bedford Square became an inspiring place of creativity and education, fulfilling the organisers’ vision for an accessible and inspiring cultural event. A full festival round-up can be read on our website; to keep informed of future Bedford Square Festival events please join the mailing list at www.bedfordsquarefestival.co.uk.
October 2017 — No.7
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Events
Autumn Calendar Events are at the Paul Mellon Centre unless otherwise indicated. October 2017
18 October, 18.00-20.00
Siegfried Charoux, Maquette for ‘The Neighbours’, 1957-1959, Courtesy Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) and Langenzersdorf Museum / Estate of Siegfried Charoux
November 2017
Research Seminar 28 September - 26 October, 18.30-
Ceramics in the Expanded Field:
2-4 November
20.30
Curating the Ceramic Object
Conference
Every Thursday Evening
Today (Livestreamed)
AA XX 100: AA Women and
Public Lecture Course
Martina Droth
Architecture in Context, 19172017
Britain, South Asia: Entangled Histories
20-21 October
Paul Mellon Centre and the
Conference
Architectural Association
4 October, 18.00-20:00
Alma-Tadema: Antiquity at
Research Seminar
Home and on Screen
7 November, 12.30-14.00
Aubrey Williams: Abstraction in
Paul Mellon Centre and Birkbeck
Fellow’s Lunch
Diaspora
Institute for the Moving Image
Red House: William Morris’s Palace of Art
Kobena Mercer 25 October, 18.00-20.00
Tessa Wild
11 October, 9.30-20.00
Research Seminar
Conference
The Valists
8 November, 18.00-20.00
Digital Art History: Practice and
Anna Gruetzner Robins
Research Seminar Thomas Girtin (1775-1802): An
Potential Paul Mellon Centre & Courtauld
29-31 October
Online Catalogue, Archive, and
Institute of Art
Conference
Introduction to the Artist
Englightened Princesses: Britain
Greg Smith
13 October, 12.30-14.00
and Europe, 1700-1820
Research Lunch
Kensington Palace, Hampton
17 November, 12.30-14.30
Forming a Community: Siegfried
Court Palace, and the Tower of
Research Lunch
Charoux’s Maquette for ‘The
London
Frederick Walker and the
Neighbours’ (1957-1959)
Idyllists - Unsung Masters of
Melanie Veasey
Victorian Art Panel Donato Esposito, Elizabeth Prettjohn and Paul Goldman
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Robert Walker Macbeth, Sedge Cutting in Wicken Fen, Cambridgshire, 1878, Private Collection.
24 November, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch “Your Beautiful and Hopeful Family”: Dynasty, Duff House and the House of Duff Helen Whiting 28 November, 12.30-14.00 Fellow’s Lunch Oscar Rejlander and British Art Photography in Rome Phillip Prodger 30 November - 1 December Conference Landscape Now
December 2017 5 December, 12.30-14.00 Fellow’s Lunch Modern Stillness Claudia Tobin 6 December, 18.00-20.30 PMC Book Night Confirmed Authors: Lynda Nead, Ben Highmore, Kate Retford, Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson 8 December, 12.30-14.00 Research Lunch ‘The Last Sad Testimony of Affection’: Portraiture As Remembrance In EighteenthCentury Britain Emily Knight
If you would like more information or to attend any of our events then please visit: www.paul-mellon.centre.ac.uk/events
October 2017 — No.7
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PMC Profile
Jonathan Law Baillie Card talks to Jonathan Law, a freelance Research Fellow and Filmmaker at the Centre.
How did you become intersted in making films? My wonderfully supportive sixth-form art teacher Mary Bailey gave me a Super 8 camera and splicer and encouraged me to experiment, and I later had the great pleasure of studying at the London Consortium alongside filmmaker Alex Mackintosh. What are the challenges of conveying scholarly ideas and new research through film? When first circling around a subject, I consider whether or not the topic really requires a film dimension. Producing films for open-access publication also poses an interesting challenge: to construct films that reward both gen-
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eral and specialist audiences; that are simultaneously fragmentary and thorough; and that visually scrutinise objects, documents and sites, while also opening up contextual frameworks. Once a project starts moving, the question becomes: how can the film’s register most effectively participate in or generate a unique research angle that will energise the subject? What projects are you working on now for the PMC? Along with a number of pieces for the research project focusing on the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition’s history to be published in 2018, we are currently developing a series of films as part of the 2019 Art in the British
Country House research project—so far this has mostly involved travelling around the country with Martin Postle! What is the best film about art that you have seen recently? I’m still very much preoccupied with Jem Cohen’s excellent film Museum Hours (2012), a drama set in and around the collection at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. It uses this setting to explore themes of observation, duration, and empathy. Another film, not about art but by one of Britain’s most interesting artists, is John Akomfrah’s remarkable Vertigo Sea (2015), a three-screen installation that reworks BBC natural history footage to interrogate histories of migration and slavery.
YCBA Exhibitions and Events 1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, Connecticut 06520 USA
8 November, 17.30
10 November, 17.30
Lecture and Book Signing
Keynote Lecture
14 September – 3 December
Louis Kahn as Artist and
Prime Objects: Digital Clay and
“Things of Beauty Growing”:
Collaborator
its Modernist Origins
British Studio Pottery
Wendy Lesser, author and editor
Jenni Sorkin, Associate Professor,
Bringing together nearly 150
The Threepenny Review
History of Art & Architecture,
Special Exhibition
University of California, Santa
ceramic objects from Europe,
Barbara
Japan, and Korea—including jars,
10 November
bowls, pots, chargers, vases, and
Graduate Student Symposium
monumental urns—this exhibition
Long Shadows: Tradition,
15 November, 17.30
surveys the array of forms that
Influence, and Persistence in
Concert
have defined the British studio
Modern Craft
Wu Man, pipa
pottery movement from the
Wu Man is recognised as the
1890s to the present by exploring
world’s premier pipa virtuoso and
the connections between form
leading ambassador of Chinese
and function.
music.
Select YCBA Events 6 October, 17:00 Film Screening and Discussion African and British Legacies in American Ceramics: Ladi Kwali and Michael Cardew Mark Hewitt, studio potter; Sequoia Miller, PhD candidate, History of Art, Yale University; and studio potter 2 November, 17.30 Andrew Carnduff Ritchie Lecture An-My Lê, Professor of Photography, Bard Collegee; and Peter van Agtmael, photographer, Magnum Photos
To stay connected and learn more about the Center’s programmes, visit britishart.yale.edu.
Akiko Hirai, Moon Jar, 2016, stoneware, porcelain slip, paper fiber, wood ash, white glaze, Collection of Akiko Hirai, photograph by Jon January 2016Stokes — No. 5 E
Showing, Telling, Seeing: Exhibiting South Asia in Britain, 1900–Now
F